VALUE OF THE BIBLE

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LXVI, Issue 19886, 14 March 1939, Page 3

VALUE OF THE BIBLE

PLACE IN SCHOOL LIFE PROF. HUXLEY’S VIEW A quotation from Professor Huxley. who was a champion of secular education and a member of the London School Board about the time when the Education Act of 1877 made the system in New Zealand secular, is given in the report presented at the annual meeting of the Bible-in-Schools League in Wellington last week. The league’s report said that recent discussion as 10 the relationship between a .'secular system and the use of the ißible in school made it timely to note the view of Professor Huxley bn the secular system in the 'seventies of last century. He wrote: — "1 have always been strongly i:i favour of secular education, in the sense of education without theology, but I must confess I hare been no less seriously perplexed to know by what practical measures the religious eel nig, which is the essential basis of conduct, was to be kept up in the present utterly chaotic state of opinion without the use of the Bible. "Take the Bible as a whole, make the severest deductions which fair criticism can dictate . . . and there still remains in this old literature a vast residuum of moral beauty and grandeur. And then consider the great historical fact that for three centuries this book has been woven into the life of all that is best and noblest in English history . . . by the study of what other book could children be so much humanised?" The report comments that the quotation is of interest in defining secular education in the sense of education without 'theology which left much room for Bible teaching to develop the “religious feeling," without which right conduct could hardly be sustained.