THE BIBLE IN SCHOOLS.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXV, Issue 48, 25 February 1913, Page 3

THE BIBLE IN SCHOOLS.

ADDRESS BY BISHOP CLEARY. (Per Press Association.) Auckland, February 24. An address was given in the Town Hall to-night by the Roman Catholic Bishop of Auckland on the Bible in schools question. The Mayor of Auckland presided over a very large attendance. Bishop Cleary stated that the Australian system demanded by the League expressly provided by Act of Parliament for “religious instruction” ami “general religious teaching” as part of the regular class work of public schools. The Government set up as a teacher of religion by determining the typo of that “religious instruction” by embodying it in a manual of scripture extracts, and by compelL ing Government officials to teach it. The League’s pamphlet by , the Rev. A. Don was quoted to show that official religious teaching in Australia was specific, dogmatic and theological, including a definition of “prayer” and “proofs of the divine mission of St. Paul.” The same League’s pamphlet showed that teachers conducted formal sectarian and denominational worship, including the singing of denominational hymns and the reciting of a denominational version of the Lord’s Prayer. It was proposed to have .that sectarian nd denominational religion taught by the State at the expense of the common purse. It was the very negation of a “national” have that sectarian and denominationnominational system in its most objectionable form, namely, a Statetaught religion, endorsed at the cost of the whole nation or the benefit of only a section of the nation.

At New Plymouth, continued the speaker, delegates representing 2800 teachers voted down the League’s proposals by 42 votes to 7. The League officially refused a conscience clause to teachers. Its pamphlets placed the duty of Biblical teaching on exactly the same footing as geography, grammar or any other subject, and the League’s pamphlets and orators were quoted by the speaker with a view to showing that dismissal would bo the penalty for the conscientiously objecting teachers. The League placed before conscientiously objecting teachers three alternatives —prosolytism to the League’s views, hypocrisy or dismissal. A British teacher quoted in Queensland Parliament had written; “One must get a living somehow, so I personally comply with my employers' and let conscience go hang.” The League’s conscience clause was devised for the express purpose of “weaning the Irish from the abuses of Popery.” The official organiser of the League had boasted at the Presbyterian Assembly in Wellington that “thirty-two thousand Roman Catholic children, with hardly an exception, read the scripture lessons in schools’ ’of Now South Wales; or, in other words, that they had been successfully proselytised into violation of thp faith and discipline of the church of their baptism, and into participation in Protestant religious worship.