TWO QUOTATIONS ON B.-IN-S. QUESTION

Star (Christchurch), Issue 17879, 22 June 1926, Page 7

TWO QUOTATIONS ON 8.-IN-S. QUESTION

To the Editor. Sir, —In asking the courtesy of your columns my excuse must be that I have not sinned before and promise to be good and not sin again. There are certain phases of the question in regard to the restoration of Bible reading to our State School system of primary education that do not appear to have been presented to the public in Christchurch. Before leaving therefore, I feel it necessary to present these points to the public. When Mr Bowen (afterwards Sir Charles Bowen)’ drafted the Education Bill of 1877, he included in it the following claim namely: “The school shall be opened every morning with the reading of the Ford's prayer and a portion of the Holy Scripture.” “With this exception the teaching shall be entirely of a' secular character, and no child shall attend at the reading herein provided for, if his or her parents or guardians inform the committee or the teacher in writing that they object to such attendance.” The originator of this Bill, which established our national system of education, did his utmost to get this religious clause agreed to. He said: “I feel certain that it is the desire of nine-teen-twentieths of the people of this country, that the Bible should not be excluded from our Public Schools, and if we take care that it should be arranged that no child should be obliged to attend at. the time the Bible was being read, if his parents objected to his presence at such reading, I am sure no injustice can be done to anybody. .... “It is proposed in this Bill that school shall be opened every morning at a fixed hour, by the reading of the Bible and the Lord’s Prayer; but it is not made necessary that any child should attend at that time, if his parents should object. ... I can .scarcely conceive that if men were to consider carefully what the effect of such a rule would be. anyone could object to it on the ground that it would be interference with the conscience of the people, and I would but ask Honourable Gentlemen to consider what a very serious matter it would be to deprive our children—the children of this rising community—of the knowledge of that. Book which has been an education to countless generations of English -children, and the language of which—unconsciously to ourselves —illustrates our conversation from day to day. I hope Honourable members will put out of their minds what I may almost call the bigotry of secularism, because there is a bigotry of secularism if secularism is erected into a principle. I do not think secularism is a principle to be proud of or to be very anxious about.” To-day, Sir, the very thing that Sir Charles Bowen considered impossible, and not worth being anxious about, has become a principle and apparently a principle that a certain type of man is proud of. My experience, is that writers who essay to guide public opinion in leading articles, together with Party leaders, invariably when approached rise to their feet, expand their chests, throw back their shoulders and grandiloquently exclaim: “We stand for ‘Free, Secular and Compulsory Education,’ ” with the emphasis laid upon the word secular. What Sir Charles Bowen considered impossible and incredible has taken place in less than forty years.

To-day a quotation from a letter recently received from Sir Harold Beauchamp (who is a business man and in no meaning of the word a “wowser”) illustrates and emphasises the change. “It is, in my opinion, nothing short of a national calamity that thousands of children in this country are being brought up without any knowledge of the Scriptures. Apart from the ethical and moral teaching of the Bible, there is no book of such a high literary standing. Many of the world’s most famous orators and literateurs ascribe their success, as speakers and writers, to a comprehensive knowledge of the Bible. I am not singular in thinking that crime, now so rampant in this Dominion is, in no small measure, due to our present Godless system of education.”

The two extracts, Sir, from leading men separated by forty years of time, require no comment from me; they speak for themselves.—l am, etc., E. PHILPOT-CROWTHER.