Fiat Justitia. THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 1898. THE EVER-PRESENT DIFFICULTY.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXVI, Issue 27, 10 November 1898, Page 17

Fiat Justitia. THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 1898. THE EVER-PRESENT DIFFICULTY.

§HE Education Question keeps crying like a sick child. Legislators may sing sweet lullabys over it ; pressmen may dose it with soothing syrup, but it wakes up and cries ever and ever the same old wail that it has been emitting for the past twenty years. Year after year it has made its melancholy plainfc in Anglican, Presbyterian, and Wesle^an synods. Our Stateschool system has failed to satisfy the demands of any I religious denomination. The pressmen and politicians who profess to look upon the Act as a signal triumph of glorified human wisdom, are in the habit of vaunting the unsectarian character of the State schools. Unsectarian is just the very thing that they are not. They represent in effect a 'view' just as marked and clear-cut as that which separates Presbyterian from Episcopalian. And that is the pagan or agnostic view of education — as if there were no life beyond the present, and consequently no need for preparation of the young mind for it. That is what it comes to when stripped of political clap-trap and the rub-a-dub-dub of the no-Popery drum. Both from the religious and the patriotic points of view we cannot view without alarm the loosening of the moral fibre that is the natural and necessary result of bringing up the childhood of a nation under a system which calmly and serenely ignores the very existence of a Deity, and, consequently, of moral obligation towards Him, towards ourselves, or towards our fellow-man. In their schools, Catholics have erected a barrier which shuts out some of the worst results of a system which has left the United States of America to all intents and purposes a nonChristian land — with a population of some 50,000,000 who attend no form of religious service. Dr. Bevan, the Congregational ist leader, said recently in Ballarat that ' the strength of the Catholic Church was secured by the training its children received.' Our Protestant fellowcolonists have no such wall raised up around their children's souls. Is it therefoie a matter for wonder that they have had their controversies, as in Auckland, on the decline of Church-going, and their knotty problems how to secure their loosening grip on the hearts and minds of the masses of the people ? # * * Catholics must ever sincerely deplore such a condition of things. It must react upon us, despite the highest efforts that our relative poverty will allow. In the first place, a large percentage of our children must, by the very necessities of the case, be brought up under the school influences which are playing havoc with divine faith in the rising generation of non-Catholics. In the second place, our youth must naturally be affected by the mental and moral tone of their surroundings. In the one case the action on the child's mind is direct ; in the other, reflex. In both, the chances are that it will make for evil ; and the evil is one whose magnitude cannot be exaggerated. It affects Protestant and Catholic, though in unequal degrees. The indifference of the Protestant laity in the matter has been strongly asserted at practically every one of the Synods held recently in the Colony. It is one of the most unpleasant features of an unpleasant situation ; for it must ever be borne in mind that the Protestant laity form the vast majority of the voters, without whose aid little can be done in the way of affording relief from the system with which the Colony was saddled by the wiseacres of twenty years ago. # # • In problems such as this, affecting so many and farreaching interests, one naturally seeks to emphasise points of agreement, without, at the same time, losing sight of serious practical difficulties that lie beside or beneath them ;

and, so far, the Protestant churches of the Colony are agreed with us in deploriDg the bald secularism of the education system. They are moreover agreed with us that there are insuperable obstacles to the imparting of due religious instruction in the State schools by the clergy. The clergy are not numerous ; they are frequently over-wrought ; and even if each of them, like Sir Boyle Roche's bird, could be in two places at the same time, the instruction imparted would be. in most cases, brief, partial, and spasmodic. Nor can such instruction be adequately given after school hours, when the children's minds are tired, and when such instruction might be wearisome and distasteful and looked -forward to with aversion. Religion is not to be imparted in homoeopathic doses, nor in weekly instalments, like Mrs. Squeers' brimstone and treacle. To be effective, religious influences must permeate the life and soul, the bone and marrow, of the education of a child. We venture to assert that the indifference of our Protestant fellow-colonists on this matter is largely due to the namby-pamby attitude of the churches themselves. The Rev. A. Cameron said at the Dunedin Presbyterian Synod, his church had ' never been in earnest ' in the matter. Like the Anglican Synods, they meet annually, go through the formality of passing resolutions that come to nothing, and then shelve the question till the circling months bring another, Synod around. While all this empty talking has been going on Catholics have put their hands into their pockets and provided school accommodation and teachers, and a Christian education for twelve thousand of their children in the Colony. The sacrifices which each party makes in the cause of Christian education may not unreasonably be taken as the measure of the importance which they attach to the right and proper function of the school. • • • At the Dunedin Presbyterian Synod last week a movement was — probably in view of the next general elections — inaugurated to arouse the conscience of the laity on the evils of the present godless system of public instruction. The effort is undoubtedly well-meant, but it has two fatal defects. In the first place it runs along too narrow lines — binding itself to advocating the use of the much-condemned Irish National Scripture Book in the public schools of New Zealand. In the second place it completely ignores the rights or claims of the Catholic body. With the question of Scripture-reading in the State schools we have dealt already. We have shown that, in effect, it practically means the turning of the public schools into sectarian institutions, and, instead of solving the education problem, sets up another in its place. If the Protestant conscience is to be satisfied by the introduction of Bible lessons in the State schools, it is difficult to see why the Catholic conscience is not to be considered, too. This, however, does not seem to have struck the minds of the members of the Presbyterian Synod. We shall watcli the movement with interest. It seems to have been the outcome of a statement made to an officer of the Synod by a member of the Legislative Council : * I fear there is very little hope of anything being done by Parliament until the people return members pledged to take a greater interest in the question.' The statement enfolds a lesson for Catholics as well as for Protestants. The time is fast approaching when the matter will be agitated on the electoral platform. Let Catholics see to their votes, and bear in mind that for them there is only one question — and that the Education Question. A tiny stream may turn a big wheel, but to do so, it must be confined to a narrow channel. The channel for our united energies to work in is that of the Education problem. We cannot afford to waste our limited strength along other and less important channels. The prohibitionists are not precisely the people whose methods we should care to adopt. But in the matter of what we might term compact impact they set us an example worthy of imitation. They — a small fraction of the population—have worked in a deep, if narrow, channel, and moved the wheel. Why not we ? Our cause is that stated by the Melbourne Congregationalist leader, Dr. Bevan : 4 If you want to win the world for Christ and keep it for Him, your work is amongst the children. The training of the children will solve the great problems of the future.'