The New Zealand TABLET Fiat Justitia. THURSDAY, APRIL 5, 1900. COMING AROUND.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXVIII, Issue 14, 5 April 1900, Page 17

The New Zealand TABLET

Fiat Justitia. THURSDAY, APRIL 5, 1900. COMING AROUND.

T tala'n ii mighty lcxeraue to lemove a political idea or a social habit that is rooted in religious prejudice. We ha\e time and again pointed out' that the hostility of legislators and of synods and assemblies and conferences to the Catholic classes on the school question is, in ils ultimate resort, based upon an idle fear that the Catholic Church would, in some unstated way, be the chief beneiieiary by the one and only satisfactory way of settling the evergreen education question. The Churches object as stroimly, though not as practically, as we do to the bold and menacing secularism of a system uhieh is training up the youth of the Colony topass a considerable portion of the most impressionable period of their lives removed as far as possible from all reference to God or to moral duty and personal responsibility. And hence from time to time there rises among our separated brethren the cry of alarm that the religious organisations to which they owe allegiance aie fa^l losing their grasp upon the masses of the population, that church-going is on the decline, that coarse vices are becoming rampant, and that it is necessary to devise some means of bringing the churchless and prayerless within the influence of religion, unless this is to cease to be, except in name, a Christian country.

To Catholics the connection between the godless school and the growing indifferentisin of our time is one of cause

and effect. There are, of course, other influences at work in the same direction. But the influence of the secularism in the school is sufficient to account for a condition of things which formed the subject of such despondent comments in the Auckland Press and pulpit some time ago. The Lutherans, both in America and in Australia, feel as Catholics do upon this subject, and, in a modest way, have made many sacrifices in order to give the rising generation the bpnofit of an education which is permeated through and through with the sweet and terming influences of religion. The Hiiro, the Au»liuau organ of "Victoria, U committed through and through to the advocacy of parochial schools. In the United States — as we learn from the S.H. Rpvieir and the Boston Pilot — many leading Protestant clergy are coming around to the same view. Thus, the Sanduslnj Regislei (Ohio) of January Id has the following evidence of the new awakening :—: —

A few days ago at a meeting of the clergy of the city of Toledo appeared Rev. F. D. Kelsey, whose name does not indicate that be is a Lutheran. He is a member of the Pastors' Union there, which is not composed of Catholics. Mr. Kelsey deliberately declared that the Protestant churches will yet be compelled to erect their own school houses and require the children of their members to be sent to parochial schools where they will not run the risk of losing their faith, as is the case now in the public schools. We quote his language. How widespread is this sentiment among the clergy in the United States ? The dispatch which announces what Mr. Kelsey says does not give his denomination. All we know is that he is of some Protestant denomination. If all the Churches in the United States, Protestant and Catholic, propose to establish parochial schools, the public school system is gone. The sentiment that appears in the last sentence has found repeated expression in the editorial columns of this paper. * * * In a recent article upon the same subject the Churchman bays :—: — We recall no time in this generation when the serious consideration of the religious instruction of the young has been pressed upon us so earnestly and from such varied quarters. . . . To-day the child studies the arts of men, their sciences, literatures, institutions, in a way and with a serious spirit that he does not give to his religious beliefs. Religious training is not taking the place to which it is pedagogirally entitled. . . . Without this religious training there are many aspects of civilisation that will be seen distortedly or imperfectly, or that will be shut out from* sight altogether. Jt is easier to find faults than reir.e'lieK. But it is noec-sjiy to feel the faults in order that we may seek <o rind the remul o. With our present political institutions it is inevitable that th-ro should be public schools and reasonably certain that thcvwill remain, as they have ever been, seoular. In other times ami in other nations to-day religious training has been and is united as a mattsr of course to the secular. It was co in the. middle ages. It su in Russia. Bnt with us at present it cannot be and we must M?ek the eolution elsewhere. Any practical solution must take the publicschool as it is. It must supplement it and not supplant it. And it must supplement it on as high a plane of efficiency as characterises the teaching in science or literature or art. We cannot put it off with a hurried and unsystematic hour on Sunday if we wish and expect the keen-witted children to think that we really regard it as worth while. And we shall not attain the result we seek if we do so. Elsewhere in the same article the Chunhaoa points out the hopeless insufficiency of the hour-a-week study of religion by the child :—: — _ Religion, as Mr. Butler says, is much more important in civilisation and in life than the Sunday school teaches. It is more real. It touches other interests at more points. It must reveal the spiritual side of all that the common school teaches showing that all life is of the spirit, thcit we cannot have religion and education till we have religion in education. We ahull be long in reaching the goal, but we shall see it and start on the way. And we can see also the alternative. In the present conditions of American domestic life religious knowledge is not holding its own. Every teacher knows that allusions to the Bible are not recognised by classes to-day as they should be or once were. The appeal to the heart needs to be reinforced by an appeal to the intellect and the will, or it will cease to be effective in conduct. Catholics have long ago, and at immense sacrifices, solved the difficulty with their system of elementary and secondary schools. That way, too, lies the only way for our separated brethren, unless they are content to see the young generation gradually but surely drifting away from their grasp into indifferentism and infidelity. "We, however, regard with friendly and sympathetic interest every earnest setting forth, by Christians of other folds, of the dangers of secular instruction divorced from religious influences, and we welcome every attempt made to amend along the right lines a system which is freighted with so much evil for both religion and the State.