The New Zealand TABLET THURSDAY, OCTOBER 16, 1902. A MORRISON PILL MOVEMENT.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXX, Issue 42, 16 October 1902, Page 17

The New Zealand TABLET

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 16, 1902. A MORRISON PILL MOVEMENT.

* To promote the cause of Religion and Justice by the ways of Truth and Peace.' LEO TTTTT. to the N.Z. TABLET.

Isfiffiw HE pre-election agitation now'going on in favor jJUJ J l^U of Bible lessons in the State schools reminds us *£*H \ Pj£ of Carlyle's sarcastic chapter on ' Morrison's /Jfl^f pin 'i n his ' Past and Present.' The Sage of vl *^^ Chelsea waxes splendidly sarcastic at the Morm»l*^ RISON's Pill or quack remedy for social and \ 4sP' political disorders ;he scourges those who greet r the real cure ' with a satirical tehee' ; and warns them that the one thing needful is a radical, universal alteration of their regimen and way of life, a most agonising divorce between them and their chimeras and falsities, and a return to Nature's ' veracities and integrities.' Without all this they will swallow their Morrison's Pills and their of Parliament and their so-called 'remedial measures' in vain.

We have in New Zealand a charming variety of quack remedies — Morrison's Pills, and. Pink Pills, and Other Pills — for the deplorable godlessness of ' Our Great National System 'of public instruction. The Anglicans agreed provisionally at last year's Synods — for the sake of uniformity — to champion a scheme which is admittedly halt and lame and blind. Ihe Presbyterians and sundry Councils of the Churches find their Morrison's Pill to be a somewhat undefined scheme of Bible lessons, and fondly imagine that the perfunctory and unexplained perusal of a few ."cripture excerpts will miraculously supply all the religious knowledge, the spiritual atmosphere, and the moral influences that are necessary for the school-life of the Christian child. These meagre and unassimilable doßes of diluted ' religion ' would be about as nourishing to the spiritual hunger of the

juvenile intellect crossing the desert of life as the husky ' seeds of the nardoo were to the explorers Bußgß and Wills and their starving companions in the waterless wastes ;'. of central Australia. It is a pathetically curious and made- •. quate remedy for a great and urgent public evil. Oar Presbyterian friends deplore, with us, • the serious defect in out educational system arising from the exclusion of all moral and religious instruction in the public schools within school hours.' A New Zealand Anglican General Synod was some time ago so far in tune with Catholic feeling on the subject as to declare that 'it is the duty of every Christian to set forward to the utmost of his power the education of the young in the fear and love of Gud ' ; that this duty devolves first and above all tin parents ; that no provision of the Church can absolve them from such duty ; that the foundations of religious teaching must not merely be laid in the home, but that religious instruction must be largely given elsewhere — to wit, in the school ; that under the present godless system the opportunities of imparting such teaching are quite inadequate and sometimes refused ; that the clergy are too few to attend to it ; and that ' the Sunday schools cannot be maintained in sufficient numbers, and, however excellent, they only partially fulfil the required conditions.* In other words, religion is not a thing to be donned and doffed like a Sunday coat or a ' best ' hat, but something which enters into the bone and marrow of our daily lives. In our coudemnation of the godless school we stand on the same platform as our Anglican, Presbyterian, and Methodist fellow-colonists. But we differ radically as to the remedy for this unhappy state of things. They believe in homoeopathic doses of that impossibility * unsectarian ' Bible lessons, for a few minutes each day. We—for reasons that we stated and restated a score of times — believe this to be the merest quackery. We hold fast by the only religious instruction that can get beyond the epidermis of the/ child — systematic training and the presence of moral influences and the fear and love of God through and through> the whole school life of the rising generation.

The objections against the schemes of Bible lessons referred to above may be briefly stated. (1) If serious religious instruction is meant to be conveyed to the pupils of our public schools, the projects of our Anglican, Presbyterian, and other non-Catholic friends — as shown above — are farcically insufficient and absurd. (2) It is the duty of the Church, not of the State, to impart religious instruction. ' Those who,' said the Archbishop of Melbourne some time ago, ' recognise the principle that religious instruction may be given by the State thereby abdicate one of the primary duties attached to a Church. If the right of the State to impart religious instruction of one particular kind be recognised at the present time, there will be nothing to prevent the State undertaking to give religious instruction of quite a different kind in the future. This is, unfortunately, what is occurring in more than one of the Continental countries of Europe at the present time.* (3) There is no such thing as the ' unsectarian ' religious instruction which bulks up so largely in the various schemes of our Protestant friends. Genuine religious instruction must, by its very nature, be based upon a doctrinal foundation. The ' undogmatic 'or ' unsectarian * religion proposed at synods and assemblies to be taught in our public Bchools is a useless, pasty, and amorphous but hopelessly sectarian Thing which is, in reality, nothing less than a • reduced ' or diluted form of Protestantism.

(4) It is impossible to draw up a scheme of Bible lessons which are really suitable for combined instruction. But even if a scheme is adopted and forced upon the public, it will only serve, in effect, to Protestantise the State schools, and, so far from settling the difficulty, will only replace one grievance by another. In the scheme now suggested it is proposed that the Scripture lessons, or difficult words in them, shall be explained by the teachers on the lines laid down in the text-book provided. This will ndt mend matters. Such explanation will be framed by Protestants of various shades of belief, and it will naturally be tinged with their peculiar views and prepossessions. We must also take into serious account the instances in which the comments would come from the lips of atheists and agnostics. There is a multitude of oft-recurring Scripture

terms which have a Protestant as well as a Catholic meaning. Take, for instance, such words as 'Church,* * penance ' or •repentance,' • forgiveness, 1 * grace,' * salvation ' *■ predestined,' • faith/ * good works,' etc. Her& again, in the very act of explaining even the meaning of the commonest words of Scripture, you may, under the segis of the State, as effectually denominafcionalise a public school in cortain matters of doctrine as if it were the Sunday school of a particular sect. A significant point is mentioned in • The Life and Letters of Dr. Whately,' the Anglican ArchMahop of Dublin, who compiled the very text-books of Scripture which some of our Protestant fellow-colonists wanted to introduce into our State schools. In one of his letters, the Anglo-Irish prelate expressly stated that he compiled those Scripture lessons for the Irish National Board of Education in the hope that they might wean the Catholic school children from ' Popery ' and ' turn them into good little English boys and girls.' We do not attribute any such intention to the advocates of Bible lessons in the schools of New Zealand. We mention the fact merely as illustrating the denominational use to whioh, in the opinion of Archbishop Whately, the Scriptures might be turned in the publio schools of Ireland — and if in Ireland, why nob, despite the best intentions on the part of the promoters of this scheme, in New Zealand, too ? In Victoria it has been found impossible to draw up any suitable scheme of Bible lessons. In Baltimore the ftabbis raised a 4olemn protest against Bible reading in the publio schools. And in October, 1900, the Chicago Board of Education rejected the proposal to introduce into the State schools nnder their control a volume of ' Readings from the Bible selected for the Public Schools.' 'The Bible,' said the President of tbe Board, ' has never been utilised as a moral educational factor in the Chicago public schools, and by a vote' of thirteen to six the Board decided it would be improper to introduce it in this day. While the selected readings inculcated nothing but good m«ral ideas, we believed it might be a step towards religious controversy.'

We have heard a great deal of late regarding ' a conscience clause for teachers and pupils.' It is a fine, sonorous mouthful, like that blessed word Mesopotamia. But we have long ago .pointed out its fallacy and shown that it furnishes no effective way out of the difficulty. Writing some years ago upon the subject, we said : ' Such a clause for teachers would nullify, in so far as it would be acted upon, the whole purpose of legislation in favor of Bible reading in the public schools. The conscience clause contemplated for pupils usually is intended to affect only those pupils whose parents, by writing, or at least orally, desire their exclusion from the Bible classes. A percentage of Catholic pupils would thus be brought within the influence of non-Catholic oi agnostic teaching through the mere indolence of their parents in not complying with formalities. We have, too, a recollection of cases occurring in New South Wales and in a suburb of Melbourne which go to show that a certain degree of practical compulsion may be exercised on, pupils even under the supposed safeguard of a conscience clause. Even were it put into effective and constant operation, it would mark out the Catholic children as a class apart — a sort of separate caste — and make them the butts of the other pupils. In New South Wales the Scripture lessons, despite their conscience clause, by no means diminish the grievance felt by the Catholic body. Catholics strenuously object to the paganising of the Public schools. They likewise object to the adoption in them of Protestant principles of religious instruction. An organised attempt is, however, being made to force this upon us. United efforts are being or to be made to pledge candidates to support the platform of the Bible-in- Schools League and allied organisations. It behoves Catholics to meet all this with strenuous opposition. In the face of the present movement for forcing a fresh educational grievance upon us, there can be only one question for Catholics at the coming elections.