Tweedledum and Tweedledee

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXI, Issue 22, 28 May 1903, Page 1

Tweedledum and Tweedledee

In an old and seldom-read play, Mrs Letitia Lovelight describes the visit of Dr. Fossile, ' a man of excellent learning,' to her husband, who had loaded into himself a bucketful or so of liquid lightning. The doctor was, in Shakespeare's phrase, ' sickened o'er affectation '—a vain, pompous man, and inordinately given to many-syllabled words. ' Madam,' said he, ' I haAe ordered Mr. What's-his-name, your spouse's apothecary, to phlebotomise him to-morrow morning' Lovelight. on hearing this, sat up m bed in a state of comical alarm 'To do what with me ? " he cried ; ' no, I'll never suffer it. No, I'm not, thank God, in so desperate a condition as to undergo so damnable an operation as that is.' 'As what is, my dear ? ' queried his wife, smiling ; ' the doctor only means to have you bled.' ' Ay,' the patient replied ; ' for bleeding, I like it well enough , but for that other thing he ordered, I will sooner die than submit to it.'

This is practically the attitude taken up by a number of those who favor the introduction of Bihlelessons into the State schools of New Zealand. They shrink with horror from the thought of ' religious instruction ' in the schoolrooms. They stand stoutly for ' ethical instruction,' which is the same thing disguised under the thin veil of a Greek derivative, and is an attempt to differentiate between Tweedledum, and Tweedlodce Moral (or ethical) and religious teaching are inseparably bound together. They stand or fall together. A code of conventional and misnamed ' ethics ' — or what the Continental enemies of all supernatural faith term ' civic morality ' — may, indeed, be impressed upon the youthful mind without reference to direct religious teaching. But this sham code of morality can have no better foundation than the rotten, shifting, and unstable one of passion or expediency. It has nothing to do with the formation of character — the training of what are termed the moral faculties of the child : the will, the conscience, the affections. This, after all, is the most vitally important part of education, and for this end, religious instruction, which is necessarily based on doctrinal teaching, is absolutely indispensable Wherein, for instance, lies the force of an appeal to the child's conscience ? Conscience makes a uniqtie claim upon us. It claims, in fact, nothing less than supreme control over all our actions. Its orders are absolute It commands this or forbids that simply because it is right, irrespective of consequences — whether obedience leads to temporal happiness or misery, to wealth or rags, to political power or to the headsman's block. Conscience is thus no meie cultivated perception of our own self-in-terest. Other desires and feelings rise In rebellion against

conscience. They may partially or temporarily dethrone it, but amidst the din and storm of sin and passion its still, small voice will still speak its commands and utter its warnings.

What is its claim to reverence and obedience ? Simply this : that it is not a self-contained faculty Its source, its explanation, its justification lie farther' back It brings us up to Him Who is the Source of all law ; it is the medium through which the voice of the Living God finds expression in our lives. And thus the first appeal that we make to the sense of duty in the child the first lesson in true ethics, depends for its ultimate and only effective sanction on dogmatic religious teaching ' The law of duty,' as one writer pithily remarks ' demands a religious source for its interpretation, a re^ ligious sanction for its claim, a religious motive for its compelling power.' Take these away, and conscience ceases to be the supreme guide of our actions, and passion, whim, and expediency become the ultimate rules of conduct Thus we are landed in rheer paganism : but, mark ye, good masters, in the paganism of ancient Greece and Home as it was at the peiyod when, througjhl the action of the philosophers, the sense of perscnal responsibility to some higher Power became dimmed ; when the strong, virile, law-abiding, national character that had been grounded upon it began to shrivel, civic life became corrupt, morals reached an unexampled depth of degradation, and the two most commanding civilisations of ancient days perished amidst their own corruption. There is one thing that history luminously proves— that religious belief and social inoiality go hand in hand. '1 hey have ever stood or fallen together. And some of our theorists would do well to remember that history— which is a mere record of human experience— has an uneasy habit of repeating itself.