Bible-in-Schools

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXVI, Issue 8, 27 February 1908, Page 9

Bible-in-Schools

Ha\ing failed in their flank attack on the secular provisions of the Education Act, .some of our old Bible-h;-schools friends are making sporadic efforts to capture the State schools for sectarian purposes by a frontal attack. Here and there through the Dominion, school committees — who are peculiarly susceptible to local pressure and local influences — have, on the requisition of non-Catholic clergymen and others, permitted sectarian Bible instruction during school hours. This action of school committees seems to be an. open breach • of the following provision of the Act : — ' The school shall be kept open five - days 'in each week for at least four hours, two of which in the forenoon and two in the afternoon shall be consecutive, and the teaching shall be entirely of a secular character.' The Wanganui Education Board overruled the permission which the local school committee gave some time ago for Biblical instruction during school hours. The committee thereupon applied to the Supreme Court for an injunction against the Board. On Monday last, Mr. Justice Cooper decided that the committee was under the authority of the Board a-nd that the power of fixing the sdhiool hours rested, not with the committee,' but with the Board. This decision will clear the atmosphere. It will serve to check the dangerous complaisance shown by some committees to groups of clergymen who (as the Napier ' Daily Telegraph ' of February 15 remarked) assume that 'no .Catholic, children eyerwill or ought to attend ' the pubKc schools, and who look upon these institutes of elementary instruction as 'Protestant educational preserves'." Hitherto, the Bible^in-schools movement, has been vastly more marked by oratory than by work. We rejoice to see the clergy of the separated Churches beginning to recognise their responsibilities in a more practical way than heretofore. But we venture to hope that the freshness of their zeal for the religious instruction of youth will not carry them beyond what is due to the law and to common fairness towards those who -do not belong to" their various folds.