The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, APRIL 16, 1908. SECULARISM IN EDUCATION

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXVI, Issue 15, 16 April 1908, Page 21

The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, APRIL 16, 1908. SECULARISM IN EDUCATION

fOURNALISTIC chain-lightning has been playing: pretty freely about the Anglican, Bishop of Auckland (Dr. Neligan) since there cameto New Zealand the following report of part of a sermon delivered by -torn some weeks ago in London.: — v - ' It might be asked, Why should there be any danger of relapsing into paganism -?"- There " were three reasons. The chief— and mark it well— was a St a te system of secular education. " Oh, my God ! " the bishop exclaimed, "if you could only see the heathenism which is the result of secularism ! God forgive the men and women in England "who want to secularise the" schools of England. If you could only live in the Colony and see what I have seeai! " In one instance in his diocese, out of forty-three children, only five knew the Lord's Prayer. A schoolmaster— a good Ohristi a n man— told him that he had' taken- eleven' boysout of his school and asked who the Lord Jesus was, and only one knew He was the Son. of God and the Saviour of the world. When he asked the bjoy iwhjerehe" had learned it, he said that his mother had taught "it to him. Thank God for English mothers ! If Englishmen and Englishwomen cauld only see the awful results '6t secularism -they would deprive themselves of luxuries to keep their schools going,' Numerous journals have been grilling "the Bishop since these words went the rounds of -the New Zealand press. Among them" are the ? out-and-outers '- (as Father Prout would call them), to whom' '• our great national system ? is the last word of glorified hum'ah "wisdom, a fetich that it would be a Macedonian atrocity, to touch. These, even while admitting a measure .of moral degeneracy and of ignorance of moral and religious,- truth, decline to lay the responsibility "for any part, of at to our secular . system of public instruction. o<n> the other band, sundry clergymen and others sustain the Bishop in has onslaught on the Education Act, aUd, by implication, lay a* its door some appalling cases of - ignorance of the elementary facts of the Christian religion that came under their personal knowledge, or .were reported, by trustworthy witnesses'. ' Here"- are "some , instances in pohnb, recorded by - • a retired officer of the Imperial Armyj- living in -a remote township of theAuckland Peninsula ' :— ' " -•' 1 This officer was distressed at the neglected condition of the children of the neighborhood, in respect to religion, so -he gathered ten of them in a class. He

begaln by a^ng them if they knew what it was to pray. Eight of the ten had ndl 'the slightest idea. Only one was in the habtt of- praying. The_ other illustration w a s giren mfc by the home missionary of our Churoh. In the district referred to within twelve miles of .the corridor express passing on its way to Rotorua, a lady formed, a Sunday school of thirty children. She found that only two out of the thirty had ever heard the name of Jesus Christ. A third illustration came to my knowledge only this week. The minister of one of our parishes in the north recently went on a preaching excursiion into the back-blocks. Meeting a smart looking boy on the road lie asked him in the course of conversation if he knew about Jesus. " No ; Who is He ? '>' the boy answered, and then the minister began to tell Mm something of the wonderful life. He was startled by a loud rude laugh. " You don't expect me to believe a yarn like that ? " cried the boy. Now, is paganism too strong a word for this sort of thing? Personally, I feel inclined to apologise to many a pagan for applying his designation to people in such a condition. 1 ' , i || i HI ' One positively envies ', said the Rev. Gray Dixon, 1 the children that go up the hill to the , Buddhist ■ or Confucian temple -in contrast with the children of our own kith and kin whose minds a re religiously such an "- appalling blank.' It seems to us that, in this discussion, the one "side has been trying to prove somewhat too much, the other side a great deal too much. It is somewhat too much, for instance, to assume or suggest /that the hard secularism of our system of public instruction—'deplorable as its effects must be— is almost wholly responsible for the ignorance of religious truths and principles', and the declension towards practical paganism, that exist among numbers of the people, not alone in the ' backblocks', but also within tine sound of the bell© fof our . city churches. The home must -shoulder a heavy share of the sin and shame. Account must also be taken of the special circumstances of the country, and especially of these three : the general comfort in which the people live ; the amount of leisure that our laws and customs accord them — things good in. themselves ; and that keen pursuit of pleasure and of wealth which tends to exaggerate the material side of life andt to obscure the spiritual, or to releg a te it to a secondary place. In connection with so much practical pagaa&sm. as exists, a grave measure of responsibility is also, r-ightly chargeable to some or many of the very organisations- whose duty it is to bring Christ, a nd Him crucified, into the homes and hearts of the people. We refer here more especially to those denominations which, for over thirty years, have made no re a l effort or sacrifice for the religious education of their children, and which (as shown by a parliamentary return a few years ago) have grievously neglected the opportunities! of spiritual instruction afforded by the provisions of the present Act. Here— omitting, for the moment, the factor of special national and social circumstance— we have three institutions that have (or ought to have) a direct interest in the moral and religious up-bringing of ' the young idea ' : the hon-e, the church, the school. Each has its own duties and responsibilities in connection with the child. And of these, the primary responsibility falls, by natural right, upon the home— upon the Parents, who "have given, to "the child the breath of life, and whose urgent duty is to 'fit him for the better life, . and to restore to God the gift He guve them. A good, pure, andi holy home life will arrest some part— great or small, a ccor<ling ■to circumstances —of the harm; done by a secularist school system, or . by neglect of the dmty of religious instruction that devolves upon the Christian ministry. Zeal on the part of the Churches will, to some extent, save children from the full force of the evils inflicted by the careless home and the secular school. .But the * abomination of desolation is soon reached with, this comibtination— an irreligious home, a Christian ministry that has no true notion' of its duties towards Christ's little ones, and a school system in which children are

taught to pass a great portion of their most impressionable years without the thought of God or of moral responsibility to Him as their first beginning and their last end;' * Even with the utmost. zeal on, -the* part of the Churoh, there are some that will rem a m outside the influences of religion— oWstinate, apathetic, or hostile. The experience of the Catholic clergy in. New Ze a land is, that • where children are being brought up in ignorance of the principles and teachings of- religion, this " condition is almost invariably associated with a public school education and a home life that Is immovably apathetic or sullenly host/ile . to spiritual influences. . There are, we rather think, few, if any, who aGldnowledge thei existence and- claims of the spiritual side of life, and who at the same time stand, on principle, for a system of public instruction that ignores this vital part of the training of youth. So far as we are aware, most of the legislators and of the newspapers that' stand for a purely secular system, do so rather as an expedient than as a principle — rather as a compromise to secure (as they think) • educational peace ' than as a complete and ordered; principle of youthful traiiyin<g. For a merely secular system cannot be called ' education 'in its true and proper sense. To ' educate ' is (as the term signifies) to ' draw out ' the faculties— to exercise them by training, by discipline, so as to develop the natural powers and render themeffiv cient ; it necessarily implies the exercise and development, not of the mental faculties alone, and not of the bodily, faculties alone, .but of the whole roan, the mind, the body, the heart, the will — the physical, the mental, and the mor a l powers of the child. ♦ Education, then, is \ the systematic development and cultivation of the religious and moral, a s we U as of the mental and bodily, faculties of youth. A rderelysecular system of public instruction is not, therefore, properly, called a system •of ' education ' ; its method of -development is lop-sided, for it leaves out of consideration that which constitutes the best and most essential part of true education, the training of the heart and will o.f the child, and the formation., in hire-, of character. And this cannot be done without irirstilling into his heart the teachings of religion and those principles of moral science which have for their sanction ' the revealed Will of the Creator, the fear of . Whom 1 is the beginning of wisdom, and the love of Whom is its end. Reason, history, and daily experience show th a t you cannot effectively teach ethics without dogmia^ nor moral principles without religion. •' All motives of self-respect, honor, sense of • duty, welfare of the community, etc.,' says a noted educationist, • may deter a man from certain more revolting crimes, but they will not hold Jin times of fierce temptation, when neither disgrace nor civil punishment is to be feared V And in any case, no ' civdl ' or man-made" code of 1 morals can have any stronger ultim a te sanction ' than that of -brute force— the fear of the policeman, or of the prison-cell, or\of the hangman's slip-noose. Unfortunately, our secular system of public instruction! makes 1 education ' consist, not so much In ' drawing out ' or funfolddng the moral and mental faculties, as- in ' putting in ' — forcing- into one set of faculties (the mental) a variegated assortment of facts and principles from- a score of different 'ologies. These things are good, so far as they go. But they do not go sufficiently far. - * Washington, the . ' F a ther of his Country ',' voiced this idea when he left to his countrymen these partIng words as a legacy to' them for all toe :— 1 Let -us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be n-aimtained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality, can prevail in exclusion of religious principles'.

Lord Stanhope, in his '. Conversations with the Duke of Wellington ' (London, 1888, p. 180), tells of a conversation which Lord Mahon h a d on the. subject of secular public instruction, with." that great military and political leader. ' Lord Mahon writes :— 1 I shiall never forget the earnestwess and energy .with which he deprecated mere secular education,- aididing, " I doubt if the devil himself could advise a worse scheme of social destruction!".' " *" And in a discourse on the Education Act, he said on December 23, 1840 : ' Take care what you axe about ; for unless you base all this education on<- religion, you are only bringing, up so many clever devils '. * Moore, in a well-worn verse, says of a vase containing attar of roses :— ' 'You may .break, you may sha-tter the v a se a& you will, But the scent of the roses will hang round it still '. Christian sentiment hangs long around the shattered ruin of Christian faith. - But it, too, vanishes at, last, just as ' the scent of the roses ' disappears in time from the fragments of the broken attar jar. Cnristian sentiment and Christian morals cannot long sustain, whether in the individual or in the community, the weakening or loss of Christian faith. And this process of weakening, and of ultimate loss, must of necessity be going on in some measure— greater here, less, there— under a widespread system of public instruction which, as a system, ignores Christ. Such a system nrny not, indeed, inculcate wrong principles ; it may not tmsitil into the pupils' minds tenets that undermine so much of religious faith as they may have. But it has these two grave, nay ruinous, defects : it does no- ' thing to protect and strengthen religious faith in the hearts of the children ; and it accustoms them (as already stated) to pass a notable part of the most in> pressionaible period of their lives without a religious atmosphere, without the thought of God, without any reference to moral responsibility towards God as their Creator and Judge, as their first beginning and last eoid. Nay, more : the system, as a. system, instils this negative irreligion or indifferentism (or whatsoever you may call it), in an age in which much of our current literature, and portion of our domestic and social life, are to a painful extent infected with the agnostic and ' new pagan ' spirit. At any time— even in- an age of robust religious f aiith — suoh a system of public instruction would be seriously defective and likely to create mischief in the souls of youth. But, in the circumsiiances named, it cannot, as a system 1 , fail to weaken religious- faith, and, with religious faith, to underrrdne, in the hearts of children, those principles 1 of true morality which have been well described as ' the pillars of human happiness antdi national security '. Bishop Neligan arid his friends may, perhaps, have erred on the question of- fact — as to how far the secular schools are responsible' for the paganism which they found among children ' 4n parts of New Zealand. This would be - a difficult matter either to prove or to disprove as a general issue, although by no means difficult .in individual cases. But there cannot, we think, be^a reasonable doubt that the secular system of public instruction is calculated, . in the highest degree, to weaken religious faith,;, nor can it, we think-, be fairly questioned that, in this respect, v the stored energies of the system for this sort of mischief have, in poilnt of fact, followed their normal path of discharge. There is hardly a priest in New Zealand who Is <not able, from personal, knowledge and experience of individual cases, to bear a measure of testimony to this fact.

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