'Pagans' in New Zealand

New Zealand Tablet, 4 November 1909, Page 1730

'Pagans ' in New Zealand

A Press Association' message from Auckland- in last Friday's daily papers ran'as follows: —'At a meeting of ~the Cambridge Church, of England Men's Society, when the Chairman (Mr. Wells) referred to the godless upbringing , of young people, Yen; Archdeacon 'Willis- said he noticed that Sir Robert Stout had" beeri"~uph'olding the value of the pre- - sent educational system, jand speaking against the introduction of religious teaching into the curriculum. Evidently he was still influenced by the Bishop of Auckland's reference '- to pragans in the "Dominion: The* Archdeacon said that there was no doubt in his mind that the Bishop was right, and that there were pagans here.'. The history, of "the~-discussion., as well as. jthe context of the news-item quoted above, makes it sufficiently clear that, in the view of Archdeacon Willis, .as well as of Bishop Neligan, . our purely secular system- of public instruction is responsible for a certain amount of the 'paganism' that exists in 'God's own country.' And by- 'paganism' is here meant irreligion. Now, we protest with great violence against both "the Archdeacon'and the Bishop, on the "ground that they are cruelly unfair —to paganism. As G. K. Chesterton says in his 'Heretics': 'The term "pagan"is continually used in fiction and light literature as meaning a man without any religion, whereas a pagan was generally a man with about half a dozen.' The term pagan is applied to those who are not Christians, Jews, or Mohammedans. It covers the adherents of a thonsand-and-one forms of" religious belief who sit in darkness and in the shadow "of death, from the ancestorworshippers of China to the totemistic wild red men in the jungly 'montana of Peru. The trouble with most of these .! is, not that they have no religion, but that they have too " much religion —of a kind.' For they have taken a number of the truths of natural^or revealed religion, and twisted and banged, punched and pulled and lugged them about —as the modiste does just now with ladies' head-gears of chip or straw —and so smothered them with frills and gew-gaws of perverted human .fancy, that their original form and substance aTe hardly at first sight discernible: You have, indeed, to hack and tear away a .pile, greater or less, of man-made religion to get at -the crumpled and mis-treated God-given faith that lies beneath. And, generally speaking, paganism recognises with greater or lesser clearness that, religion is a body of truths or beliefs respecting the Deity and our relations to Him; andj flowing from these, a collection of duties which have God as their primary cbjeet. One of these duties generally recognised among pagans is that of religious worship of some sort —the expression of man's sense of dependence on the Deity by an external sign -that comes under the cognisance of the senses. Worship is not, of course, the whole law of God. But we mention the matter here for' the purpose of showing that there is a good deal of religion in paganism, although the religious truth that is contained in it is often wrapped- round and found in the vain fancies and superstitions of-savage or barbarian peoples. * " But there is no such thing as religion of any "sort — Christian, Jewish, Mohammedan/or pagan —legally possible within the circle of operations of our secular system of public instruction. Legally,, it jmay concern itself only with things that are 'secular' in the ordinary and current meaning of the" term 'secular' —that is, with matters 'pertaining to the present world,' wilh 'things not spiritual or sacred,' with 'things connected with the life only,' and 'disassociated from Teligipn and religious teaching,' with ' things, relating to temporalas distinguished from eternal interests.' We take these meanings of the word 'secular' from Vol.

VI., Part 1., of the ' Encyclopaedic Dictionary,' and from page 1301 of 'Webster's International Dictionary'; and we refer our readers, for the further elucidation of the non^ religious "and godless character of .the system, to pages -24-29 of our publication, ' Secular Versus Eeligious Education.' There is no- need to emphasise (we have often, emphasised them before) the evil results that are. calculated to arise from treating the child as an intelligent, but not as am oral, being; from monopolising the best, most impressionable, and most formative part of hislife ; and : shutting _out- therefrom .the highest, tenderest,- most inspiring, -and most- exalting . influences, and concentrating his intellectual' faculties," by a lopsided development thereof, upon material interests - and material pursuits. Our secular system is doing all this. It has, too, dethroned God from His immemorial and prescriptive place in the school; it treats Him as ' an' undesirable alien' during the operations of the jsystem; it destroys the bond that exists between secular and religious instruction; and its whole action, as a ' system, cannot -fail to impress ' the child-mind with an idea of the superior importance . of -secular .to religious interests. ' - - ' . The purely secular „ school was, and is, advocated' in France as a .means of squeezing Christianity out of the hearts of the people. There it has contributed much to "the negative irreligion that prevails so widely in that decadent land — to the rejection of the Christian view of life and its purpose, of the Christian view of the sanctity of marriage and the moral training of the young. 'In these -negations,' says Devas, in his 'Key to the World's Progress,' 'the leaders of the de-christianising movement .resemble the Moslems; and they are like them in being essenti- " ally parasitic, and , destructive of the very civilisation they seem to foster: the early enthusiasm ends in. bitter disillusion; they only differ in. the i)roeess being much more rapid than with their earlier brethren. France .offers aa yet .the most complete specimen for observation: the brilliant outburst of emancipated humanity, her tongue, her influence, .and later her arms dominating all Europe, admired or dreaded, and then the steady ebb of that glory, as the accumulated waters of Christianity gradually flowed away. To sink from being in the first place politically to the seventh .or lower is a comparatively small matter, and may be due to other causes;, the loss of literary and intellectual eminence is graver; but the main point is the loss of moral influence and :to be a labelled specimen, of decadence* Here the After-Christian appears in his development; he treats as an illusion all belief in God, as illusion all devotion to prince or people, as illusion all eternal. and spiritual human love, as illusion his own free will and undying personality. So all that gave life its value and' dignity is abandoned, and all that remains are the calculated' pleasures of the cynic who resolves to be a dupe no more. ' A long experience of secular schools in the United States has called forth the humiliating avowals of •G. Stanley Hall (in his ' Adolescence'), of W. E. Chancellor (in his 'American Schools'), anjl. of sundry other educationists, that duty and, the spirit of obedience_ cannot be taught under the system, nor any c adequate check placed upon the downward path of youthful lubricity. The secular school is a queer 'barrier' to oppose to the blight of a decadence in domestic ideals which darkens the brilliant prospects of these -new countries with the dual

curse of artificial sterility and divorce."