Archbishop Redwood on Education

New Zealand Tablet, 24 March 1910, Page 450

Archbishop Redwood on Education

(From our Wellington correspondent.) \ r In his address at the opening of the new school-chapel at Northlands on Sunday, March 13, his Grace the Archbishop spoke to the following effect, on . education: —He said the secular system of public instruction was, . in his opinion, the greatest evil that ever befell this new country. That it was the natural and ■ logical outcome of the antireligious philosophy of Voltaire and Rousseau and ; their school, whose avowed object was to blot out Christianity from the souls of men. That this system was the direct product of the French Revolution at the close of the last century, which Revolution De Maistre rightly styled Satanic' He pointed out that this system exhibits hypocrisy on a par with its injustice and tyranny ; u for, while it proposes to be '' unsectarian,' and •undenominational,' it at the very same time is intensely denominational and sectarian. Like every system of education, it started from the principle that education is a preparation for life; and upon that principle it logically - raised • the following implied dogmas: Religion is inconsistent with the true life-aim of the child; religion is hostile to the true life-aim of the child; religion is at best unnecessary for the true life-aim of the child; and, again, the exclusion of religion from education promotes the true life-aim of the child; and, lastly, the need of an intimate union of religion and education is, so to speak, a species of modern heretical pravity. Here, then, we had a highly sectarian

set of dogmas regarding religion— is, of religious dogmas. Here we had an attitude towards religion, a school of. thought, an ’ism. And what sects did such educational ideals suit? .. Why, of course, the Secularists, the Agnostics, the Atheists. Now, these implied dogmas were ruthlessly forced by law upon the public schools of this Dominion. Such parents as accepted them were rewarded with the free education of their children; such parents as were bound in conscience to reject them, and who did reject them, must either smother their conscientious convictions for the proffered boon of free education, or pay a double and continuing tax or fineone for the education which they cannot in conscience accept, the other for the education which they can. What a sad and scandalous spectacle! In a so-called Christian land the money of Christians is taken to destroy Christianity—this is a masterpiece of anti-Christian craft, while it is barefaced plunder and tyranny. ‘- His Grace further remarked that the late Marquis of Salisbury, Prime Minister of England, in one of his public speeches, smote and flagellated severely those who tell parents ‘ that because there is a difference amongst those who desire to be their teachers as to what form of religion they shall be taught, they shall be taught no religion at all.’ - This he described as the most grotesque form of tyranny that can be devised.’ Suppose,’ he added, a starving man were to apply to two gentlemen for relief, and they, quarrelling whether they should give him beef or mutton, decided not to give him anything at all.’ The present system (his Grace continued) was no solution of the religious difficulty, but only an evasion— an evasion which violates the royal right of Jesus Christ, the King of Kings, by dethroning Him from His age-long and prescriptive place in the school ; by treating the child as an intelligent, but not a moral, being; by monopolising the best, the most impressionable, and the most formative part of his life, and shutting out therefrom the highest, the tenderest, most inspiring, and most exalting influences, and concentrating his intellectual faculties, by a lop-sided development of them, upon material interests and pursuits alone. No wonder, then, that the great Duke of Wellington, speaking of such a school system, said ‘I doubt if the devil himself could devise a worse scheme of social destruction.’ And, again, on December 23, 1840, the same great Englishman thus warned the Government of the day: ‘ Take care what you are about, for unless you base all this education on religion you are only bringing up so many clever, devils.’ The Catholic system of schools (his Grace added) is absolutely correct in this Dominion and elsewhere. It will secure the future for the best civilisation; whereas the secular system is the direct high road to paganism, and a worse paganism than the one from which Christianity rescued the world— a paganism self-contented, but really .without God and without hope. Catholics wanted their children educated in Catholic schools taught by Catholic teachers. They had a right to this, and with nothing less would they be satisfied. He congratulated all concerned upon the erection of this new school.