IV

_LIFE, LIBERTY, AND JUSTICE_

When an article in a newspaper produces a reply, the modest writer

is gratified; for he knows that he has had at any rate one reader.

If the reply comes to him privately, he is even better pleased, for

then he feels that his reader thinks the matter worthy of personal

discussion and of freely exchanged opinion. I have lately written an

article on "Life and Liberty" as proposed by some earnest clergymen

for the English Church, and an article on Mr. Fisher's Education

Bill, in which I avowed my dislike to all attempts on the part of

the State to teach religion. Both these articles have brought me

a good deal of correspondence, both friendly and hostile. The term

allotted to human life does not allow one to enter into private

controversy with every correspondent, so I take this method of

making a general reply. "Life and Liberty" are glorious ideals,

but, to make the combination, perfect, we must add Justice. Hence

my title.

The State consists of persons who profess all sorts of religion,

and none. If the State compels its citizens to pay for religious

teaching in which they do not believe, it commits, in my opinion,

a palpable injustice. This is not merely a question between one

sect and another sect. It is, indeed, unjust to make a Quaker pay

for teaching the doctrine of the Sacraments, or a Unitarian for

teaching the Deity of Christ; but it is equally unjust to make

an Atheist pay for teaching the existence of God, or a Churchman

for teaching that curious kind of implied Socinianism which is

called "undenominational religion."

The only way out of these inequities is what is commonly called

"Secularism." The word has some unfortunate associations. It has

been connected in the past with a blatant form of negation, and

also with a social doctrine which all decent people repudiate. But,

strictly considered, it means no more than "temporal" or "worldly";

and when I say that I recommend the "Secular" system of education,

I mean that the State should confine itself to the temporal or

worldly work with which alone it is competent to deal, and should

leave religion (which it cannot touch without inflicting injustice

on someone) to those whose proper function is to instil it.

Who are they? Speaking generally, parents, ministers of religion,

and teachers who are themselves convinced of what they teach; but

I must narrow my ground. To-day I am writing as a Churchman for

those Churchmen whom my previous articles disturbed; and I have

only space to set forth some of the grounds on which we Churchmen

should support the "secular solution."

A Churchman is bound by his baptismal vows to "believe all the

articles of the Christian Faith." These, according to his catechism,

are summed up in the Apostles' Creed. He cannot, therefore, be

satisfied with any religious instruction which is not based on

that formula; and yet such instruction cannot rightly be enforced

in schools which belong as much to unbelievers as to Christians.

A Churchman's religious faith is not derived primarily from the

Bible, but from the teaching of the Christian Church, who is older

than the oldest of her documents. There was a Church before the

New Testament was written, and that Church transmitted the faith

by oral tradition. "From the very first the rule has been, as a

matter of fact, that the Church should teach the truth, and then

should appeal to Scripture in vindication of its own teaching."

For a Churchman, religious instruction must be the teaching of the

Church, tested by the Bible. The two cannot be separated. Hence it

follows that, while the State is bound to respect the convictions

of those who adhere to all manner of beliefs and disbeliefs, the

Churchman cannot recognize religious teaching imparted under such

conditions as being that which his own conscience demands.

And, further, supposing that some contrivance could be discovered

whereby the State might authorize the teaching of the Church's

doctrine, the Churchman could not conscientiously be a party to

it; for, according to his theory, there is only one Body divinely

commissioned to decide what is to be taught--and that Body is not

the State, but the Church; and there is only one set of persons

qualified to teach it--viz., those who are duly authorized by the

Church, and are fully persuaded as to the truth of what they teach.

It is sometimes asked how the Church is to fulfil this obligation

without being subsidized in some way by the State. The principal

requisite is greater faith in its Divine mission. If the Bishops

and clergy had a stronger conviction that what they are divinely

commissioned to undertake they will be divinely assisted to fulfil,

this question need not be suggested. The first teachers of the

Christian religion performed their task without either "Rate-aid"

or "State-aid" and the result of their labour is still to be seen;

whereas now the object of leaders of religion seems to be to get

done for them what they ought to do for themselves. It may be well

to quote an utterance of the Bishop of Oxford at the time when the

Liberal Government was dealing with education. "We are now, more

or less, in the middle of a crisis. We are always in the middle

of a crisis. This crisis is about the religious question in our

day-schools. I would ask you, then, to get at the root of our

difficulty. What is it? The heart of our difficulty is partly that

we have _shifted on to the wrong shoulders_ the central function

of teaching children; secondly, that we have so lost the idea of

what the teaching of the Church is, and _the meaning of religious

education_, that we are considered by the public to be unreasonable

and uncompromising people if we are not disposed to admit that the

County Councils can settle the standard of sufficient religious

knowledge for everybody."

The difficulty as to means might be overcome if the Church would

mind its own business, and leave to the State what the State can

do so much more effectively. Let me quote the words of a great

Christian and a great Churchman--Mr. Gladstone--written in 1894:

"Foul fall the day when the persons of this world shall, on whatever

pretext, take into their uncommissioned hands the manipulation of

the religion of our Lord and Saviour."

Surely Churchmen will best serve the religion which they profess by

joining with other "men of goodwill," though of different faiths,

who desire the secular solution. In that way only, as far as I can

see, can the interests of Education be reconciled with the higher

interests of Justice.

V

_THE STATE AND THE BOY_

When Mr. A. J. Balfour was a very young man he published _A Defence

of Philosophic Doubt_. Nobody read it, but a great many talked

about it; and serious people went about with long faces, murmuring,

"How sad that Lord Salisbury's nephew should be an Agnostic!" When

Mr. Balfour had become a conspicuous figure in politics, the serious

people began to read the book which, so far, they had only denounced,

and then they found, to their surprise and joy, that it was an

essay in orthodox apologetic. Thenceforward Mr. Balfour ranked

in their eyes as a "Defender of the Faith" second only to Henry

VIII.

To compare small things with great, I have had a similar experience.

Not long ago I wrote a paper designed to set forth the pretty obvious

truth that increase in knowledge is not in itself a good. It evoked

much criticism, and the critics once again exemplified our truly

English habit of denouncing what we have not read. If these quaint

people were to be believed, I was an enemy of education in general

and of elementary education in particular. I hope that they will be

as much relieved as were Mr. Balfour's critics when they discover that

I am, and all my life have been, a zealous supporter of education,

and, to some extent, an expert in it.

If the world could be exhaustively divided into two classes-the

Educated and the Uneducated--I suppose that I should be included in

the former, though I anticipate an inevitable sarcasm by allowing

that I should find myself perilously near the dividing-line. It

is more to the purpose to say that, whatever my own educational

deficiencies, I have always been keenly interested in the education

of other people, and have preached incessantly that the State has a

sacred duty to its boys. If I leave the education of girls on one

side, I do so, not because I consider it unimportant, but because

I know nothing about it.

Information, as the great Butler said, is the least part of education.

The greatest is the development of the child's natural power to

its utmost extent and capacity; and the duty of so developing it

must be admitted by everyone who ponders our Lord's teaching about

the Buried Talent and the Pound laid up in the Napkin. Unless we

enable and encourage every boy in England to bring whatever mental

gifts he has to the highest point of their possible perfection,

we are shamefully and culpably squandering the treasure which God

has given us to be traded with and accounted for. We shall have

no one but ourselves to blame if, as a Nemesis on our neglect, we

lose our present standing among the educated peoples of the world.

I always get back to the ideal of the "Golden Ladder," reaching

from the Elementary Schools, by Scholarships or "free places," to

the Secondary Schools, and from them again to the Universities.

This ideal is, unlike some ideals, attainable, and has in repeated

instances been attained. Again and again the highest mathematical

honours of Cambridge have been won by Elementary Schoolboys, and

what is true of mathematics might also be true of every branch of

knowledge. I say advisedly that it "might" be true: whether or

not it will be depends on our handling of quite young boys.

The pedagogic notion under which people of my time were reared was

that every boy must learn exactly the same things as every other

boy, and must go on learning them till his last day at school,

whether that day arrived when he was fourteen or eighteen. "We must

catch up every man, whether he is to be a clergyman or a duke,

begin with him at six years of age, and never quit him till he is

twenty; making him conjugate and decline for life and death; and

so teaching him to estimate his progress in real wisdom as he can

scan the verses of the Greek tragedians." So said Sydney Smith, and

with perfect truth. "The grand, old, fortifying, classical curriculum"

was enforced on the boy whose whole heart was in the engineer's shed,

while his friend, to whom literature was a passion, was constrained

to simulate an interest in the blue lights and bad smells of a

chemical lecture. "Let it be granted" (as the odious Euclid, now

happily dethroned, used to say) that there is a certain amount that

all alike must learn but this amount will prove, when scrutinized,

to be very small. I suppose we must all learn to read and write,

and it is useful to be able to do a sum in simple addition; though

very eminent people have often written very illegible hands, and

Dean Stanley--one of the most accomplished men of his day--could

never be persuaded that eighteen pence was not the equivalent of

1s. 8d. Zealots for various "knowledges" (to use the curious plural

sanctioned by Matthew Arnold) will urge the indispensability of

their respective hobbies. One will say let everybody learn that

the earth is round; another, that James I. was not the son of Queen

Elizabeth. But let us leave, these pribbles and prabbles. Let every

boy be coerced into learning what is absolutely necessary for the

daily work of life; but let him, at a very early age, have his

powers concentrated on the subject which really interests him.

One of the highest gifts which a teacher can possess is the power

of "discerning the spirits"--of discovering what a boy's mind really

is; what it is made of; what can be made of it. This power is a natural

gift, and can by no means be acquired. Many teachers entirely lack

it; but those who possess it are among the most valuable servants

of the State. This power may be brought to bear on every boy when

he is, say, from fourteen to sixteen years old--perhaps in some

cases even earlier; and, when once the teacher has made the

all-important discovery, then let everything be done to stimulate,

and at the same time to discipline, the boy's natural inclination,

his inborn aptitude. Fifty years ago, every boy at every Public

School, though he might be as unpoetical as Blackstone who wrote

the Commentaries, or Bradshaw who compiled the Railway Guide, was

forced to produce a weekly tale of Latin and Greek verses which would

have made Horace laugh and Sophocles cry. The Rev. Esau Hittall's

"Longs and Shorts about the Calydonian Boar," commemorated in

_Friendship's Garland_, may stand for a sample of the absurdities

which I have in mind; and the supporters of this amazing abuse

assured the world that Greek and Latin versification was an essential

element of a liberal education. It took a good many generations to

deliver England from this absurdity, and there are others like

unto it which still hold their own in the scholastic world. To

sweep these away should be the first object of the educational

reformer; and, when that preliminary step has been taken, the State

will be able to say to every boy who is not mentally deficient:

"This, or this, is the path which Nature intended you to tread.

Follow it with all your heart. We will back you, and help you,

and applaud you, and will not forsake you till the goal is won."