=Source.=--_Life of Thomas Henry Huxley_, by his Son, vol. ii., pp.
342, 343. (Macmillan and Co., 1900.)
At the first meeting of the Education Committee of the London School
Board, Mr. W. H. Smith, M.P., proposed, and Mr. Samuel Morley, M.P.,
seconded a resolution in favour of religious teaching. “That in the
schools provided by the Board, the Bible shall be read, and there
shall be given therefrom such explanations and such instruction in the
principles of religion and morality as are suited to the capacities
of children,” with certain provisos. Several antagonistic amendments
were proposed; but Professor Huxley gave his support to Mr. Smith’s
resolutions, which, however, he thought might “be trimmed and amended
in a way that the Rev. Dr. Angus had suggested. His speech, defining
his own position, was a very remarkable one. He said it was assumed
in the public mind that this question of religious instruction was a
little family quarrel between the different sects of Protestantism
on the one hand, and the old Catholic Church on the other. Side by
side with this much shivered and splintered Protestantism of theirs,
and with the united fabric of the Catholic Church (not so strong
temporally as she used to be, otherwise he might not have been
addressing them at that moment), there was a third party growing
up into very considerable and daily increasing significance, which
had nothing to do with either of those great parties, and which was
pushing its own way independent of them, having its own religion and
morality, which rested in no way whatever on the foundations of the
other two.” He thought that “the action of the Board should be guided
and influenced very much by the consideration of this third great
aspect of things,” which he called the scientific aspect, for want of a
better name. “It had been very justly said that they had a great mass
of low, half-instructed population which owed what little redemption
from ignorance and barbarism it possessed mainly to the efforts of
the clergy of the different denominations. Any system of gaining the
attention of these people to these matters must be a system connected
with, or not too rudely divorced from, their own system of belief. He
wanted regulations, not in accordance with what he himself thought was
right, but in the direction in which thought was moving.” He wanted an
elastic system that did not oppose any obstacle to the free play of the
public mind. Huxley voted against all the proposed amendments, and in
favour of Mr. Smith’s motion. There were only three who voted against
it; while the three Roman Catholic members refrained from voting. This
basis of religious instruction, practically unaltered, has remained the
law of the Board ever since.
There was a controversy in the papers between Professor Huxley and
the Rev. W. H. Freemantle as to the nature of the explanation of the
Bible lessons. Huxley maintained that it should be purely grammatical,
geographical, and historical in its nature; Freemantle that it should
include some species of distinct religious teaching, but not of a
denominational character.