RELIGION AND NON-RELIGION AND THE CHILD.
I. Decline of religious education—Defects of this education,
in especial in Catholic countries—Means of lightening
these defects—The priest—The possibility of state-action
on the priest.
II. Education provided by the state—Primary instruction—The
schoolmaster—Secondary and higher instruction—Should the
history of religion be introduced into the curriculum.
III. Education at home—Should the father take no part in the
religious education of his children—Evils of a preliminary
religious education to be followed by disillusionment—The
special question of the immortality of the soul: what
should be said to children about death.
_I. Decline of religious education._
[Sidenote: Unfitness of religious dogma as material for education.]
The religious education given to children by the priest possesses
defects and even dangers which it is important to set in a clear
light, and which explain the gradual decline in secular education.
An opinion regarded as divine is an opinion which is as unfit for
purposes of education as for purposes of science. The great opposition
which obtains between religion and philosophy—in spite of their
outward resemblances—is that the one is seeking and that the other
declares that it has found; the one is anxious to hear, the other
has already heard; the one weighs evidence, the other puts forth
assertions and condemnations; the one recognizes it as its duty to
raise objections and to reply to them; the other to shut its eyes
to objections and to difficulties. From these differences result
corresponding differences in methods of instruction. A philosopher,
a metaphysician, aims to convince, the priest inculcates; the former
instructs, the latter reveals; the former endeavours to stimulate and
to train the reasoning, the latter to suppress it or at least to turn
it aside from primitive and fundamental dogmas; the former awakens
the intelligence, the latter in some measure lays it asleep. It is
inevitable that revelations should be opposed to spontaneity and
liberty of mind. When God has spoken man should be silent, in especial
when the man is a child. And errors, which are often inoffensive if
taught by a philosopher, are grave and dangerous if taught by a priest
who speaks in the name and with the authority of God. In the first
instance the remedy lies always at hand: an insufficient reason may
always be made to give way before a sufficient reason; the child holds
the standards of weight and measure in his own hands. And indeed it
is not always easy to teach error at all by reason and reasoning: to
attempt to give reasons for a prejudice is an excellent means of making
its essential untruth prominent. It has always been some attempt on the
part of humanity to demonstrate its beliefs that has resulted in their
disproof. Whoever endeavours to examine a dogma is close upon the point
of contradicting it, and the priest, who regards contradiction as a
failure in faith, is always obliged, in the nature of things, to avoid
an examination of it, to interdict a certain number of questions, to
take refuge in mystery. When a priest has filled a brain with faith he
seals it. Doubt and investigation, which are the life of philosophy,
the priest regards as a mark of distrust and suspicion, as a sin,
as an impiety; he lifts his eyes to Heaven at the bare notion of
anybody’s thinking for himself. God is both judge and party in every
discussion; at the very time when you are endeavouring to find reasons
for believing in his existence, He commands you to affirm it. The
believer who hesitates at a dogma is a little in the position of the
sheep in the fable, who wished to reason with the wolf and to prove to
him that the water was not muddy; he proved it indeed, but he was eaten
up for his pains; he would have done just as well to hold his peace and
yield. Also there is nothing more difficult than to shake yourself free
from a faith that was fastened upon you in your childhood and that has
been confirmed by the priest, by custom, by example, by fear. Fear, in
especial, is a capital guardian to watch over the interests of positive
religion and a religious education, a guardian who is always on the
_qui vive_; but for it the body of belief which is known as dogma would
soon fall into decay and blow away in dust. One person would reject
this, another that; everybody would rise in open revolt, running hither
and thither gaily like a lot of schoolchildren out for a holiday.
Happily they are always accompanied by a tutor, who keeps them in order
and brings them home like a flock of lambs to the sheepcote. What power
can reasoning have over anybody who is afraid? How can you be expected
to see anything as in itself it really is, if you have been accustomed
from childhood to walk with your eyes closed? Truth becomes for you as
variable and unstable as your own sensibility. At an audacious moment
you deny everything, the next day you are prepared to affirm more than
you were before. It is very easy to understand; nobody is obliged to
be brave always, and, more than all, one’s conscience is involved.
Conscience, like government, is conservative; it is naturally inimical
to revolution and change. It is early taken in hand, and taught its
little lesson; it becomes uneasy the instant you call in question a
line on the map; you cannot take an independent step without some inner
voice crying out to you to take care. Accustomed as you are to hear
people anathematized who do not think as you do, you shudder at the
thought of incurring such anathemas yourself. The priest has corrupted
to his interest every sentiment in your soul—fear, respect, remorse;
he has fashioned your soul, your character, your morals to his hand.
Insomuch that if you call religion in question, you call everything in
question.
[Sidenote: Impropriety of suppressing the clergy.]
Subsidence of thought, benumbment of the spirit of liberty, love of
routine, of blind tradition, of passive obedience, of everything, in
a word, which is directly opposed to the spirit of modern science are
the results of a too exclusively clerical education. These dangers are
being more and more distinctly felt, especially in France—perhaps
too much so. We go the length of demanding that religious education
shall be suppressed and that immediately, as being hostile to liberty
and to progress. An irresistible movement has begun toward lay
education, a movement to which Catholics must some day or other adjust
themselves. But it should be done slowly, transition should not be
pushed too rapidly. To suppress at a blow the whole clergy who once
had complete control of the national education, and still have charge
of some portion of it, ought not to be the aim of free-thinkers; the
clergy will suppress themselves if they are but given time; they will
simply become extinct. At bottom it is not a bad thing that fifty-five
thousand people should be or appear to be occupied with something
else than their personal wants. No doubt one never lives completely
up to one’s ideal, and the ideal of disinterestedness that the priest
proposes to himself is rarely realized; still it is good that a certain
number of men here below should labour at a task which is above their
strength; so many others labour at tasks only which are beneath them.
[Sidenote: A religion at its best only in competition.]
It must be confessed, however, that no religion is at its best in a
country in which it reigns supreme; really to estimate it, one must see
it struggling for supremacy against some rival faith, Catholic against
Protestant, for example. Under such circumstances the priest and the
pastor in a sense run a race with each other, compete with each other
in activity and intelligence. One may see the results in the Dauphiné,
in Alsace, and in a number of foreign countries. The zeal of the priest
profits immensely by some such struggle for existence on the part of
the religion to which he belongs; whoever does the most good, gives the
best advice, the best education, to the children in his charge, wins a
victory for his faith. The result, which is easy to foresee, is that
a mixed population of Protestants and Catholics is better instructed,
more enlightened, is possessed of a higher morality than many other
countries wholly Catholic.
[Sidenote: Proposed reform in Catholic countries.]
One very desirable step in Catholic countries is that the priest
should be given complete civil liberty, should be allowed to leave
the Church if he choose, without becoming an outcast in society,
should be free to marry, and to enjoy absolutely all the rights of
citizenship. A second desirable step, and an essential one, is that the
priest, who is one of the schoolmasters of the nation, should himself
receive a higher education than he does to-day. The state, far from
endeavouring to diminish the income of the priesthood—a very slight
economy—might well, at need, augment it and exact diplomas analogous
to those demanded of other instructors, and sufficient evidences of
competence in extended historical and scientific inquiries and in
religious history.[81] Already a number of priests in country districts
are studying botany, mineralogy, and, in some instances, music. The
ranks of the clergy contain a great quantity of live force, which is
neutralized by a defective primary education, by lack of initiative,
by lack of habits of freedom. Instead of endeavouring to separate
church and state by a species of surgical operation, free-thinkers
might well take their stand on the concordat, and profit by the fact
that the state controls the income of the clergy, and endeavour to
reawaken the priesthood to the conditions of modern life. In sociology,
as in mechanics, it is sometimes easier to make use of the obstacles
to one’s advancement than to try to batter them down. Whatever is, is
in some measure useful; from the very fact that clerical education
still maintains its existence it may be argued that it still plays a
certain rôle in maintaining the social equilibrium, even if it be but
a passive rôle, the rôle of counterpoise. But whatever possesses some
degree of utility may well acquire a higher degree; whatever is may
be transformed. We must not endeavour to destroy the priesthood but
to transform it; to supply it with other practical and theoretical
pursuits than the mechanical handling of the breviary. Between the
literal religion which the majority of the French clergy teach, and
a national and human ideal, there exist innumerable degrees which
must be achieved successively and slowly, by a gradual intellectual
progress, by an almost insensible widening of the intellectual horizon.
Meanwhile, until the priest shall have passed through these successive
degrees and have become aware of his essential superfluousness, it is
good that he should make himself useful in the manner in which he
still believes himself capable of being of use: but one thing should
be exacted of him, that he should not make himself harmful by stepping
outside of the limits within which he is properly confined.
[81] Would it not be possible at once to raise the income of
all priests who are possessed of certain lay diplomas such as
those of bachelor, licentiate, etc., and who, by that very
fact, would be plainly competent to conduct a lay or religious
education in a more modern and scientific spirit?
_II. Education provided by the state._
[Sidenote: State neutrality in religious matters.]
The task undertaken by a state that is endeavouring to substitute a
lay for a clerical education is one of increasing importance. The law
ought, no doubt, to recognize all religions as equal, but, as has been
remarked,[82] there are two ways in which this recognition may be
conducted: the one passive, the other active. The government may stand
neutral simply, and abstain from either refuting or from giving comfort
to the pretensions of any given system of theology; or it may be
actively neuter, that is to say, it may pursue its task of scientific
and philosophical achievement in complete indifference to any and every
system of theology.[83] It is a neutrality of the latter sort that
should be practised in primary and secondary instruction, and that
should govern the conduct of the instructor.
[82] M. Goblet d’Alviella.
[83] “Lay education,” said Littré, “ought not to avoid dealing
with anything which is essential; and what could be more
essential in considering the moral government of society than
the religions which have dominated or still dominate it?”
[Sidenote: Importance of the schoolmaster.]
The schoolmaster has always been a mark for raillery, and sometimes
justly so; to-day he is slightly regarded by everyone with any
pretensions to high acquirements. Renan and Taine, and partisans
generally of an intellectual aristocracy, can scarcely suppress a
smile at the mention of this representative of democracy, of science
for small children. University professors show small tolerance for
the pedantry of their humble assistant, who is sometimes ignorant of
Greek. Men of culture, with any tincture of poetry or of art, regard
the man as something very prosaic and utilitarian whose main ambition
is to instruct some thousands of peasants in the alphabet, grammar, and
the names of the principal cities of Europe, and of the geographical
localities from which we obtain pepper and coffee. And yet this
despised schoolmaster, whose importance is daily increasing, is the
sole middle-man between the belated masses and the intellectual élite,
who are moving ever more and more rapidly forward. He has the advantage
of being necessary and the disadvantage of knowing it; buried in his
remote village, his accomplishments impress him almost as much as they
do the children and the peasantry about him; the optical illusion is
a natural one. But if an exaggerated estimate of his own importance
sometimes gives rise in him to an offensive pedantry, it supplies
him with the sort of devotion that enables a humble functionary to
rise to the height of the duties to which he has been called. And
who, after all, but society, is responsible for the fashioning and
instruction of the schoolmaster? And cannot society raise the level
of his intelligence in proportion as it increases the magnitude of
his task? A little knowledge makes a pedant, much knowledge makes
a scholar. There will always be schoolmasters who will be as well
educated as one could wish, provided only that their salaries are
raised side by side with the list of required studies. It is strange
that a society should not do its best to form those whose function it
is in turn to form it. The great question of popular education becomes
in certain aspects a question of shillings and pence. The practical
instruction of schoolmasters has already been carried to a certain
degree of perfection; he has been initiated into an apprenticeship, and
introduced, as it were, into the kitchen of certain sciences; he has
been supplied with notions on agriculture and chemistry which often
enable him to give excellent advice to the peasantry. It would be very
easy a little to perfect his theoretical knowledge, to give him a
broader knowledge of the sciences which he considers too exclusively
on their practical side, to give him some conception of things as
a whole, to raise him above an exclusive adoration of the isolated
facts of historical or grammatical minutiæ. A little philosophy would
make a better historian and a less tedious geographer. He might be
introduced to the great cosmological hypotheses, to some sufficient
notions of psychology, and in especial of child-psychology, and finally
a little history of religion would familiarize him with the principal
metaphysical speculations that the human mind has put forth in its
endeavour to pass beyond the bounds of science; he would become, as a
result of it, more tolerant in all matters of religious belief. This
more extended instruction would permit him to follow at a distance the
progress of science; his intelligence would not stand still, he would
not come to his complete maturity somewhere between the ABC-book and
the grammar. Moreover, intellectual elevation is always accompanied
by a moral elevation which manifests itself in all the conduct of
life, and sometimes a word from a schoolmaster may change all the
rest of a pupil’s existence. The greater one’s intellectual, and in
especial, one’s moral superiority, the greater one’s influence over
those about one. Even at the present time the very modest amount of
knowledge at the disposal of the ordinary teacher gives him a very
genuine influence; he is believed in, his words are listened to and
accepted. The peasant—that doubting Thomas—who nowadays shakes his
head over what the priest says, is becoming accustomed to consult
the schoolmaster; the schoolmaster has shown him how to make more
grain grow in the same amount of ground; the quivering of a blade of
grass in the wind is for a man of the people the most categorical
of affirmations; to accomplish something is to prove: action is
ratiocination enough. Moreover the schoolmaster demonstrates the
practical power of science by fashioning successive generations of
mankind, by converting them into men. It is at the schoolmaster’s hands
that everyone receives the provision of knowledge that must last him
and maintain his strength throughout his whole life; he prepares one
for life as the priest prepares one for death, and in the eyes of the
peasant, preparation for life is much more important than preparation
for death. Life has its mystery as well as death, and in the former
case the fact of one’s capability is certain; the schoolmaster often
determines the future of the pupil in a manner that is visible and
verifiable; and nothing like so much can be said for the priest. The
power of the latter also has diminished with the change that has taken
place in the popular notion of punishment after death. The priest’s
power lies in ceremonies, in propitiatory or expiatory sacrifices;
the virtue of sacrifices of both kinds equally is to-day looked on
sceptically. Knowledge is better than prayer, and the priest is
gradually losing his ascendency over the people. The schoolmaster is
often the butt of raillery, but the country priest, whom it was so much
the fashion to idealize at the beginning of the century, is to-day
a mark for open mirth. The reaction was natural and in some measure
legitimate; perfection is not of this world, and dwells neither in
the state nor the school, but the rôle of the schoolmaster and the
priest in humanity is important, for they are the sole dispensers of
science and metaphysics to the multitude. We have seen how much it is
to be hoped that the priest, who is so ignorant to-day in Catholic
countries, will soon receive a better education, will soon begin to
create a reason for his continued existence in modern society. If he
falls too far behind the intellectual movement of the times, he will
drop out simply, and the schoolmaster will inherit his power. After all
there are all kinds of apostles, in blouse and frock-coat as well as
in priestly robes; and the proselytism of some of them is based upon a
mystical disinterestedness, and of others on a certain practical aim;
there are some who travel about the world, and some who sit by the fire
and are none the less active for all that. What may be affirmed safely
is that in all times apostles have been even more disposed to address
little children than men, and it is notable that the modern Vincent de
Paul was a schoolmaster-Pestalozzi.
[Sidenote: Moral education the legitimate successor of religious
education.]
What is taking the place of religious education, in existing societies,
is moral education. The moral sentiment, as we know, is the least
suspicious element in the modern religious sentiment, and metaphysical
hypotheses, based in the last resort upon moral conceptions, are
the ultimate and highest outcome of religious hypotheses. To the
elements of philosophic morality it has been proposed to add, in
secondary and even in primary instruction, some notion of the history
of religions[84]. If this proposition is to be made acceptable it
must be reduced within just limits. Let us cherish no illusion; M.
Vernes is wrong if he believes that a professor, and in especial a
schoolmaster, ever could dwell with insistence upon the history of the
Jews without coming into conflict with the clergy. A truly scientific
criticism of the legends which are usually taught children under the
name of sacred history positively batters down the very foundations
of Christianity. Clergymen and priests would not endure it; they
would protest and with some show of reason against it, in the name of
religious neutrality: religion is not less certain in their eyes than
science, and the ignorant faith that distinguishes many of them has
not yet been tempered by a habit of free criticism; so that anything
like a genuine historical education which should openly controvert
portions of the traditional theology must be considered in advance as
impossible. There must be no question in the matter of openly refuting
anybody; the course of instruction must simply be such as to furnish
those who follow it with a criterion of truth, and to teach them to
make use of it. We believe therefore that if the history of religions
is ever made a part of the regular course of instruction, it will deal
principally with everything but the history of the Jews. It might
furnish elementary instruction on the moral system of Confucius, on
the moral metaphysical notions involved in Indo-European religions,
on the antique Egyptian religion, on the Greek myths, and finally on
the religious and moral atmosphere in which Christianity took its
rise, and on which it in some sort depended and throve. It would be
well even to make scholars in primary schools acquainted with the
names of some of the great sages in the history of the world, with
their actual or legendary biography, with the moral maxims which are
attributed to them. What harm could it do to instruct our children in
the aphorisms uttered by Confucius, Zoroaster, Buddha, Socrates, Plato,
and Aristotle, and to let them see something of what humanity really
believed before the time of Christ? One cannot destroy the old faith
openly and in a minute, but one may do much to undermine and justly to
undermine it by showing where and how it borrowed much of all that is
best in it—that it is not an exception in the history of human thought
nor even, in all respects, unsurpassed in its kind.
[84] By M. Maurice Vernes (approved by Littré, and later by M.
Paul Bert).
[Sidenote: Helplessness of religion in the face of argument.]
The Church possesses two means of educating children in its dogmas, and
only two; the first is that of patristic or ecclesiastical authority:
‘The fact is thus and such because I say so’; the second is the
testimony of miracles. These two, even at the present day, constitute
the whole effective contents of the priests’ armoury. The moment they
step outside this little circle of ideas they lose their power. And to
destroy these two arguments it suffices to show: 1st, that other men
have said something different from the teachings of Christianity; 2d,
that other gods than Jehovah have also performed miracles; or, in other
words, there are no miracles whatever that have been scientifically
ascertained. A number of French schools were founded in Kabail, and
were prospering, when by degrees they were abandoned. In one of
them, which was the last deserted, some exercises of the pupils were
discovered: they dealt with a story about Fredegunde. This anecdote
illustrates current notions on instruction in classical history:
History means facts, and facts often monstrous and immoral; not content
with teaching them to young Frenchmen we export them to Kabail; but we
do not export our ideas, nor even employ them at home. We should have
done better to teach the young Algerians what we know about Mohammed
and his religion and about Jesus and the other prophets, the divinity
of whose inspiration Mohammed himself admitted. The slightest traces
that a really rational education should leave in a half-savage mind
would be more useful than a heap of absurd facts perfectly remembered.
At bottom it is more important even that a French child should know
something of Mohammed or Buddha than of Fredegunde. Although Mohammed
and Buddha never lived on French soil, their influence on us is
infinitely more great and their relation to us infinitely closer than
that of Chilperic or Lothaire.
[Sidenote: Place of religion in state education.]
The place in which the history of religions really belongs, is in the
higher education. It is not enough to have introduced it with success
into the Collège de France, and quite recently to have secured its
recognition in a small part of the higher studies in the École. If
we should replace our faculties of theology by chairs of religious
criticism we should do no more than follow the example of Holland.[85]
Mr. Max Müller introduced the science of religions into the University
of Oxford with success. Similarly in Switzerland at the organization
of the University of Geneva, in 1873, there was created in the faculty
of letters a chair of the history of religions, although there already
existed in the university a faculty of theology. In Germany the history
of religions is taught independently, notably at the University of
Wurtzburg, under the name of Comparative Symbolism. Just as a complete
course of instruction in philosophy should include the principles of
the philosophy of law and the philosophy of history, it will some day
include also the principles of the philosophy of religion. After all,
even from the point of view of philosophy, Buddha and Jesus possess a
much greater importance than Anaximander or Thales.[86]
[85] Some years ago, as is well known, on the 1st of October,
1877, the faculty of theology in the three state universities
of Leyden, Utrecht, and Groningen, and in the Communal
University of Amsterdam, was declared to be a lay faculty and
was freed from all association and connection with the Church,
and was required to give purely scientific and philosophic
instruction on the history of religion, without practical
discipline. (See M. Steyn Parvé, _Organisation de l’instruction
primaire, secondaire et supérieure dans le royaume des
Pays-Bas_, Leyden, 1878, and M. Maurice Vernes, _Mélanges de
critique religieuse_, p. 305.)
The following is the programme of this faculty: 1. General
theology; 2. History of doctrines concerning divinity; 3.
History of religions in general; 4. History of the Israelite
religion; 5. History of Christianity; 6. Literature of the
Israelites, and the ancient Christians; 7. Old and New
Testament exegesis; 8. History of the dogmas of the Christian
church; 9. Philosophy of religion; 10. Ethics.
[86] As M. Vernes has remarked, the preparation for teaching
the history of religions might well be the same as that for
teaching philosophy, history, and letters. It should include
the studies in the upper classes, of the philosophical section
of the _école normale_, and a preparatory course in the divers
other faculties: a real _normal_ course. In this course the
professor should point out the general principle of the history
of religions and should confine himself to indicating them very
summarily in the case of the religions of Greece and Rome, to
which a general literary education will have given the pupil
access; he should deal, without excessive attention to detail,
with the other Indo-European religions (those of India, Persia,
etc.), with the religions of Egypt, of Assyria, of Phœnicia, of
Islam; and should spend his greatest efforts on the criticism
of Judaism and the early stages of Christianity, on the history
of the principal Christian dogmas and their development.
[Sidenote: Education of instructors.]
It has been said, after M. Laboulaye, that a professor of the history
of religion should be at once an archæologist, an epigraphist, a
numismatist, a linguist, an anthropologist, and versed in Hindu,
Phœnician, Slavonic, Germanic, Celtic, Etruscan, Greek, and Roman
antiquities; he should be nothing less than a Pico della Mirandola. At
that rate one might show also that neither schools nor colleges can be
expected to include a course on natural history or on the political
history of some seven or eight nations—nay, even that it is impossible
to teach children to read: the art of reading is so difficult in its
perfection! Really is it necessary that the historian of religion
should be a master of all the historical sciences? He is under no
obligation to discover new materials, he has simply to make use of
those which philologists and epigraphists have put at his disposal;
such materials are now abundant enough and well enough ascertained
to require a course specially devoted to them. There is no need for
the instructor to master such and such a particular division of the
history of religion; he is simply required to furnish students in our
universities, in the course of one or two years, with a general view
of the development of religious ideas in history. The professor will
no doubt encounter certain difficulties in dealing with religious
questions because of the amount of feeling that such problems always
involve, but the same difficulty is met with in every course which
deals with contemporary questions, and almost every course does deal
with them. A professor of history has to deal with contemporary facts,
to describe the successive changes in the form of government in
France, etc. A professor of philosophy has to deal with questions of
theodicy and morals; and even in pure psychology, materialistic and
deterministic theories have to be passed upon; even a mere professor
of rhetoric is obliged, in treating of literature and of Voltaire and
of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to touch on questions
which are burning. Similarly, a professor in the law school must find
a thousand occasions for praising, or blaming, or criticising the laws
of the State. And must one, because of dangers of this sort which are
met with at every step, cease teaching history, philosophy, and law?
No, and we do not believe that one should be debarred from teaching
religious history. The whole question is one of fact rather than of
principle; it should be the master’s business to avoid digressions
beyond the limits of pure science, and to be on his guard against
seeming to mean something more than he says, and masking a criticism of
the existing order of things under a course on abstract theory.[87]
[87] Works in religious criticism would naturally find their
place in the school and college libraries. They might be
supplemented by a more or less extensive museum of religious
curiosities, beginning with the fetiches of savage tribes and
extending down to the present day.
To the mass of the French public the solid results already
achieved by an independent criticism of the Bible constitute a
_terra incognita_; they must be disseminated. M. Lenormant’s
effort might serve as an example for other efforts of the
same kind. In order to make it apparent at a glance how the
Pentateuch has been formed, by the combination and fusion
of the earlier sets of documents, M. Lenormant undertook
to publish a translation from the Hebrew, in which he
distinguishes the extracts from the respective sets of
documents by different kinds of type. Thus one has before one
the natural explanation of the way in which all the episodes in
Genesis are presented in the two parallel versions, sometimes
juxtaposed, sometimes mingled.
[Sidenote: Legitimate object of religious instruction.]
The aim of this impartial course of instruction should be to supply
each religion with its proper historical setting, to show how it
was born, developed, opposed to others; it should be described, not
refuted. The bare introduction of historical continuity into the course
of religious thought is itself a considerable step in advance; whatever
is continuous ceases to be marvellous. Nobody is astonished at a brook
which gradually becomes bigger; our ancestors adored great rivers of
whose sources they were ignorant.
_III. Education at Home._
It has often been asked, as a question of practical conduct, whether
the head of a household ought not to have a religion, at least if not
for himself, for his wife and children, and if his wife is religious
ought he to abandon the education of his children to her?
[Sidenote: Father’s duty in regard to religious instruction.]
We believe it is the duty of the head of a household to rear his family
in the ideas in which he believes. Whatever solution of the religious
problem he may have attained, he ought to hide it from no one, and
in especial not from his family. Moreover, even if he should wish to
keep his opinions secret, he would be unable to do so, at least for
the whole of his life. His dissimulation would simply result in such
an association in the minds of his children between moral precepts
and religious dogmas that the chances would be that they would stand,
or rather fall, together. Of all people in the world the child is
precisely the one who is likely to suffer most from a belief that
religion and morality are inseparably bound up together. Of all human
beings children are least philosophical, least metaphysical, least
familiar with scientific ideas, and therefore of all others the most
easily biassed once for all by the inculcation of false or doubtful
notions presented as certain. In China, at the periodical conferences,
certain mandarins dilate upon the following theme in the presence of
the more notable among the inhabitants: “Do your duty as a citizen and
beware of religion.” That is precisely what a father ought to say again
and again to his children. It is a good principle of education to take
it for granted that the child is rational, and to treat it as such, in
order ultimately and gradually to develop the spirit of reason in it.
What a child lacks is much less intensity of attention than continuity.
Very often among country people, and almost always among inferior races
(as also among animals), the young are more wide-awake, more curious,
more quick-minded than the mature men; but their attention must be
seized in transit; teaching them resembles teaching a bird on the wing.
Their schoolmaster must have the gifts of a bird-fancier; and it is his
fault much oftener than the child’s if the latter does not understand,
does not ask questions, is inert and incurious. The scientific
education of the child should begin with its first question; truth is
a debt that one owes to it, and truth accessible to its intelligence.
The moment a child asks a question out of its own head, it is at least
in part prepared to understand the reply; the duty of the person
interrogated is to reply, as fully and as truly as he believes the
child capable of understanding, and if he leaves gaps he must at least
never fill them with lies. It is so easy to tell the child to wait
until it is bigger. There should be no fear of precociously developing
the child’s reason in its two essential forms, the instinct of inquiry,
of _why_ and _how_, and the instinct of perception, of logical cogency
in the reply to the “why” and “how.” One need not be afraid that the
child will fatigue its brain by abstract reasoning; Pascals are rare.
The danger does not lie in a premature development of the reason, which
it is always easy moreover to check, but in a premature development of
the sensibility. The child must not be encouraged to feel too strongly.
To subject it to vain fears such as those of hell and the devil, or to
beatific visions and mystic enthusiasms such as young girls experience
at the time of the first communion, is to do it much greater harm than
to teach it to reason justly and to develop in it a certain intelligent
virility. Races become effeminate by excess of sensibility, never by
excess of scientific and philosophic power.
[Sidenote: Impossible to leave the child in ignorance.]
It will perhaps be said, with Rousseau, that if the child is not
to be trammelled with religious prejudice it may at least wait for
reasoned instruction on religion until it has attained its intellectual
maturity. We reply that it is impossible to do so in the present state
of society. If the father does not teach his child it will absorb the
prejudices of those it associates with, and to disabuse it of them
afterward will demand a veritable crisis, which is always painful and
often the cause of permanent suffering. The great art of education
should consist precisely in avoiding crises of this sort in the orderly
growth of the intellect. The father who postpones the decisive moment
will be the first person to be surprised at the amount of pain he will
be obliged to subject his child to in order to root up the error which
he has placidly permitted to grow under his very eyes.
[Sidenote: One must begin early.]
M. Littré has given an account of a case of conscience of this kind;
after having voluntarily held aloof from the religious education of
his daughter till she had reached years of discretion, he found her
at last so sincerely convinced, so completely fashioned by religion
for religion, that he recoiled before so thorough-going a change; like
a surgeon whose hand should tremble at the thought of an operation
upon a body that love had rendered sacred to him; like an oculist who
should feel that light was not worth the pain that he would have to
inflict on eyes that were dear to him. The intellectual operator has
not at his command even the resource of chloroform; he must practise
his surgery upon a subject who is fully conscious and even excited
by attention and reflection. Prevention is better than expectant
treatment, which allows the disease to develop in the hopes of curing
it afterward. The competent educator, like the competent physician,
may be known by his ability in avoiding the necessity of operations.
It is a mistake to allow a child to grow up in complete belief in
religious legends, with the intention of undeceiving it afterward. It
will be undeceived not without regret nor without effort. And often
the effort put forth will itself be too great, will overshoot itself,
and from excess of faith the child will pass at a bound to sceptical
indifference and will suffer for it. Treasures in heaven are treasures
in fiat money; the disappointment which must some day come, when
one learns the truth, will be bitter. It would be better always to
have known that one was poor. A child may early be accustomed to the
conception of the infinite; it makes up its account with it as with
the notion of the antipodes, or of the absence of an absolute up and
down in the universe. The first sensation one experiences when one
learns that the earth is spherical is of terror, a fear of the void,
of tumbling off into the abyss of open space. The same naïve fear lies
at the bottom of the religious sentiment in certain minds, and is due
to factitious associations of ideas which are a matter of education
wholly. A fish born in an aquarium becomes accustomed to its habitat,
as the ancients were accustomed to the inverted crystal ball of the
heavens; it would be lost in the ocean. Birds reared in the cage often
die if they are abruptly given their liberty. A period of transition is
always necessary, one needs time to become accustomed to intellectual
expanses as well as to expanses of air and water. If mankind is to live
without religion it must receive a non-religious education, and this
education will spare it a great deal of the suffering that those who
have been educated in the faith and have subsequently broken away by
their own efforts have undergone. The wood-cutter’s child experiences
no sentiment of fear in the solitude and obscurity of the forest, in
the arched lanes and alleys, among the trees among which it was born. A
town-born child would feel lost in such a place and would begin to cry.
The world of science, with its shadowy labyrinths and limitless extent
and its numberless obstacles which must be removed one at a time, is
such a forest; the child who is born in it will not be frightened, will
live in it always happily.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: What to say to the child about death. M. Louis Ménard’s
position.]
Of all the problems of education which lie on the borders of religious
metaphysics the most interesting is, unquestionably, what to say to
the child about death and human destiny. When these questions are
discussed before him, is a rational and truly philosophical method to
be employed? Is he to be informed dogmatically, or is it a matter of
indifference what is said to him? This problem has been discussed,
in the “Critique philosophique,” by M. Louis Ménard, who deals with
the hypothetical case of a child that has lost its mother and is
cross-questioning its father. That is ingenious, but it is a specious
way of raising the problem. When a young child loses its mother we
regard it as the first duty of the father to console and spare its
delicate organism the strain of all strong emotions. The question
is one of moral hygiene, in which philosophy and religion are not
concerned, in which the age and temperament of the child are the sole
things to consider. Truth is not equally valuable at all periods of
life; one does not tell a man abruptly that his wife has just died.
The most convinced materialist will hesitate to announce to a nervous
child that it will never see its mother again. But the materialist
in question would always do wrong to put forth a categorical
affirmation in a case in which there exists at best nothing more than
probabilities; the most dangerous method of deception is to present as
a recognized certainty what is really nothing of the kind. In any event
there is one form of immortality, that of memory, and that species of
immortality we may ourselves secure by implanting it in the mind of
the child.[88] The father ought repeatedly to talk to the orphan child
of the dead mother. He can create a recollection in the child as vivid
and as detailed as his own; whether the child behaves well or ill he
can always say, “If your mother were but here!” The child will thus
become accustomed to find a recompense or a punishment in its mother’s
approbation or disapprobation.[89]
[88] “Memory is no doubt an affliction for the grown man
much more than for the child, but it is also a consolation.
Cultivation of one’s memories supplies powerful means of
moral education for all ages, and for nations as well as for
individuals. It was quite to be expected that we should find an
ancestor worship in the early history of every people.” (Felix
Henneguy, _Critique philosophique_, 8th year, vol. ii. p. 218.)
[89] _Ibid._
[Sidenote: Should talk with child as with a grown person.]
To raise the problem more fairly, let us suppose the circumstances
somewhat less tragic than those which M. Ménard has chosen, and let us
ask how, in general, the child must be spoken to about death. When the
child is capable of following a more or less complex bit of exposition,
toward the age of ten or twelve for example, I confess that I see no
reason why its questions should not be answered exactly as if they
were those of a grown person. At that age it will no longer believe
in fairies, it will no longer need to believe in legends, not even
in those of Christianity. The scientific and philosophic spirit will
have begun to develop and must not be either checked or distorted. If
its intelligence leads it toward philosophical problems, so much the
better; one must meet its need as simply as if the problems in question
were historical. I have seen a child much tormented by a desire to know
whether such and such an historical personage died a natural death or
was poisoned. The child was told that the thing was doubtful, but that
the probability was so and so. The same method should be pursued in
reference to more important problems.
[Sidenote: No difficulty in making the child understand.]
But how, it may be asked, is one to form replies, that the child can
understand, to questions which relate to the life beyond the grave?
Is not the sole language that it understands that of Christianity,
which deals with men raised to heaven, with happy souls seated among
the angels and the seraphim, etc.? We reply that people in general
seem to have a strange conception of the child’s intelligence; they
expect it to understand the most refined subtleties of grammar, the
most unexpected turns and shifts of theology, and are afraid to say
a word to it of philosophy. A little girl of twelve years, of my
acquaintance, replied with much ingenuity to this unexpected question:
What is the difference between a perfect and an imperfect Christian?
It was evident that she would not have experienced greater difficulty
in replying to a metaphysical question. I recollect having myself
followed, at the age of eight, a discussion on the immortality of the
soul; nay, I even pronounced an interior judgment in favour of him
who was maintaining the cause of immortality. Our system of education
is full of contradictions, which consist at once in mechanically
burdening the child’s memory with things it cannot understand, and
in depriving its intelligence of subjects in which it might take an
interest. “But,” M. Ménard will object, “a child must not be put into
a position of being able to oppose its father’s belief to that of its
mother or of its grand-mother.” Why not? It happens, necessarily, every
day. There are, on all subjects, incessantly going on in the bosom of
the family a series of discussions, of small disagreements which in
nowise fundamentally disturb the harmony of the household; why should
it be otherwise when more important and uncertain questions simply
are involved? “But the child will lose respect for its parents.” It
is certainly better that it should lose respect for them than that
it should believe everything they say, even when they deceive it.
Happily, respect for one’s parents is not at all the same thing as
belief in their infallibility. Children early make use of liberty
of judgment, they may early be taught to sift out the truth from a
mass of more or less contradictory affirmations, their judgment may
be developed instead of being supplied, as is at present attempted,
ready and completely made. The essential thing is to avoid rousing
their passions and converting them into fanatics. The child needs an
atmosphere of calm for the harmonious development of its faculties;
it is a delicate plant that must not be too soon exposed to wind and
weather; but it does not follow that it should be kept in the obscurity
or half light of religious legend. The sole means of sparing the child
the trouble of passion and fanaticism is to place it outside of all
religious communion and to habituate it to examine things coolly,
philosophically; to take problems of religion for what they are; that
is to say, for problems simply, with ambiguous solutions.[90] Nothing
serves better to awake the intellectual spontaneity of the child than
to say to it: This is what I believe, and these are my reasons for
believing it; I may be wrong. Your mother, or such and such a person,
believes something else for certain other reasons, right or wrong. The
child acquires thus a rare quality, that of tolerance; its respect
for its parents attaches to the diverse doctrines that it sees them
professing; it learns, in its earliest years, that every sincere and
reasoned belief is in the highest degree respectable. I am intimately
acquainted with a child that has been reared in this way, and it has
never had any occasion for anything but satisfaction with the education
it has received. It has never been presented on the subject of human
destiny, or the destiny of the world, with any opinion in the nature of
an article of faith; instead of religious certitudes it has heard only
of metaphysical possibilities and probabilities. Toward the age of
thirteen and a half the problem of the destiny of mankind was abruptly
suggested to it; the death of a very dear aged relative caused it to
do more thinking than is customary at that age, but its philosophic
beliefs proved themselves sufficient. They still are sufficient,
although the child in question has been obliged several times to face
the possibility, and the immediate possibility, of its own death. I
cite the example as an experiment which bears on the question under
discussion.
[90] Among the greatest causes of difficulty with a child, let
us note the following: the father is apt to be a free-thinker,
the mother a Catholic. It hears every day at Church that those
who do not practise their religious duties will go to hell:
the child therefore reasons that if its father dies it will
never see him again, unless it goes to hell with him, and then
it will never see its mother again. A full and complete belief
in annihilation would be less painful and less annoying than
this belief in eternal damnation. Add that in this respect many
Protestant clergymen, in especial in England and in the United
States, are not less intolerant than Catholic priests.
[Sidenote: Summary.]
How then should death be spoken of to a child? I reply confidently, as
one would speak of it to a grown person, allowing for the difference
between abstract and concrete language. I naturally suppose the child
to be semi-rational, more than ten years old, and capable of thinking
of something else than its top or its doll. I believe it should then
be talked with openly, and told what we ourselves think most probable
on these terrible questions. The free-thinker who leans toward
naturalistic doctrines will say to his son or his daughter that he
believes death to be a resolution of the person into its constituent
elements, a return to a blind material existence, a fresh beginning
in the perpetual round of evolution; that all that we leave behind is
the good that we have done and that we live in humanity by our good
actions and our good thoughts, and that immortality is productivity
for the best interests of humanity. The spiritualist will say that,
owing to the distinction between the soul and the body, death is simply
a deliverance. The pantheist or the monist will repeat the formula
consecrated by the use of three thousand years: _Tat tvam asi_—Thou
art that; and the modern child will recognize, as the young Brahman
does, that beneath the surface of things there lies a mysterious unity
into which the individual may fade. Finally the Kantian will endeavour
to make his child understand that the conception of duty involves
something anterior and superior to the present life; that to be aware
of the moral law is to be conscious of immortality. Everyone will say
what he believes, and take care not to pretend that his opinion is the
absolute truth. The child, thus treated like a human being, will early
learn to make up its own mind, to provide itself with a creed without
having received it from any traditional religion or any immutable
doctrine; it will learn that a really sacred belief is one which is
reflective and reasoned and seemingly personal; and if at times, as it
advances in age, it experiences a greater or less anxiety about the
unknown, so much the better; such an anxiety, when the senses are not
involved and thought alone is concerned, is in no sense dangerous. The
child who experiences it will be of the stuff out of which philosophers
and sages are made.