Now children must be taught some sort of religion. Secular education is
an impossibility. Secular education comes to this: that the only reason
for ceasing to do evil and learning to do well is that if you do not you
will be caned. This is worse than being taught in a church school that
if you become a dissenter you will go to hell; for hell is presented as
the instrument of something eternal, divine, and inevitable: you cannot
evade it the moment the schoolmaster's back is turned. What confuses
this issue and leads even highly intelligent religious persons to
advocate secular education as a means of rescuing children from the
strife of rival proselytizers is the failure to distinguish between
the child's personal subjective need for a religion and its right to
an impartially communicated historical objective knowledge of all the
creeds and Churches. Just as a child, no matter what its race and color
may be, should know that there are black men and brown men and yellow
men, and, no matter what its political convictions may be, that
there are Monarchists and Republicans and Positivists, Socialists and
Unsocialists, so it should know that there are Christians and Mahometans
and Buddhists and Shintoists and so forth, and that they are on the
average just as honest and well-behaved as its own father. For example,
it should not be told that Allah is a false god set up by the Turks and
Arabs, who will all be damned for taking that liberty; but it should be
told that many English people think so, and that many Turks and Arabs
think the converse about English people. It should be taught that Allah
is simply the name by which God is known to Turks and Arabs, who are
just as eligible for salvation as any Christian. Further, that the
practical reason why a Turkish child should pray in a mosque and an
English child in a church is that as worship is organized in Turkey in
mosques in the name of Mahomet and in England in churches in the name
of Christ, a Turkish child joining the Church of England or an English
child following Mahomet will find that it has no place for its worship
and no organization of its religion within its reach. Any other teaching
of the history and present facts of religion is false teaching, and is
politically extremely dangerous in an empire in which a huge majority of
the fellow subjects of the governing island do not profess the religion
of that island.
But this objectivity, though intellectually honest, tells the child
only what other people believe. What it should itself believe is quite
another matter. The sort of Rationalism which says to a child "You must
suspend your judgment until you are old enough to choose your religion"
is Rationalism gone mad. The child must have a conscience and a code
of honor (which is the essence of religion) even if it be only a
provisional one, to be revised at its confirmation. For confirmation is
meant to signalize a spiritual coming of age, and may be a repudiation.
Really active souls have many confirmations and repudiations as their
life deepens and their knowledge widens. But what is to guide the child
before its first confirmation? Not mere orders, because orders must
have a sanction of some sort or why should the child obey them? If, as a
Secularist, you refuse to teach any sanction, you must say "You will
be punished if you disobey." "Yes," says the child to itself, "if I am
found out; but wait until your back is turned and I will do as I like,
and lie about it." There can be no objective punishment for successful
fraud; and as no espionage can cover the whole range of a child's
conduct, the upshot is that the child becomes a liar and schemer with an
atrophied conscience. And a good many of the orders given to it are not
obeyed after all. Thus the Secularist who is not a fool is forced to
appeal to the child's vital impulse towards perfection, to the divine
spark; and no resolution not to call this impulse an impulse of loyalty
to the Fellowship of the Holy Ghost, or obedience to the Will of God,
or any other standard theological term, can alter the fact that the
Secularist has stepped outside Secularism and is educating the child
religiously, even if he insists on repudiating that pious adverb and
substituting the word metaphysically.