We must make up our minds to it therefore that whatever measures we may
be forced to take to prevent the recruiting sergeants of the Churches,
free or established, from obtaining an exclusive right of entry to
schools, we shall not be able to exclude religion from them. The most
horrible of all religions: that which teaches us to regard ourselves
as the helpless prey of a series of senseless accidents called Natural
Selection, is allowed and even welcomed in so-called secular schools
because it is, in a sense, the negation of all religion; but for school
purposes a religion is a belief which affects conduct; and no belief
affects conduct more radically and often so disastrously as the belief
that the universe is a product of Natural Selection. What is more, the
theory of Natural Selection cannot be kept out of schools, because
many of the natural facts that present the most plausible appearance
of design can be accounted for by Natural Selection; and it would be so
absurd to keep a child in delusive ignorance of so potent a factor
in evolution as to keep it in ignorance of radiation or capillary
attraction. Even if you make a religion of Natural Selection, and
teach the child to regard itself as the irresponsible prey of its
circumstances and appetites (or its heredity as you will perhaps call
them), you will none the less find that its appetites are stimulated by
your encouragement and daunted by your discouragement; that one of its
appetites is an appetite for perfection; that if you discourage this
appetite and encourage the cruder acquisitive appetites the child will
steal and lie and be a nuisance to you; and that if you encourage its
appetite for perfection and teach it to attach a peculiar sacredness
to it and place it before the other appetites, it will be a much nicer
child and you will have a much easier job, at which point you will,
in spite of your pseudoscientific jargon, find yourself back in the
old-fashioned religious teaching as deep as Dr. Watts and in fact
fathoms deeper.