PUT GOD IN THE SCHOOLROOM.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLVIII, Issue 3596, 8 February 1927, Page 3

PUT GOD IN THE SCHOOLROOM.

At jtlie opening ceremony of the Roman Catholic College of St. Mary’s, at Oamaru on Sunday, Archbishop Ridwood, in the course of bis address said to take God out of the life of the child, or to leave Him there only during the brief hours of the Sunday School, was uot only a crime in a Christian nation, but a gross and well-nigh irremediable .pedagogical error. The great duty of education, considered purely from the standpoint of the natural and normal development of the human faculties, was to put God in the schoolroom, to enthrone Him in the heart and’ the mind of childhood and youth. There was no education substitute for the Ten Commandments. “Thou shalt not steal” would not restrain the thief or the highwayman if lie had only to fear the human law and' prison. It had some chance of doing so when considered as the command of a Supreme Being who had the right to command obedience and the power to punish disloyalty with the full and awful consequences of His just wrath. “God and His Law” —any education, omitting to put these two in its programme was but a scrap of paper which in the moment of blind passion would be torn to shreds. There was no substitute for God and His Law..