M. GAMBETTA ON EDUCATION.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXII, Issue 5010, 14 April 1877, Page 3

M. GAMBETTA ON EDUCATION.

M. Gambetta, on February 4, continuing his series of Sunday speeches, presided at the delivery of a lecture by M. Tirard on behalf of the Secular School, in the Rue des Deux Boules. He advocated education, which would make a practical France, mindful of the civil and moral interests of contemporary humanity, not a France carried away in the whirlwind of religious or philosophic disputes. He described the contest between religious and secular education as a duel which had been going on from all time, and which led society to free itself more and more from the spirit of servitude and chimeras, and pursue the path illuminated by reason, free examination, and human dignity. To diffuse education was to sow the seed of the future. As to Ultramontane denunciations, he remarked that complaints of persecution always emanated from persecutors, the authors of the most sullied pages of history. Secular educatisn, though so much cried out against, had existed more than a century in Holland ; for seventy years in Sweden. In Belgium there were many secular schools ; and who had not heard of the great progress of unsectarian—in other words, secular—schools in England? They were schools in which morality was taught, but apart from all revelation and theology; so that those ardent and endless disputes of which the track was afterwards found in society were not begun at school, but the integrity of the child’s conscience was preserved. The spirit of liberty was on the side of those who advocated the respect and integrity of the free thought of childhood, while the sectarian and usurping sdirit was with those who alleged that there was no human morality derived from observation and logic, but only a morality shrouded with mystery and governed byan imposed theology and metaphysics —those who taught children to say, “ Credo quia alsurdum." M. Gambetta preceded to say ; —“f Consequently, without fear of falling into the spirit of persecution and exclusion, we have the right and the duty, by book, pamphlet, conversation in public places, at our firesides, in our drawing-rooms, to maintain that in the secular school is freedom of thought. By-and-bye, on leaving school, one will go to the synagogue, another to church, another to Protestant worship ; another, ascending the mountain, will have a right to an independent faith on that immensity placed beneath his eye, on his origin, and on the ’laws which govern it ; and others, who in their minds have found nothing giving them an idea of first causes, will stop at negation and doubt. They will say, 1 I know not ; but I seek.’ The world is open to me, if metaphysics are closed.” M. Gambetta then denounced the reaction which, with an audacity justified only by ephemeral success, now vaunted itself in the face of a France, perhaps moved, but tranquil as to the issue of these attempted clerical aggressions. Peace, order, and civilisation, he said, would only be insured in France and the world when reason supplanted dreaming, and this result could be protected and promoted by the Republic alone.