1.—13b.

68

[J. CAUGHLEY*

of New Zealand, confidently appeal io Parliament, the protector of our liberties both as citizens and as public servants, to declare thai there shall be no teaching in State schools which would, by compulsion, impose on a public servant a religious lesson of a kind or under conditions that would be an offence to his religious beliefs. We state mosi solemnly that it would not be an agnostic teacher whose conscience would be most offended by ihis teaching. It would be many of our lincsi men and women whose religious convictions are the deepest. There is scarcely a man or woman in the Dominion who would not emphatically endorse the vindication of our rights of conscience by Parliament, the only tribunal to which w<; can look for justice. We appeal unto Ceesar. We press the appeal mosi earnestly at this stage because the experience of Queensland shows that once the Referendum Bill passed from the House to the poll the issues were finally sealed if the vote were favourable. The last sentence in clause 0 of the Bill noY before the House has a sinister significance li-oiii the effects of its counterpart in Queensland. From the moment the Gazette statement of the poll was laid on the table of the Bouse a dumb Parliament was tied to every jot and tittle of the ballot-paper. The League officials sat by the Minister in charge of the empowering Bill, and all amendments were referred to them. Every amendment, however reasonable, was guillotined in Committee. In the Upper House the Hon. Mr. Barlow, in charge of the empowering Bill, placed it before the Council in Committee on a Wednesday afternoon, and announced that the Kill would be reported to the Speaker on the following day at •"> p.m. " without amendments,' , and ii was done. Every atteinpi to safeguard liberty or to secure justice, even to secure a conscience clause for teachers, tn which Mr. Barlow had pledged himself, were rejected because they were " not so nominated in the bond. , ' Shvlock himself was not more flinty in his cry "I will have iiiv bond " than was tin Bible in Schools League. 'I hey clung to that gazetted return, which was held to express the will of the peopl* —really the befogged will of 26*8 per cent, of the people. Portia's appeal of mercy addressed to Sh\l"ck fell on a nature less obdurate than did any appeal, not for mercy but for bare justice, fall on the heart of the Bible in Schools League. To every plea it was replied in effect. " It is not so nominated ill the bond " — l.c., in the schedule of the Hill containing the obscure, double-issue ballot-paper. The attitude of the New Zealand League before the referendum may be taken as evidence of what their attitude would be afterwards if they hail even '2(i per cent, of votes to rest on. The Outlook, concerning any attempts to modify the Hill now before the House as before i]Uoted, says. " All suggestions, however plausible they may appear, and from whatever course they emanate, must be sternly resisted." We confidently place this matter of the teachers' rights of conscience in the hands of Parliament even if it is "sternly resisted " by a League winch would crush conscience with the Bible. The lion. Mr. Barlow, who carried through the Upper Bouse in Queensland the Act carrying the referendum into effect, declared that "the only remedy when Parliament interferes with conscience is to suffer. There have been put forward for teachers several objections of a minor nature. They cannol fairly lie regarded as the ground of the widespread ami deeply rooted objection of the teaching profession to the League's scheme. The number of subjects on the syllabus, the appointment of teachers, ami the like, all have some relation to the question, but the fundamental objections are that the scheme is inherently weak, formal, stale. Hat. and dead; that it is not only almost farcical in the methods of teaching proposed, but it is a serious and dangerous travesty of religion such as is denounced by Inspector Holmes; that il lulls the public conscience into the belief that the religious training is being attended to. and causes a slackening of really effective means of religious teaching; that the use of the Bible as a secular book would defeat the purpose for which the League demands its introduction ; that the glaring injustice of the scheme, as disclosed even by the League's manifesto, condemns it forever as an instrument for moral and religious influence in the alleged interests of the Bible, whose universal demand is that we shall not only be just but more than just; that the compulsion of teaohera to teach fhe Scriptures is in violent opposition to the whole spirit of the Scriptures themselves; that the Bible from end to end places on the parent and those specially called to teacli the Scriptures, and on them alone, the duty and privilege of the religious training of the children; that the whole spirit of the Bible is in opposition to Hie delegation of his duty, far less the compulsion of any one to spread the knowledge of the Word of God; that no self-constituted body has the right to set up a new legislative procedure not legally constitutional and to tie the hands of half the electors by a form of ballot-paper framed confessedly in the interests of one denomination, which seeks to secure enfranchisement at the cost of the disenfranchisement of others; that if our educational s\ stem requires radical alteration this shall l>e done by a body that will go fully into all the resulting issues that are involved, instead of passively allowing a proposal which fairly bristles with educational problems of vital importance, with constitutional cpiestions of a revolutionary character, with questions of religious and civil liberty that have not hitherto been settled lor .yen raised in New Zealand, passively allowing all this to Ih , thrown into a plebiscite in which these i|iiestions will not even lie realized, and in which the irresponsible individual voter will be actuated mostly by his sectarial leanings and appealed to purely on the question of the Bible —as if there were no other means on earth by which the Bible could be taught than as a piece of secular literature by teachers who are forced to do it but are treated as if they of all the people in New Zealand had no conscience; that, finally, we hold that there are ample existing means for the religious training of the children by agencies acting under the \vr\' spiritual, voluntary conditions which alone should lx> employed. As a Sunday-school teacher of twenty years' experience I have no hesitation in declaring that one hour of Sunday-school teaching by a devoted Christian teacher, even if lie is an amateur. is worth twenty hours of the officialized, restricted, formal, compulsory instruction demanded by this Bill ; that if the Churches put half the organization, time, money, and men into these agencies