A Negation.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXX, Issue 32, 7 August 1902, Page 6

A Negation.

Wk have often said (says the Ace Maria) that the public are gradca ly coming to view the school question as Catholics do. There are many indications of this. Half admissions of our stand are huarl on all side*, and many persons who formerly denounced the. Church for its opposition to education without religion are now loud in their praise of its solicitude for the moral well-being of the yoith of the l»nd. Such an article as appeared in the Brooklyn Eagle the other dsy would have excited general discussion a few year Hago — that is, if the Eagle, or any other paper, were independent enough to publish it. Our ' great dailies,' as they are called, do rot n tluenoe public opinion : they simply reflect it; and the article to which we n fer is of interest as showing how the school question is now viewed by intelligent non-Catholics. We quote the more salient sentences :—: — The truth is we are taking for grant, d a moral intelligence whub <loee not exi^t. We are leiniug upon it, depending upon it tru-h.-g to it and it is not there. . . . We have multitudes o, youiha and iiniA'n men •unl wonii n who have no more intelligent mmk-, f wh:.t in tk ht ami what is wrong than had so many Greekt of the time of Alcibudep. . . . The great Roman Catholics vhuri.li . . is ui. qutsLumxbly right in the contention that the whole sybtem [o. JMaie tducutio>,J as it now exists is morally a notation. iSim«t< r h-ymp<oms of moral obtumnesß show themselves on evirjhan.i. We are foolishly surprised when we find a gang of toughs nb»aultii g harmless pa*»si nger.s on a trolley line or stoning a pasting carriage : when we see a wholtf populace unmoved at any extremity of corruption in civic administration ; when we see young men of respectable families running about the Btreetß, and their sifters affecting the manners of the Tenderloin. Why should we bo surprised 1 It is the l.teral truth that they know no better. This is the depressing part of it all They have never learned, because tin re is no provision made for teaching them. The great company of educators and the whole American oommnnity need to be sternly warned that if morality cannot be speoifiVally taught in the public schools without admitting religions dogma, then religious dogma may have to be taught in them. For righteousness is essential to a people's very existence. . . . We are within measurable distance of the time when society may for its own sake go on its knees to any factor which can be warranted to make education compatible with and inseparable from morality, letting that factor do it on its own termß and teach therewith whatsoever it lists.