THURSDAY, MAY 7, 1903. THE PROPOSED EDUCATIONAL REVOLUTION.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXI, Issue 19, 7 May 1903, Page 17

THURSDAY, MAY 7, 1903. THE PROPOSED EDUCATIONAL REVOLUTION.

OXSISTENOIE'S a Jewell.' So the old-time poet wiote. But, according to the contradictory Emerson, 'great souls' will have simply nothing to do with it. We have full many a gieat soul of this barocco style of mental architecture in Ts'ew Zealand. It used to be the fashion among some of them to grill Catholics in fiery pulpit and platform denunciation for their supposed lack of patriotism in refusing to fall down and adore the State Idol — 'Our Gieat National System' — which our political INABreiiODomsORS set up a quarter of a century ago. ' Spoak what you think to-day,' says Kmerson, 'in words as hard as cannon-balls, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hird words again, though it contradict everything you said today.' * Our Great National System '—free, secular, and compulsory — was inaugurated with the blessing or the tacit

approval of the non-Catholic denominations. Now their united voices pronounce an anathema maranatha against its agnostic attitude towards religion. For years they have been busy planning, arranging, conferring, to overturn the Great idol of their early worship. A mixed assembly of Anglican, Presbyterian, Methodist, Congregational, Baptist, Primitive Methodist, and Church of Christ representatives at Wellington has at last drawn up a definite Rcheme. They demand the reading of the Bible (Protestant version), with 1 simple explanations of a literary, historical, and ethical character ' ; and this programme of religious instruction is to ' form part of the (State) school curriculum under the inspectors.' The manual of Scripture lessons drawn up by the Victorian Commission in 1900 has found favor in the sight of the Wellington Conference on the Bible-in-schools and, with slight modifications, is accepted as the central item in the great revolution which is to turn our H&teschool system from secular (or rather Secularist) into sectarian.

Hitherto, leading Protestant denominations, and some odd groups of denominations, had each its separate— and in many respects contradictory— prescription for the godlessness of our system of public instruction. Now, for the first time, we have a 'definite scheme before us. It does not represent the unanimous views of all the Churches whose leaders met in Conference in Wellington. But it has at least the merit of furnishing a clear-cut subject for comment and consideration. And this is better than the sound of many and contradictory voices that we have been accustomed to since the days when the leaders of the nonCatholic creeds began to realise that godlessness and agnosticism in the school work out at last in diminishing church attendance, in a gain to unbelief, a loss to Christianity, and threaten to leave the minister of the Lord a voice crying in a wilderness of empty benches. Over two and a half yeard ago, when the Victorian Commission's dire labors were completed, we predicted that the scheme evolved by them would be followed by the Bible-in-schools League in New Zealand. Our prediction has been verified at every point. And the Commission and the Conference alike emphasise what we have over and over again pointed out — the hopeless tangle of difficulties that surround any attempt to introduce Bible lessons into the public schools in countries of such mixed religion as Australia and New Zealand. A plebiscite of the voters of the Colony is asked for to deal with the radical change^ in our State system of education which the Wellington Conference demands. The machinery for the proposed referendum does not yet exist. It will probably be manufactured by our law-makers during the next session of Parliament. And then the country is to decide whether the rights of minorities are to be adequately protected and whether our public schools shall be secular or sectarian. For that is the whole question in a nutshell. The Wellington scheme proposes nothing less than this : that the teaching of what is practically Unitarianism sbali be part of the curriculum of our State instruction, and that ' Our Great National System ' — which is now free, compulsory, and secular — shall become free, compulsory, and sectarian.

The scheme detailed in the report of the Victorian Commission on the Bible-in-schools, and now adopted by the Wellington Conference, was dissected in a masterly way by the Archbishop of Melbourne in the ' Argus ' of October 8, 1900. His remarks have, therefore, a special appropriateness to the circumstances that have arisen in New Zealand. 'We do not,' said the distinguished prelate in the course of his observations, * object to a system of education because it is religious. And it is equally needless to say that we do not object to denominational schools having the Hble read and taught in them. It is taught in our own schools, and we should wish it could be taught, under proper supervision, to every child, Catholic and Protestant, in the Colony! But we do object to Bible lessons in mixed schools. \N c hold that the Bible is the depositary, not the organ, of God's revelation to man. VN c hold, therefore, that it requires an interpreter ; and we hold that the Church, through its representatives, is the divinely constituted interpreter or organ of revealed truth. We hold, too, that dogmatic truth is the basis both of faith and of morality.' Catholic teaching is, therefore, wholly irreconcileable with the position

taken up by modern rationalists and agnostics who reject the Bible as the depositary of revelation and ' abjure dogmatic truth.' A totally different stand is also made upon Bible teaching even by denominations * who take God's revelation as it stands.' The various Protestant creeds reject the living authority of the Catholic Church and adopt, instead, various methods of private -interpretation of the Sacred Word — ' the most prolific source of division and religious disunion. Nor, indeed,' added his Grace, ' need we go beyond the members of the Commission to find proofs of the lamentable divisions and differences which the reading of Scripture with private interpretation, or with an unreliable internal standard, is capable of producing.'

'The Commission,' said the Archbishop,' was composed of men who all, in some sense, recognised the authority of the .Bible. They must be regarded as favorable exponents of the results of Scriptural interpretation made according to one or other of the methods to which I have referred. And yet how lamentable are the differences and how wide the divisions that exist amongst them ! Even in regard to what must be looked upon as the most important truths of religion — such as the doctrine of the Trinity, the Virgin Birth of the Saviour, the Divinity of Christ, the inspiration and authority of the Scripture, the Atonement, the constitution of the Church established by Christ on carth — on these and other revealed truths an impassable gulf lies between them. How could it be hoped, then, that suitable Scripture lessons could be drawn up by that heterogeneous Commission, or taught with safety in Hate schools to Catholic and non-Catholic children alike ?' The Scripture manual of that Commission — which it is now seriously proposed to place upon the curriculum of our New Zealand public schools — was of a singularly unsatisfactory kind. Their Scripture lessons — which have been accepted by the Wellington Conference— are the result of endless discussion, amendment, and rescision, with the word ' compromise ' written large across the face of every page. They are supposed to be consistent with belief in and denial of the doctrine of the Trinity, with belief in and denial of the Incarnation and Divinity of Christ, and with belief in and denial of His \tonetnent for the sins of the world. In other words, the Victorian Commission's Scripture lessons are (as the Archbishop of Melbourne said) deemed by their compiler to be consis;ent with • belief in and denial of Christianity as it is ordinally accepted and professed by the general body of Chrihtians.' And he adds this damning bit of information : 'By the use of unauthorised headings, favorable selections, capital letters, and it dies, an effort has been made, if not to reconcile the jarring elements, at least to give expression to the various views that prevailed among the members of the Commission.'

The Commission might, in fact, be compared to the house which was so divided against itself that it did not know which way to fall. But on one — though only onepoint its members were in cordial agreement : in their determination to make the lessons as Protestant as possible by using King James's Protestant version of the Bible, with all its heavy burden of inaccuracies and errors, down even to the exploded Protestant termination of the Lord's Prayer, which is not found either in the Douay (Catholic) translation, nor in the Revised ('Protestant) version. ' What is true of the text,' says the Archbishop, 4 is also true, to a great extent, of the suggested hymns and forms of prayer—namely, that, in what is omitted, as well as in the general tone of what is expressed, they help to make the whole volume as Protestant us it could well be made in the circumstances.' Such is the manual that — with a ' conscience clause ' which, as Victoria's experience has amply proved, could give no practical piotection to Catholic children— the members of the recent Wellington Conference have adopted and seriously proposed for use in the State schools of New Zealand. And from its tangled t ex ts — torn from their context— our teachers are supposed to perform a feat of pedagogical legerdemain vthich its compilers failed to accomplish — namely, to dose the young idea with ' historical and ethical ' truth without revealing their own beliefs or unbeliefs ! '\ he age of miracles is by no means past.