Bible-in-Schcols Consistency

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXIII, Issue 33, 17 August 1905, Page 2

Bible-in-Schcols Consistency

What worlds away the Biblc-in-schools clergy arc from the example of the 'ullage pastor of Auburn, who allured his little flock to brighter worlds, and led the way ! Billings wrote a quaint and practical variant on Cfoldsmith's lines when he said : 'To bring up a child in the way he should go, travel that way yourself.' But the ease-loving clerics of the sectarianising movement are up to t-he eyebrows in a political campaign to force upon the shoulders of reluctant State officials the duty of bringing up the little ones in the way they should go ; ana, so far as the black-coated agitators are concerned, their spiritual children are serenely left, in their school-hours, to gang their am gait, as test they may, to the portals of Paradise or the pit of Tonhet. How like the heartless • vvoman'sright ' mother whom the dramatist flays for gadding about the country addressing political meetings, while her little ones aie callously left in colJ and hunger and ragged styialor and neglect within the four walls that are called, by mod- ing courtesy, a Home '

One of their number, s; caking some time ago, expressed his readiness to tal-e Vhe risks of ' sectarianism ' that might be associated with their scheme for Protestantising the public schools of New Zealand. Well, in 1870 M. Olliuer entered ' dun coeur leger ' (with a light heart) on one of the most disastrous campaigns of history. lie, too, gaily took the risks. The Bible-in-schools party go farther still. Rather than take oft their coats to their own proper work, those somnolent clerics are prepared to take the certainty of greatly aggravating the present educational difficulty, of making schools, and school-committee elections, and \acant teacherships in schools, so many eontres for the play of sectarian passion. They— or many of them—have raised •their voices in benediction over the cheap martyrs of the ' passive resistance ' movement in England ; bait they are determined—if they can— to inflict a real and vastly graver wrong upon their fellow-citi/ens . of other creeds in New Zealand, by compelling Catholic, Jewish, Protestant, and other obiectors, by imprisonment or'fme, to pay tithes for the direct and official teaching, by State employees, of the proposed Unitarian State creed, in schools that have been built, from foundation to chim-ney-coping, out of the public pocket.