THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 1905. BIBLE-IN-SCHOOLS TYRANNY

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXIII, Issue 36, 7 September 1905, Page 17

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 1905. BIBLE-IN-SCHOOLS TYRANNY

fHE Bible-in-schools party are at loggerheads with justice and out of tune with our time. Their inspiration comes from the days of State creeds and religious tests.) Nearly eighty years have gone by since the Test <^%^a, Act was abolished and Catholic Emancipa- » tIIf ' on was P asse d- People in the mass cover Vr with a merciful forgetfulness the ovil days of grinding religious imetyuality that preceded the historic years of libterty, 1827 and 1829. And yet, strangely enough, it is from the Nonconformist side of Reformed Christianity— the side that felt almost as keenly 'as Catholics the bitter brunt of the Test and Corporation Act— tftiat there comes the chief volume of the loiid- and discordant cry for the imposition of a peculiarly odious form of religious tests in the administration of the Education Act in New Zealand. These are in tended to hit teacher and pupil alike. ' And the high! official approval given by the Bib/l'e-in-sahQols! Leaders to tiha intolerable condition of things that prevails in certain Stlates of the American Unionf furnishes a sufficient indication " of the heartless spirit in which such' tests wioUM be enforced in this ■' God's own coulntry ' upon dissidents from the proposed established creed. We have already given detailed evidence of the open, shameless, and wholesale discrimination that is practised against Catholic teachers, no matter how high their 'qualifications, in those ' model ' States where our Bible-in-schools League's programme is in force. And we have before us numerous and recent newspaper prattefcts a)g;a'iinst ' the annual Qutnage ' that is there inflicted, 'aa a preparation for the school fno-lidays, upon the faith and the religious sentiments of Catholic parents and 'pupils*

Tihes'e .protests come from States as widely soparatad as Massydhu'setts, California, and Louisiana. They refer to the ovil and long-established custom of turning what we would call the "break-up ' exercises of the supposedly ' unseotanan ' public schools into Protestant prayer-meetingis. These are sometimes (as recently at Befverley,, Majss.) \ conducted in t(he churches or cofnventiclcsi of the Reformed denominations that happen to be locally dominant. An average sample of the sort of ' nan-4stectia}-|i|a ) nism ' tihaJt prevails in -those regions is furnished by 'a Massachusetts State Normal School, to which reference is made in a recent issue of a Buffalo contemporary. The exercises took plaice in the school. They consisted of a Protestant hymn, a Scripture reading from a Protestant version of the Bible by a Protestant clergyman and class, a prayer by another Pro-

testant divine, and \ then more Protestant hymns. Next followed the presentation of diplomas to -the bidding; teachers. The function then closed, on approved Prates* - tant lines, with ' the doxolqgy and the ■b)emedictton.j ) r< A very feood, 'programme,' says the Buffa-lo 'Union and Times,' 'for a sectarian school picnic, 'but for the commencement exercises of a State Normal School unnecessary, not in Steeping with the unseotarian spirit that showld prevail, and eminently unfair.' If the 1 , pupils of, say, the Dunodin Normal School were required to attend Hig/h Mas® in St. .Joseph's Cathedral, or -to take part in Vespers and Benediction in their ; class-irt>*)ins, as part of their annual 'break-up,' the;Bible-4n-gahools Executive would go off in a collective fit of apotflexy, •and -a tidal wave of religious pas-sjon wouia sweep New Zealand from the nose of North Cape to the toe ofStewart Island. But the very States, where a simijar^ outrage is, (by an old and tyrant- custom, «uura3lX;inflicted on Catholics, Jews, etc., are admiringly- pointedto (by the - official index-finger of our Bibte-in-whools League, as igcand exemplars for our country's imitation. The significance of this latest pronouncement of the Leagjue should Mot be lost sight of by parents and teachers throughout New Zealand.