The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, -NOVEMBER 14, 1907. ATHEISM IN THE SCHOOL

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXV, Issue 46, 14 November 1907, Page 21

The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, -NOVEMBER 14, 1907. ATHEISM IN THE SCHOOL

ago the following resolution was passed at a Masonic congress :—: — 1 Considering that, in spite of the laicisation of the public schools,- a great number of classical books are ■still edited in a spirit clerical, or at least mystic and full of spiritualism, the "congress desires that, in their annual reunions teachers be invited to the purification of these classical works into a lay and republican-forai. ' The result is set forth as follows , by an English contemporary : — . • ' The French teachers have now a new edition of a grammar, from which all clerical ideas are .expunged. Thus the sentence, " God is great," becomes "Paris is great " ; and instead of " the soul is immortal," the child reads " the ass is patient ". All this shows how closely the men who hate religion watch over every approach of those truths which tHey detest. In Europe to-day, as well as in France, the battle that is being fought is one for or against God. Secularism is but , another form of atheism, and secular education means an education without knowledge of God, and of man's duty to God. In that stern fight Catholics at least know where they stand and Catholics in England may look to Catholics in France to see what any weakness on their part "would bring about.' All this reminds one that Secularists in Victoria ploughed this field before atheists in France even_looked •over the fence. And the community of feeling between ■them is not devoid of a certain grim significance. At writer in the ' Crucible ', telling how rigidly religion was being excluded froan the State schools in Victoria, says :— 'In a story in the Victorian Reading Books, in "which the term " Christian mother " occurred, it was obliterated, and the term " frantic mother " substituted. In a well-known poem of Longfellow's occurs the phrase : " And she thought of Christ, Who> stilled -the "waves on the Lake of Galilee " ; the verse has consequently been cut out of the poem ; and from " The 'Cotter's Saturday Night n is cut out Burns' beautiful stanza describing the old cottager reading the Bible to 3his children '. The Rev. R. G. Balfour, a Presbyterian divine, '(quoted recently by the ' Glasgow Observer ') tells as follows the story of how Christ was hunted from the public schools of Victoria :—: — ' The school-books contained several references to "Christ. At the instigation of some rabid secularists, the publishers were instructed to print a Victorian edition from which the name of Christ was expunged. Some three or four years ago Parliament ordered it to be restored. Strangely enough, the Minister of State who .•got the name of Christ removed from the school-books was the son of a Presbyterian minister, while the jc ember of Parliament who got it restored was a Roman Catholic '. *^ We think there is nothing ' strange ' in the action' of the Catholic member of Parliarcent. Here, as on Continental Europe, the battle of the schools is — although in somewhat different ways— a battle ' for or against God '. It is a poor system that cannot be pushed to its logical issue. And the logical and consistent carrying out of the secular— or, rather, secularist — idea of education would land us where it landed Victoria-~tn the nineties, and where it has landed France to-day, in such an exclusion of God from tKe text-book and the school, as would be equivalent to a negative atheism.

fRENt!H atheism has for a long time past been busy driving the thought of God, and the idea of moral responsibility to an all- ■ seeing judge, out of the schools, the^army, the hospitals, and the other public institu£s*&& tions of the Third Republic. The radical- ■ socialist ' machine ' are busy persecuting plundering, and oppressing the elements that make for morality and social order. And they are too busy to "attend seriously to the juvenile and adult crime that is rampant in the great centres, too criminally chicken-hearted and indulgent' to apply the ' butt-end' iv the law ' to the bands of armed ■ ' Apaches ' ' that are terrorising Paris, or to unspeakable criminals of the. type of the child-murderer Soleilland. No capital sentence has been executed in Paris since 1898 ; the law in this respect has become a dead letter ; and the city has at last been roused, and stands alarmed at the growing menace to life and limb and public ,,order which has grown up under the new regime. Great demonstrations,, haye. surged and eddied through the city, calling upon the powers that be to inflict the extreme penalty of the law upon the man who decoyed, dishonored, • and then played the part of ' '.Tack the Ripper- to a twelve-year-old child in the heart of ' the gayest capital '. Crowds may come and crowds may go, but the campaign against religion goes on for ever. While" the President of the Republic was saving the neck_of Soleilland from the edge of the falling guillotine, soldiers were driving out the gentle Ursuline nuns, at the point of the bayonet, from their comvent home in Finisterre, after the Government bailiffs had seized and stolen •their kitchen-ware, ransacked their clothes-presses, plundered them even of their beds and bedding, and left therai to sleep, as best they could, for several weeks upon straw. After the massacre of the Holy • Innocents at Bethlehem, the rumor went around that Herod's own son had been inadvertently slain on that red day. And (so the story runneth) a Don Pas'quin'o of the time thereupon declared that it was better to 'be Herod's pig than Herod's son. , So far as the comforts of this life are concerned, it appears to be more tolerable, under the present atheistic regime in Prance, to be a nciagsman or a ' Jack the Ripper ' than an Ursuline Sister ;i for even Soleilland is assured of abundant food and clothing, and> — till released again for the benefit of society— he will sleep o' nights upon a comfortable bed, and not upon the strewn straw which was the couch of the gentle* Sisters of Finisterre— till they were thrown upon the world at the bayonet's point. * -~ The latest 'activity of the radical-socialist 'machine' is of a kind that has been long coming>. Some t'ilme