Paganism

New Zealand Tablet, 22 October 1908, Page 9

Paganism

Your pooh-pooh philosopher deals with a sink by spraying with eau-de-cologne, and he wraps his description of its germladen atmosphere with redundant folds of silken phrase. But in his recent charge to the Anglican Synod at Auckland, Canon Mac Murray poked deep into the evils of a system of public insiruction that ijjn-.ii- iis God, and spoke of its results upon iarge bodies of children, with a pointed reference to the word ' pagan.' 'We must,' said he, 'be amazingly optimistic indeed if we expect them intuitively to acquire a knowledge of the Christian faith, and instinctively to act in accordance with Christian morality.' Paganism in England (added he) is mainly ' the result of the bad social conditions under which a large percentage of the population live, and from which we are at present fortunately free; but do not let it be fot gotten that the religious teaching which is given in the public schools in England is an important factor that makes for the moial health of the nation, and it is a factor which we in New Zealand do not possess.' In one of I.is hymns, Watts sings :

' So, when a raging fever burn?, We shift from side to side by turns ; And 'tis a poor relief we gain, To change the place but keep the -pain.'

Our teformed friends of various faiths have been for a generation past shifting ' from side to side by turns ' vainly seeking, in homoeopathic doses of, Bible-reading or Bible-teaching, relief from the hard secularism of our State system of public instruction. After all these years of tossing about from one unworkable scheme to another, they find that they have all along done nothing but change the place and keep the pain. We therefore welcome, as the possible beginning of better things, the setting up of a committee by the Anglican Synod of Auckland to report upon the proposal ' to establish and support their own schools ' and thus ' follow the example set by Roman Catholics in the .education of their young people.' We wish the project Godspeed.