IV.—THE ARGUMENT FROM RESULTS: SECULAR SCHOOLS AND CRIME STATISTICS.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXVII, Issue 5, 4 February 1909, Page 171

IV.— THE ARGUMENT FROM RESULTS: SECULAR SCHOOLS AND CRIME STATISTICS.

Our secular system of public instruction assumes as a dogma that, in effect, religion is more or less of a speculative philosophy, or that at least it is something separable from the real business of life. In the three previous articles of this series I have dwelt exclusively on the principles of philosophy and of pedagogy (the science of teaching) ; for upon these, in its last resort, the only real defence of our secular system must be based. These considerations dominate the whole position.

'^The rest is all but leather or prunello ' — all other pleas in favor of the system are at best subsidiary or of conditional relevancy. The same statement holds true os regards the results which have been or may be claimed for the system in actual operation. The argument from results supposes two things: (1) That the results have been sufficiently ascertained, and (2) that they are good. But, obviously, results are good or bad according to the criteria by which they are judged. And, in the present connection, these criteria resolve themselves ultimately into a philosophy of life — into doctrines as to the origin- and destiny of -the child that is taught — and, closesly connected with this, into the principles and processes of the art of teaching. So that we get back ever to the fundamental considerations which I have so strongly emphasised in previous articles. What are the fruits by which our secular system of

public instruction claims to be judged? It will haidly be contended (especially in view of well-known facts) tliat the union of religion with education tends of itself to produce a lower physical or intellectual type. We may therefore concentrate our attention, upon what is admittedly the chief end of education — namely, upon the moral -viewpoint, upon the formation of character and the training of true men and women as we need. them. And be it borne in mind that I am all along assuming that this discussion is with men who accept at least the fundamental truths and principles of the faitli. The appeal to results is a favorite theme in the journalistic defence of Australasian' secular systems of public instruction. So far as lam aware, however, this argument is advanced, not by way of demonstration, but as a ' retort courteous ' — namely, , as a challenge to certain adversaries to prove that the secularity of the systems has led to an increase of crime. To this is commonly added a statistical contention to the effect that Catholics, despite their religious system of education, show a notable relative preponderance of crime. A separate operation will be needed for the proper dissection of each of_ these two flagrant statistical fallacies.

1. It is no part of the duty of the friends of Teligious education to establish a case against the secular system, whether on the grounds of philosophy or of pedagogy oi of results. On the contrary, it is the duty of the advocates of our secular system to justify, if they can, the banishment of religion from the place which it occupied faom the beginning in our schools, and which it has occupied throughout Christendom from ages immemorial.

2. The great object of education is to form character, to strengthen the child to. adhere to moral principle, to build up habits of virtue, or ' permament dispositions >jin the will to act according to the 'dictates of the moral reason.' Surely it is damning our secular system with faint praise to suggest, as an argument in its favor, that it has not clearly increased the business of our criminal courts.

3. Our returns of crime are practically returns of convictions for crime. But convictions for crime are notoriously only a fraction of the country's total crime. Even on the mere issue of crime an appeal to statistics, therefore, furnishes no clear case for our system of public instruction.

4. ' Social phenomena,' says Rickaby, ' are as a rule exceedingly complex ; cause and effect are hard to unravel. Statistics are excellent things, logically applied. But, logic apart, "you can prove anything by statistics." ' The good or bad results of our secular system cannot well be expressed in terms of mathematics.

5. Statistics give but an imperfect statement of the crimes of a country. They afford practically no criterion of its moral condition. For the secular State (and the secular State school) takes no cognisance of sin. ' But in morals,' as Spalding remarks, 'sin is the vital matter; crime is but its legal aspect. Men begin as sinners before they end as criminals.' Every historian and moralist knows that an appalling condition of moral rottenness and degeneracy may co-exist with a low criminal calendar — an external conventionalism or aestheticism filming ' The ulcerous place ; Whiles rank corruption, mining all within, Infects unseen.'

Conversely, a high calendar of legal crime may, in given circumstances, be perfectly compatible with remarkable moral purity and cultivated goodness. An example in point is furnished by the turbulence aroused among the clean-hearted peasantry of Ireland by the heartless evictions, the wholesale confiscations, and the crude seizures of the scanty food which, in the great famine, stood between them and the long-drawn agonies of death by starvation. Moral degeneracy and dry-rot do not necessarily, nor even commonly, tend to the dock or the prison cell or the hangman's noose — and least of all in a country like New Zealand, in which a high and well-distributed prosperity gives a wide extension and force to social conventions. The ugliest-looking sins are not necessarily the most detestable. There are, for instance, many degrading vices, and more or less fashionable and ' cultivated ' abominations, which the statistician never records, but which injure society far more deeply than the beer-sviller and the vulgar brawler that figure on our criminal calendar. Ihe moral justification of our secular system" "must be sought elsewhere than in statistics of crime. We know what the Christian religion has done for the moral uplifting of the individual, the family, and society. .Let the defenders of our secular system demonstrate the moral benefits which it has conferred in the same direction This demonstration would, of course, present some of the difficulties that are inherent to estimating the causes of social phenomena generally. But there are some guiding lines which I hereby offer for the consideration^ of those

Christians who may wish to justify, by an appeal to moral results, the exclusion of religion from the school-life of the child :. — 1. We are entitled to assume, a-priori, that wrong or evil principles of life or conduct will lead, in action to bad results. And, on Christian grounds (which alone are considered here), the exclusion of religion from its prescriptive place in the formative processes of education must be presumed to be wrong and evil until he conrary is shown. 2. From the broadly calculable influence of the exclusion of religion from the life of the individual, one may roughly estimate its results upon the social life of the nation. The results of a secular system may, perhaps, be best brought home to the general reader by pushing that system to its logical issue, namely, by excluding religion and its sentiments and influences from every phase of the ; life of the ' individual. Our prisons tell the tale in part. But if this principle is a sound one, it will bear universal application. The full and final logic of the secular school is, therefore, the emptying of God and His law and His love out of the lives of all individuals that make up our' State. This would mean the extinction of religion in this Dominion in one generation. In existing conditions, the exclusion of religion from our school life is fairly chargeable with its fair . proportionate quota of the total evils that would be brought about by the exclusion of religion from the whole life of the individual. 3. An old proverbial saying hath it that ' nemo repente fit improbus' — nobody becomes wicked all of a sudden. Wickedness, vice, moral degeneracy, are not, so to speak, propagated explosively. "Like virtue, they are of gradual s growth. And this is true of the nation as well as of the individual. Now, (a) our secular system has been in operation only since 1876. That is a very short period in the history of a nation. (b) We are entitled (as stated) to assume that evil principles lead to evil results. (c) Even if, owing to the complexity of the problem, we could not demohstrably connect given moral evils with our secular school system, it would not therefore follow that such evils are not chargeable to it. An internal cancer may be gnawing at the vitals of an individual long before it manifests itself to sight or touch or feeling. The same thing may happen to a nation. 4. In Christian countries there are beneficial external causes at work which long stand between a godless system of public instruction and its full results. Among these may be mentioned the following: — (a) The good example and refining influence of many earnest Christian teachers. (b) The influence of a good home life. (c) The comparative absence of poverty, especially in its degrading, phases, and the consequent diminution of the classes of vice and crime due to this cause. (d) The-wide and general distribution of prosperity and comfort, and the cultivation of the social 'virtues' or conventions that are ordinarily associated therewith. (c) Industrial and social peace. " <f) The tremendous power of modern law. (g) Above all, and running through all, the restraining,refining, and elevating moral influence of Christian sentiment, which is woven into the very substance of our civili- ' sation and social life, and which endures long after the beliefs, out of which it grew, have ceased 'to gain assent. The Key to the World's Progress, by Devas (London, 1906, pp. 18-58), furnishes, some illuminating reading in this connection. It is true of Christian sentiment, as of Moore's attar- jar, that N " " You may break, you may shatter the vase if you will, But the scent of the roses will hang round it still. In The Foundations of Belief the Right Hon. Arthur James Balfour (pp. 87-8) compares the examples of virtue (apparently) unsupported by religion to ' parasites which live, and can only live, within the bodies of animals more highly organised than they.' 'Their spiritual life,' says he, 'is parasitic : it is sheltered by convictions which belong, not to them, but to the society of which they form a part; it is nourished by processes in which they take no share. And when those convictions decay, and those processes come to an end, the alien life which they have maintained can scarce be expected to outlast them.' 'The bearings of this observation (in Captain Cuttle's phrase) lays in the application on it ' to our secular system and its results. It can claim no, credit for the real soul of good that exists in our personal, domestic, and social life. These are the triumphs of Christianity and of the Christian sentiment that is in the very atmosphere of our civilisation. 5. In investigating the effects of the exclusion of religion and its moralising influences from the school lives of Christian children we are entitled, a-priori, to credit such exclusion with the evils which, in the circumstances of our country, it is, on Christian principles, calculated to produce. The complexity of the problem, arising from the variety of causes at work, makes it difficult

to fix the precise measure of the accountability chargeable to the defective and lopsided training of the public schools. In cases of doubt we can only follow the lines of greatest suspicion. Here are some phases of oxir life which lie open to varying measures' of this suspicion: — The widely prevalent complaints on the following points: Lack of Toverenco in our youth; the serious neglect of 'family prayer, church-going, and Sunday-school; the distressful ignorance of God and God's Word which is said to be increasing among youth; the phenomenally rapid increase of race-suicide; the increase of suicide, divorce, and tandem polygamy; tho appalling stories that one constantly hears as to the prevalence of" pre-natal murder; the prevalence of juvenile depravity, and of the conditions which in "various parts of the Dominion have resulted in a demand for the curfow ; and so on. I might quote in these various connections the weighty words x)f synods, assemblies, the liench, and the newspaper press. But I must^not so far overstep the space so- generously placed at my disposal. These, however, represent a feeling, among persons specially qualified to judge, that thei-e are signs of a moral slipaway along sundry lines that bode no good for the future of our beautiful young country. And, for the reasons already stated, we are entitled — until evidence to the contrary is forthcoming — to assume that some measure of this declension is due to a system which excludes the noblest, most attractive, and only powerful moralising influences from tlio best and most impressionable part of the lives of our citizens.