Untitled article | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Company · New York · July 16, 1896

WHAT IS RELIGIOUS TEACHING?

[Canadian Baptist (Toronto), July 2.]

IN all the multitudinous articles which have from time to time appeared in England and Canada upon the burning question of religious teaching in the schools, we do not remember to have seen what most of us regard as the sound logical objections to any such teaching under government control and at public expense more clearly and trenchantly put than in the following extract from a letter in the London (England) Daily Chronicle, written by Mr. George Russell, avowedly a churchman and evidently a high churchman:—

“Everyone who believes in religion must, I imagine, wish children to be religiously brought up. The ideal condition of things would be where the whole State consisted of Christian men, and, professing the same religion, brought up all its children therein. But this is Utopia. As a matter of fact, we have in England to-day upwards of a hundred forms of religion, and this makes any national system of religious education, in my judgment, impossible. For example, I am a firm believer in the spiritual claims and the doctrinal system of the Church of England; but I think it unjust, and therefore I do not wish, to teach baptismal regeneration with money taken from Baptists

and Independents; nor, on the other hand, do I wish the infallibility of the Pope to be taught with money taken from me. But many of our Nonconformist friends say that although we are split up into a hundred sects we can all unite in teaching children ‘undenominational,’ or ‘unsectarian,’ or ‘undogmatic’ religion. But is this possible? If, laying aside all questions of church government, sacraments, ministry, and the like, we teach children that Jesus Christ is their Saviour, we touch at once the most vital and also the most controversial of dogmas. If we teach them that there is a God, we touch the foundation of all dogmas. If we go on to teach that God is our Father, that he sees what we do, and will treat us accordingly, we plunge at every step deeper and deeper into dogma.

For myself, the Christian religion, with its fundamental dogma that Christ is God, is as vital as air, and I am more certain that I believe in it and trust it than that I have hands and feet. But I do not think it just, and therefore I do not wish, to teach the Godhead of Christ with money taken from the Jews. I do not wish to teach the doctrine of the Holy Trinity with money taken from Unitarians. I do not wish to teach the existence of God and a future life with money taken from atheists and agnostics. And if, in order to be ‘unsectarian,’ ‘undenominational,’ and ‘undogmatic,’ we abstain from teaching any of these things, what is left? What has become of that ‘unsectarian religion’ which we were all to agree in teaching, and which the State was to offer to its children as their guide in life and death? All that is left is a bare system of morality, and morality, deprived of its authority, the revealed will of God, may be many things, but is assuredly not religion.”