A Deserved Rebuke by W. A. S.

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Aug 23, 1906

A Deserved Rebuke

By W. A. S.

JUST now the religious education controversy is at white heat in Great Britain. The government has tried to satisfy all parties demanding religious teaching in public schools, and, naturally enough, their bill pleases none of the great religious parties. Anglicans, Catholics, and non-conformists are holding meetings to denounce the bill for going too far here and not far enough there.

At a meeting of non-conformist opponents of the measure, Lord Stanley, of Alderley, a veteran educationalist and a member of the Church of England, gave the following well-phrased rebuke to the non-conformists: —

I think that your fault is that you have not had the courage to be true to your own principles.

I suppose every one of you has been at some time on a Liberation Society platform. The cardinal principle of that society is that the state has no call, or duty, or right, or competence to meddle with religious teaching. (Cheers.)

Yet you are not unwilling to take advantage of a state permission to teach that form of Bible teaching, or fundamental Christianity, whichever you call it, which satisfies you at the public expense, while if somebody goes beyond that, you call it an intolerable levying of taxes against your conscience.

The general attitude on the question bears witness to the terrible decay of religion. It is assumed that the state must teach religion if the general body of children are to receive any religious teaching at all. In the Nineteenth Century Review, Rev. E. H. Rycroft protests that the Sunday-schools can not give this instruction. He writes the average Sunday-school down as a failure, and says: “Quite three fourths of the children present in every Sunday-school are there because the parents do not want them at home.”

London. W. A. S.