[.—l3b.

58

[j. CAUGHLEY.

The report of the Conference on Scripture-teaching in Secondary Schools, 1913, at which papers were read by Canon Masterman, Professor Peake, Canon Holland, Dr. Headlam, and others is a protest from beginning to end against mechanical teaching of Scripture and the limitation of the subject to a few books of the Bible. All these go to show that if the teacher did use the Bible in the class he should be infinitely more a teacher, an interpreter, than in any other lesson. Yet the proposed scheme actually requires that a teacher when using this Book, the tinal word on morality and religion, with the most profound of all topics, the relation of the soul of man to God, shall be less a teacher than when teaching any other subject—that is, he is to teach the Bible without teaching religion, and yet, in some way or other, supply the spiritual needs of the children. The Bible without Religion. The above extraordinary task set for the teacher violates another great educational principle. After tlfe teacher has conducted a Bible lesson without being a teacher, a clergyman is to come along and teach what the lesson was really intended to convey. This is as if one teacher took a book on chemistry, or the best text-book on geography or history, without teaching geography or chemistry or history. The teacher must conduct a reading-lesson different from any other reading-lesson he ever takes in school. Then, a day or two after, a visiting instructor comes, who does not know the children, who has not heard the lesson read, who is less a teachei than the one who was forbidden really to-teach the lesson, and in one lesson the latter is to reveal the true spirit of the four reading-lessons previously uiven. But he may if he chooses—and he most likely would —deal with matter quite different from what was mechanically read .without real explanation. He may cram the children with abstruse dogmas or abstract definitions. Or he may not come at all, and the undeveloped lessons may drift away. Would any sane person propose to teach a secular subject in this way? Yet this is the proposed method of giving religious instruction, the greatest of all great subjects. Words would fail any School Inspector if he found such procedure with the meanest subject on the syllabus. Yet many misguided people seem to think that as long as there is religious instruction, at least in appearance, matters are sure to be going on satisfactorily. Literature. The official organizer of the League, and other exponents of its scheme, vie with each other in declaring how little a teacher is to teach when giving Bible lessons, but no two of them agree as to what the teacher really is to do. They even contradict each other. However, they all call for the introduction of the Bible as literature, as the well of English undefiled, as the greatest classic in English literature, as the interpreter of history and of all other literature. Yet even a pupil-teacher would be roundly condemned if he dealt with the simplest piece of childish poetry in the way that the League prescribes for teaching the greatest of all classics.' Literature is the embodiment of the thoughts of a great mintl. It ceases to be literature if it is not so read and used. A work of art is but a daub of colour or a maze of lines unless the message of the artist is in a fair measure comprehended. The Bible, given by inspiration of God, God's word to man, ceases to be His word if it is not used as such. It ceases to have any moral authority and spiritual sanction unless it is so regarded. It ceases even to be literature if it ignores the Author's message. Yet here are a few of the sayings of some of the foremost leaders of the League: Canon Garland says the class is to read the Bible like any other book. Rev. T. Tail says it is to be read like a play of Shakespeare. At the same time they say we must have the Bible in the school to give Divine sanction and authority to the moral precepts already taught. a sanction without which, the League declares, that morality is valueless. We are to read the Bible like any other book. This is an impossibility. The Bible is like no other book. It came to us like no other book. Its contents and its teachings, its claims and its authority, are like those of no other book. Its Author is like no other author. How can that which is like no other, not merely in degree, but in kind in a unique way. be treated like any other book without destroying its very essence, the very purpose for which the League claims to want it read? Worse still, the League would have the teacher put the Bible far below the level of the commonest school text-book by forbidding him to see that the children get from the Bible the only teaching it was ever intended to give—viz., religious teaching—by forbidding him to see that the children get the only thought that the Bible was ever intended to convey. Rev. J. McKenzie-, secretary of the Bible in Schools League, said that the teacher was to read the Bible like any other book. At a later date he told his congregation. "You cannot read the Bible like any other book. You must read it prayerfully and with the help of the Holy Spirit." And a few weeks later, in an address at Timaru, he said that he would have no objection to an agnostic giving a Bible lesson. If the League really meant that it was as literature i 1 wants the Bible in schools, their plan would, if carried out, effectively kill the essential literary value of the Bible. Let any one read the 53rd chapter of Isaiah, the 23rd Psalm, the Sermon on the Mount, and if he treats it as literature is taken in school at other times he will just as surely teach religion the thing the League says he must not do. If the League were candid it would not try to introduce under one guise a Book which they plainly want to see used in another guise. Would there be this ecclesiastical agitation, this clamour to Parliament, this proposed revolution of the Constitution, in order to put a classic into the schools? Tf the Bible were not the Word of God there would be no claim to make it the basis for altering the dreadful secularism of our schools, for it too would be a secular book. Yet if i< is treated like any other book it is secularized—the Bible secularized at the instance of the supposed champions of the Bible. In the League's pamphlet "Opinions of Experts" (page LI) we liml one ingenious expert stating that " General religious instruction is imparted as secular instruction." The Bible teaching is given