[To THE EDITOR 07 THE "SPECTATOR."]
Sin,—In the remarkable article by Mr. S. S. McClure in McClure's Magazine for the current month,, on which you commented lately, the increase of lawlessness in the United States is attributed by the various writers from whom Mr. McClure quotes to "the dull indifference of the people," "our low conception of the nature of the State," the incompleteness of "the reign of law," "a feverish appetite for gold," "the delay of justice," "a widespread contempt for law and authority," " the political pull." These may he among the immediate causes, but I will cite evidence which seems to me to show that these immediate causes of evil have them- selves causes which ought to be removed. In the last nine- teen hundred years two instruments have been found to be very efficacious for the prevention of lawlessness, and for the cure of it when it has existed : religious instruction and religious fellowship. The school system of Germany and our own have shown that much which receives the name of "religious instruction "—the teaching of creeds and other formularies to children who do not understand them, by teachers many of whom do not fully believe them—has little or no good influence on conduct ; but I believe that all who have succeeded in giving to children that simple teaching which was heard gladly nearly two thousand years ago by the common people are convinced that such teaching has been the best protection possible from crime. The churches and chapels all over the world are losing their members so rapidly that it is obvious that there are useless forms of "religious fellowship "; but it will still be found that wherever men and women are freest from crime, there the rightness of their life is in great measure due to the continued existence of a whole- some form of religious fellowship. Americans have always valued rellgious fellowship highly, but they have failed to see that those who desire an end must ensure the existence of means. Believing that there would always be churches for all everywhere in their country, they allowed religious in- struction to be banished from their common schools for the purpose of escaping from the difficulty of deciding exactly what kind of religious instruction should be given. They failed also to provide endowments for the purpose of ensuring that in every inhabited place at least one church should always be maintained. When some years ago many rural districts became impoverished, and most of their most intelligent inhabitants migrated into the cities, all religious organisation died out in many places, and as the schools gave no religious instruction, the districts lost all religious teaching. The process and its results are well described in "The New Era" by Dr. Josiah Strong, an English edition of which was published in 1893 by Messrs. Hodder and Stoughton. *Dr. Strong states that "during the past thirty years thousands of churches have thus died from exhaustion in the rural districts of the United States," and that there were then many districts in which no provision for religious services existed. After speaking of the "heathenish degradation" of some of the mountain whites of the South, people of good English and Scotch-Irish stock, and of a " town " (township) in one of the older New England States in which are found "the same ignorance of the Christian religion, the same vices, the same marriage and divorce, without reference to the laws of God or man, which characterise the mountain whites of the South," he says : "If this migration [to the towns] continues and no new preventive measures are devised, I see no reason why isolation, irreligion, ignorance, vice, and degrada- tion should not increase in the country until we have a rural American peasantry, illiterate and immoral, possessing the rights of citizenship, but utterly incapable of performing or comprehending its duties." In such townships as Dr. Strong describes it is not likely that there will be much respect for law. To all who feel that in this country we do not realize that the migration to towns of our country people will plunge villages which have good denominational schools and an endowed church into degradation and vice, it will probably seem, as it does to me, that the only "preventive measures" which can ward off such evils are the giving of good moral and religious instruction in all schools and the endowment of ministers who will teach real Christianity.—I am, Sir, Ste.,
Swanscoe Park, near Macclesfield. T. C. HORBFALL.
[We agree with our correspondent as to the essential need for religious instruction in our schools. We also agree with him as to the need of Christian fellowship, and therefore, like him, view with dismay the notion of impairing that great Chtistian fellowship which is formed by the Establishment. But we must never foi pt that to insist on the mainte- nance of the Establishment is not to disparage or condemn the Free Churches. They are legitimate and most useful parts of what Coleridge called "the clericy,"—i.e., the total religious element in the nation. To maintain the connection between the Church and the State is not to persecute, or to be unjust in thought or deed to, the Nonconformist Churches. An essential part of the work of an Establishment is to mark the dependence of society on religion. But since only one form of Christianity can be chosen for the Establishment, that form, it will be generally admitted, had better be the Anglican Communion,—not because the other Churches are
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