TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE LONDON SCHOOL BOARD BATTLE.
TORD SALISBURY is quite right in saying, in his letter .4 to Dean Gregory, that it is now of no use to debate -whose fault it was that the religious education question has been reopened. A great deal of very needless recrimina- tion has been spent—and indeed usually is spent, in con- troversies of the kind on which the next London School Board Election turns,—on the very irrelevant question, Who began it ? Perhaps neither party began it ; per- haps both parties began it. Perhaps the inevitable development of those same feelings which nearly sixty years ago caused the utter collapse of the first attempt to establish what was afterwards called "the Compromise" between the Church and the Dissenters, began it. At that time, under the £10 household suffrage, school managers, both in the Church and in the Dissenting bodies, cared a great deal snore who managed the religious teaching of the schools than they cared how much religion the children actually learned, and it was found quite im- possible to subdue either the unwillingness of the Dis- senting managers to leave the children of the poor at the mercy of the Church, or the unwillingness of the Church managers to leave their children at the mercy of Dis- senters. The consequence was that the attempt failed to establish State schools covering religious education at all. After the great extension of the suffrage in 1867, the interest of the parents in having their children educated, and having them educated in the principles of the Christian Revelation, became so predominant, that this jealousy was for the time subdued. Rather than have them left to mere voluntary effort, or to mere secular education without any religious teaching, a practical compromise was accepted by both parties to the effect that the religious principles which are common to the Church and nine. tenths of the Dissenting bodies,—namely, orthodox views of Christ's nature and authority, withaut sacramental principles such as the Dissenters stoutly resist,—should be taught in all the schools of School Boards, subject to the condition that the Managers should be obliged to exempt from such teaching under the Cowper-Temple conscience clause, the children of all parents who objected to the teaching of this common Christian doctrine. This com- promise answered fairly well, till the question of the Dis- establishment of the English Church came again to the front, and with it, the reluctance of the teachers to have any sort of test of their orthodoxy imposed on them, became a burning one. Of course, when the proposal to disestablish the Church in Wales became a practical and urgent one, it was inevitable that all the various argu- ments in favour of what is termed " religious equality," should be pressed home ; while the indisposition of some of the teachers to have anything like doctrinal teaching imposed on them, or, as an alternative, to have the religious lesson taken out of their hands, and placed in that of more orthodox believers, was greatly intensified. At the same time, a few, if only a few, of the masters and mistresses of schools, had become infected by Agnostic, or at least, more or less " undenominational " opinions,—the view that you could teach a religion without teaching any theology,—and. it was found that in certain schools there was practically no attempt at all to deal with the various questions raised, for instance, in the Gospel of St. John and most of the Epistles, as to the nature of Christ and the light he threw on the nature of God. This roused anew, of course, the question as to the working of the so-called Compromise, and then the sensitiveness of a few of the teachers on that subject, made it a matter of first-rate importance. The School Board of London endeavoured to make the actual meaning of the Compromise more clear, and a good many of the teachers resented the attempt, deeming it an attack upon their own liberty,—as to some extent it certainly was, and could not help being. If the parents are to be entitled to have the Gospel, say, of St. John, and the various Epistles ex- plained to them in the natural sense, the scruples of teachers against submitting to something like a virtual test as to the nature of their theological tenets must be overruled. That, of course, some of them will resent. And equally, of course, the Secularists avail themselves of this resentment to denounce any such overruling ; while the Dissenters, not unnaturally, see in the unanimity, or all but unanimity, of the Anglican clergy on the subject, an attempt of the Established Church to undermine the religious influence of the Nonconformist bodies. We do not believe that there has been any such attempt. We believe that the' School Boards have, on the whole, abstained most carefully from any infringement of the rule against denominational' teaching,—for example, from any inculcation of sacra- mental doctrine. But we think it perfectly inevitable that religious jealousies should break out again, especially when it is quite evident that many of the orthodox Nonconformists- are themselves beginning to regard anything like explicit teaching of the Trinity and Incarnation as questionable policy, and to consider it better to keep such teaching for the Sunday-schools only, and to treat it as unfit for Board- school lessons. It must be remembered that this is quite a new attitude on the part of the orthodox Nonconformists... In 1870, nobody doubted that St. John's Gospel and the Epistles were to be explained to the elder children in an. orthodox sense, and that Unitarian or Agnostic parents were to avail themselves of the conscience clause to with- draw their children from such teaching if they disliked it. Now the minority in the London School Board have taken a very different line. They contend that the religious lesson should ignore orthodox Christianity altogether, and that it should be carefully non-committal even in ite teaching as to the person of Christ and the doctrine of Redemption. No wonder the more orthodox believers were alarmed and astonished at the open declaration of these vehemently undenominational theologians. Now the test-question of the next election is, as we un- derstand it, simply this,—Do the parents desire that the religious lessons of tho future in Board-schools shall evade all teaching of theology proper, even on the meaning (say) of the statement as to the Word having become Flesh and dwelt amongst us, or as to Christ having given his life as a ransom for many ; or do they not ? If they do, they will vote with the minority, and avow in Mr. Diggle's words that they wish "to spend everybody's money to teach nobody's. religion." But if they do not, they will vote for the majority of the present Board that while there is to be no Anglican. denominationalism, no teaching of sacramental doctrine such as orthodox Nonconformists condemn, there shall be explanations given, and given in the old orthodox sense, as to the doctrine of Christ's divine and human nature, and the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, and the doctrine of the Sacrifice of the Cross. We think the parents entitled to determine this for themselves, and we do not under- stand that if they do determine it for themselves in the old sense, there will be any disposition at all to interpret the decision as a triumph for the Church of England, or to attempt to inculcate either Episcopalian or sacra- mental doctrine,—which would be a real breach of the Compromise, and, in our opinion, a very unworthy breach of it. If the parents determine the question in an opposite sense, and declare that no doctrinal teaching of a kind to touch the various aspects of Trinitarian theology shall be given at all in the Board-school lessons. the Compromise will be at an end, and as a result, religious teaching will be more and more confined to the Sunday- schools or the voluntary schools. In fact, we shall expect that before long the reading of the Bible, without any explanation at all, will become the rule in Board- schools. We should, we confess, greatly regret such a result ; but the parents have the power in their own hands to put an end to the Compromise as soon as they wish, and to prevent any return to it for as long as they like. However, we shall be much surprised if that should be the issue. If we understand what the majority of the parents desire, they do desire that the plain drift of the Christian Revelation, as it was taught by the Evangelists and Apostles in the New Testament, should be inculcated on their children, even though that should involve the super- seding of some of the masters and mistresses by more orthodox religious teachers during the Bible lessons, and the more frequent application of the Conscience Clause for the protection of the Unitarians and Theists.
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