RELIGION AND THE SCHOOLS
SII2,—The present opportunity of coming to an agreement on this question is a challenge to the sincerity and common sense of all Christian denominations, not excluding the Roman Catholic Church.
Those of us who remember the details of the religious controversy over the schools of forty years ago do not wonder that both national education and agreed religious instruction in the schools have been forty years in the wilderness. Here is now the opportunity of entering the Canaan of an agreed settlement.
The Rev. E. E. A. Heriz-Smith, Assistant Chaplain at Malvern College, hits the nail on the head when he says that the boys find the rival Churches of Christendom a great stumbling-block. There is, he says, a general feeling that here is one of the most urgent problems to be solved before we can get ahead with anything else. I would like to add that surely the words "rival Churches " are a contradiction of terms of which the Christian denominations should feel ashamed!
The immediate and fundamental duty of all the denominations is to formulate an agreed syllabus of Christian doctrine and teaching which can be used in both provided and non-provided schools. Such an agreed syllabus, after nearly two thousand years of Christianity, should not be impossible of early attainment. Obviously, there should be no dual control of the schools ; and therefore the next step towards a general agreement among the denominations would be the immediate transfer to the local authorities of all school buildings which are either insanitary or unsuitable for use. If the Christian welfare of the present and future generations of children is made the first and paramount consideration (as it should be), all thoughts of any denomination insisting upon main- taining denominational methods at the public expense must disappear.
Let the first thing, however, be a determined attempt of all the denominations to compile a syllabus of Christian teaching for general use. There is no lack of suitable teachers for imparting such instruction.
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