19 MAY 1906, Page 13

SIMPLE BIBLE TEACHING.

[To THE EDITOR OF TEE "SPECTATOR."] SIR,—May I say a word with reference to your note on Mr. Lathbury's letter in your last issue ? You say you wish to see "simple Bible teaching" established as the Church of England is established. But the clergy of the Church of England are not maintained out of the rates, though the "terminological inexactitudes" of the Liberation Society may have persuaded some foolish people that they are. When wo who dislike " undenominationalism " are asking why it should be put on the rates which we have to pay, it is no answer to tell us that we ought to like it. We say with Mr. Lath bury, let those who like it pay for it. Why, after all, do we dislike it ? It is not because we want to get rid of the Bible, but because we reverence it too much to see it put into the bands of an unbeliever for explanation or comment. We object to selected snippets, torn from their context, interpreted without check or standard by teachers of all kinds of views, being offered to children as "simple Bible teaching." It is useless to produce here and there an excellent syllabus. The question is, how will this syllabus be taught, and who will teach it ? In religious teaching the tone and atmosphere are every- thing. What will a child's religious beliefs be like after he has been instructed in snippets of Scripture history successively as he goes up the school by a Congregationalist, an Anglican, an agnostic, a Roman Catholic, and a Particular Baptist ? The amiable indifference to all forms of historical Christianity which such teaching is likely to foster may be acceptable to certain minds, but it is rather hard that people of definite religious principles should be compelled by law to bear the cost of it. No; the wonder to us is not that Churchmen object to such teaching, but that devout Nonconformists can stand it. Surely at this time of day one wants to get behind words. It is childish to beg the question by a phrase like " simple Bible teaching." The Bible is a vast literature consisting of writings of different degrees of importance and authority. The New Testament itself is a collection of memoirs and occasional letters, addressed to people holding a common Christian tradition, and knowledge of that tradition must be assumed or given if it is to be properly understood. In other words, the Bible cannot be rightly taught apart from the Church. Those who like to treat it differently are, as we think, unscientific and unhistorical in their methods, but they have a right to their own opinion. What they have not a right to do is to force it on the nation and make the nation [The best answer to our correspondent is to quote once more the words of the present Archbishop of Canterbury:— "Have all those who speak with ready assurance on the subject really examined the religious syllabus of the London School Board, or read the Reports of its religious inspectors ? The Board-schools of London are a solid fact. Tens of thousands of our children attend them. Is it naught that they should receive therein, at the hands of skilled and faithful masters and mistresses (seventy per cent. of whom, it is said, have come from Church Training Colleges), a course of such teaching as the religious syllabus en- joins ? Now surely it is simply trifling with this grave subject to ignore that such instruction lays the foundation upon which the ampler teaching of the Christian faith can be securely built."

When these are the words of the Primate of All England—they were spoken when he was Bishop of Rochester, but his view has not changed—we protest against being proclaimed either as perversely ignorant or else as enemies of the Church when we declare that the maintenance of simple Bible teaching in all the schools of the nation is a cause well worth fighting for.—ED. Spectator.]