LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
THE LEAGUE SCHEME AND THE RURAL PARISHES.
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR:"]
SIR,—If your readers are not quite tired of the Education question and the "religious difficulty," will you afford me space in your columns to ask the members of the League whether they have fully considered the effect in the country districts of their plan of allowing religious instruction to be given in Board schools by independent persons?
In towns where the personal influence of school managers over the parents is but slight, attendance at any separate religious lesson which the Board might permit would really be a matter of per- fectly free choice, though, as I believe, it would in fact come to little or nothing.
But will this be the case in very many rural parishes ? The Church party will nearly always have a majority at the Board, and will permit a religious lesson to be given by the master, or by the clergyman or his curate, before "school," technically, begins, —say, at nine o'clock. Wherever the parson and squire are a minded, it will soon be well understood in the pariah that attend- ance at this hour is "expected," and little difficulty will be experienced in securing the attendance of the children at this preliminary lesson, and all distinction between it and the school instruction proper will in practice soon be lost,—indeed, that this distinction will be unrecognised by parents and children is a favourite argument with some members of the League, when they are indignantly refuting the charge of seeking to exclude religious teaching from the schools.
But what security shall we have as to the character of the reli- gions instruction which will thus (in effect, if not in legal contem- plation) be given under the authority of the Act, and with the sanction of the School Board ? Absolutely none whatever. There will be no "Cowper-Temple clause" to exert a moderating in- fluence, no sense of responsibility to the public to check sectarian zeal. Dogmatism and rancour, where they exist, will have free scope, and nothing is more likely than that in not a few eases our public-school houses will be used for imparting the ideas and prin- ciples of extreme religions partisanship.
Surely such a state of things would be a far sorer " conscien- tious " grievance to many of us than the payment of a few pence out of the rates under the "Twenty-fifth Section."
Many of the clergy DOW look upon School Boards as inevitable, and some of them, if I mistake not, are beginning to perceive in
this scheme of "separate religions instruction" a means of getting rid of the restrictions of the Cowper-Temple clause in Board
schools. Is the League prepared to support them in this am Sir, SIC., A LIBERAL AND A SCHOOL-BOARD CHAIRMAN.
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