THE CONSERVATIVES ON SCOTCH EDUCATION.
11 MORE bizarre decision than that taken by the House of Commons on Monday night in relation to Scotch Edu- cation it is scarcely possible to imagine. In a political sense nothing could be much more bizarre than the vote of 216 Conservatives in favour of what was regarded by one of them (Mr. Orr Ewing) as an instalment of the principle of Home- Rule for Scotland, especially as this instalment was forced on Sootland against the votes of more than three-fourths of the Scotch representatives present. And ecclesiastically nothing could be more bizarre than the vote of a great Episcopalian party for enforcing the teaching of "the Shorter Catechism,"—for that is the real drift of Mr. Gordon's amendment,—on the Scotch people. The truth is, we suppose, that encouraged by the complete and even dramatic failure of the Secularist policy in relation to Scotch education on the second reading of the Scotch Education Bill, the Tories thought that they could give the Dissenters and the Secularists a more impressive lesson on the weakness or their party in relation to this Bill than would be at all possible in relation to either Eng- lish or Irish education, and resolved to do it without the slightest regard to the provisions of the Bill before them. In no other way is the course pursued even intelligible. The situation was this. At present the schoolmasters of Scotch schools are compelled to subscribe a pledge not to teach anything "directly or indirectly opposed to the divine authority of the Holy Scriptures, or to the doctrines contained in the Shorter Catechism agreed upon by the Assembly of Divines at West- minster, and approved by the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in the year 1648," and further, that they will "faithfully conform thereto" in their teaching. This test, it is obvious, is negative. It only requires teachers not to teach anything at variance with either the Scriptures or the Shorter Catechism, and to take care that what they do teach is per- fectly " conformable " to the assumption of divine authority for both the Scriptures and the Shorter Catechism. Now, that pledge is violated only if a teacher inculcates what either directly or indirectly tends to undermine the authority of Scrip- ture or of the Shorter Catechism ; or, to put the force of the undertaking at its very highest, if he inculcates any- thing on subjects of the same class as those treated in Scripture and the Shorter Catechism, which would seem to ignore, and therefore depreciate the value of, their ex- press declarations. Nobody who accepts these authorities as they are at present understood, will suppose that to teach Arithmetic, or Euclid, or French, or Geography, is not a kind of teaching perfectly " conformable " to the Scrip- tures and the Shorter Catechism. On the other hand, if in teaching the history of the period before 1648 anything is said implying that the Presbyterian Church was not distilling absolute truth from Scripture when it drew up the Shorter Catechism, that teacher would be violating his pledged word. If, however, the teacher adopted a text-book in which the Presbyterian cause was espoused and approved, and said nothing himself to interfere with that impression, we take it that his word would be kept in the strictest manner, even though he failed personally to endorse the view of the text-book. Such is the nature of the pledge at present in force ; and it is not denied that if a school were now, under the pre- sent law, founded by Scotch Secularists, and the managers obtained a master who, after taking this pledge, never gave a single minute's religious instruction, such a school would be perfectly legal in Scotland, though exceedingly unlikely to get any respectable number of pupils. What the Government have proposed is to repeal all previous enact- ments,—the Scotch schoolmaster's compulsory subscription of course included,—and to leave the arrangements as to religious teaching quite free (except as to hours) for every School Board to make for itself,—the School Boards being chosen, as in Eng- land, by the ratepayers. In other words, the only existing religi- ous provision which would fall through is the negative pledge to which we have already drawn attention. The School Boards would still have power,—as the School managers have now,— to provide for religious teaching at their own discretion, to teach the Shorter, and if they pleased the Longer Catechism too, at pleasure, or to omit both and all other kinds of religious teaching, if they preferred ; but they would not have power to ask schoolmasters for subscription to any pledge. They could say to them, 'Unless you do practically teach the Shorter Catechism, we shan't have confidence in you, and shan't be able to keep you ; 'but they could not say to them, Sign this pledge to conform your teaching to that of the Shorter Catechism.' And here comes in Mr. Gordon's resolution, which he carried on Monday night by a majority of nine against the Govern- ment, and which starts with a thoroughly misleading re- cital. He persuaded the House to vote that, "having regard to the principles and history of the past edu- cational legislation and practice of Scotland, which pro- vided for instruction in the Holy Scriptures in the public schools as an essential par? of edttcation, this House, while desirous of passing a measure during the present Session for the improvement of education in Scotland, is of opinion that the law and practice of Scotland in this respect should be con- tinued by provisions in the Bill now before the House." Now, there is a careful confusion here between law and practice;' the unwary politician is meant to believe that the law re- quires Scripture teaching as the basis of education, whereas it is only "practice." All that the law does is to impose the sub- scription we have described on the Scotch schoolmaster, in which the Scriptures and the Shorter Catechism are both treated in the same way as equally obligatory, while Scotch "prac- tice," again, involves the teaching both of Scripture and of the Shorter Catechism on the same equal terms. If, then, Mr. Gordon's resolution means anything, it means that the above-mentioned subscription shall be reimposed on school- masters by this Bill, and that besides this, the practice of teach- ing the Shorter Catechism as well as of teaching the Bible, shall be made compulsory. And for this resolation,—a resolution which makes it a duty for all the schoolmasters of Scotland to teach, for instance, that "God, having out of His mere good pleasure, from all eternity, elected some to everlasting life," did contrive a particular plan for saving those, and none others, —a whole host of Episcopalians voted en masse, and, moreover, a whole host of Episcopalians the majority of whom abhor the very notion of accommodating our legislation in special parts of the country to the special ideas of the division.
And the motive assigned for the vote was as odd as the vote it- self. The motive given was that as all Scotland wishes for edu- cation in the Bible and in the Shorter Catechism, therefore you ought to make it compulsory. Usually when a country is unanimous in its wishes, compulsory legislation is not thought necessary. Nobody thinks of compelling people to buy bread, though there is talk of compelling people to forego beer and wine. We never should have thought it essential to make religious teaching compulsory on the ground that it is universally desired. If the ratepayers are certain to insist on teachers who teach the Shorter Catechism as well as the Bible, why oblige them to choose such teachers by Act of Parliament ? If they are not certain to do so, to compel them by Act of Parliament to choose such teachers is a most monstrous piece of bigotry. We have gone a long way towards meeting the assumed religious wishes of Scotland, by not excluding there the teaching of religious formularies, as we have done in the Board Schools of England. But to go so far as to compel what the consciences of the Scotch people themselves do not require, seems to us the very insanity of religious Toryism.
Nor do we, of course, in the smallest- degree confine our criticism to the effect of this resolution in relation to the Calvinistic divinity of the Shorter Catechism. That teaching is, we believe, as mischievous as it is false ; but no doubt many ranks of the Tory battalions who voted- for Mr. Gordon's resolution did so on the erroneous supposition that they were only legislating the Bible into the Scotch schools, and not also a virulent kind of Calvinism. Bat take it on a broader issue. It is one thing to refuse to exclude the Bible and religious teaching froth the system of Scotch education, and quite another thing, and one very opposite in tendency indeed, to compel its use. Is Parliament to commit itself for the first time to the startling assumption that in any part. of the United Kingdom, purely secular education is worse than none? As Mr. Forster very truly and wisely said, there could not by any possibility be a clause more fatal to religious teaching than any which en- forced it on a school against the wish of the majority of the people supporting that school. If in our day religion is to reassert its old influence, it must be by the people's choice, and not by the authority of the law. The only effect of trying to back religious teaching by the authority of the law will be to bring it into utter discredit, and turn sceptics into martyrs. Besides, what can correspond less to the true con- viction of the House of Commons than to assert that no-edu- cation at all is better than any education lacking a religions element Would a single member of Parliament consent to leave his son ignorant of Latin, Greek, mathematics, and Eng-
lish, supposing he were unfortunately not in a position to send him to any but a secular school ? We do not say and do not believe that knowledge without character is as valuable as character without knowledge,—though it is certainly difficult to conceive any high form of character in combination with profound ignorance. But we do say that to prevent people who happen, whether from their own fault or their own misfortune, to dislike religious teaching, from establishing secular schools which shall have the sanction and aid of Government, is to cut off their children from the best chance they have of access to tree religious teaching, and to give a great stimulus to the prejudice that the cause of knowledge is adverse to the cause of religion.
The Tories have committed a serious as well as a very gro- tesque blunder in their strange tactics of Monday night. While admitting that the State cannot and dare not attempt to discriminate between the truth of different forms of religious teaching, they have prohibited altogether teachingthat is notin some form religious ; i.e., they have agreed to require a form of teaching which, in nine cases out of ten, must involve some error, and which, if it be, as it will almost always be, of the "Shorter Catechism" kind, must involve what almost all of them believe to be very grave error. This is as great a leap from the refusal to (=elude religious teaching as can well be imagined, and lays them open to the accusation of caring more even for religion itself as a party-cry than they do for the truths which it teaches. We can only express our strong hope and belief that this grotesque resolution of Mr. Gordon's will be actually or virtually reversed in Committee. We cannot afford to trifle with a subject so serious as that of education, and still less with education in its religious aspects. Mr. Gordon's victory was elaborate trifling, for it did not and could not mean what it said ; and if carried out in practice, it would come to mean just the opposite of what it said,—to bring religion into discredit in Scotland, instead of raising it higher in the esteem of a religious people.
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