[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] SIR,- - - I entirely agree with
Mrs. Williams-Ellin that children should be brought up to respect intellectual scrupulosity and to seek truth and ensue it. But, with all respect to her, I am unable to sympathise with her negative attitude towards religious teaching.
To refuse to give to children any instruction in the Christian religion is to my mind deliberately to suppress a historical truth in order to support a convenient theory or to escape a difficult issue. Such suppression I believe to be a crime not only against intellectual honesty, but against the child himself ; for the greatest need of childhood is a sense of security without which no child can fully develop his latent powers of mind or body. The average adult; being only human, is from the child's pOint of view an unreliable quantity. All too often do we fail to recognize or to meet the needs of our children when their acute- young minds are busily and early engaged in seeking for a solution of the difficult problems of life and its cause and purpose. Absorbed in the cares of everyday life, the adult quickly • Shows himself - to be inadequate. How, then, is the child to gain this necessary sense of inward peace and security except through the knowledge of the loving Fatherhood- Of GOdI • To whom else can he turn for comprehension and support when his parents and his teachers fail him ? For a child must turn to some one, not to some thing. Personalities are the dominant influence in his life and he has little use for abstractions. God is far more real to a child then to the average adult. Who, then, shall dare in a fit of intellectual cowardice or superiority to destroy a faith that may sonic day become the sheet anchor of another's life ? Who, indeed, may dare to deprive the hero-worshipping boy or girl of the inspiration of the life of Christ One cannot be neutral. Either the Christian religion is true or it is not. Until it is definitely proved that God is non-existent, that the universe has no spiritual significance, that death is indeed the end of all things,-surely children have a right to be taught a religion which the experience of Christians in all ages has found to provide the Only possible solution of the mysteries of human existence and its purpose, and to offer the only solid basis for a "good life.
" It must needs be that Offences' collie, but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh ! an Sir, be., R. M. WYNNE.
Roughatn Home School, Rougham, Bury St. Edmund's.
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