LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
THE EDUCATION BILL
[To THE EDITOR OP THE " SPECTATOR:1
SER,,—May I say a word to your correspondent in last week's Spectator who reflects that it was the Church of HM time that brought about our Lord's death, yet feels that he must fight to preserve Anglican Christianity in the schools ? Surely we must do our utmost to have our children taught what we ourselves believe, but as surely we must observe the rules that our Lord laid down fer the Christian warfare. I have no solution of the present problem to offer ; but I am certain that the solution will only be found when it is sought for in such obedience. I submit that in the present agitation many of us are departing from the teaching of Christ in three respects :—
(1) A great and serious sin our Lord laid to the charge of the religious leaders of His age,—that they did not observe the signs of the times. The great sign of our time is that the masses are beginning to read and think for themselves ; and crude as much of this thought may be, there is in it one vast, though almost inarticulate, demand for some obvious likeness between the Church and her Lord. Every one who goes among the people unblinded by prejudice knows that they are not unmindful of the humility and gentleness of Christ. They know what the fighting spirit is, and they hold doggedly the bald belief that it is not inspired by Christ. Nor can you twist them from this belief as you may twist the crowds of pious women, and the small company of men, who in a leisured and easy life attend upon every service of the Church. These, reading the political party papers and the more partisan religious papers, and finding the clerical agitation falls in, unfortunately, with their own class prejudice, easily accept a sophistical argument. They are not disciplined by the hard reality of work ; they are ready to go to war and to do many wonderful works in the name of Christ, without asking whether they are acting in that gentleness and humility which would alone prove that at the last Christ would own their service. In one district which has come under my observation, all the most self-respecting and independent of the working and com- mercial classes voted Liberal at the late General Election. S Those who voted on the Tory side were the rich, their servants, the shopkeepers who courted their custom, and the poor who clung to Church charities. At another Election there may be another line of cleavage, but in the last the whole really virile element in
this parish happened to go LiberaL Close upon this the vicar and his curates began preaching and writing hard things against Mr. Birrell, the Government, and all Nonconformists. Their intention was to make the Liberal faction repent of their recent vote. What is the result? At this month's District Council election, when the whole strength of the Church was used in the name of education to put in a churchwarden as against a reform candidate, the churchwarden was not even elected, and the man whom the Church opposed was at the top of the poll. Could any- thing be clearer proof that the best sons of the Church are in this district being alienated from her ? Yet the clergy, surrounded by their own little band of echoing enthusiasts, pricked on by party politicians, are so mistaking the situation that they are well satisfied with their own violent methods.
(2) Our Lord told the religious leaders of His day that no zeal for what they held to be God's law could excuse them for for- getting judgment and mercy and faith; and to all His hearers He said that in so far as they injured the least of His children they injured Him. Yet many a prominent Christian leader in the present agitation is forgetting these virtues, and is speaking unkindly of many of the Lord's brethren. In the last years, when a few of the Nonconformist leaders caused their followers to believe that, in the matter of the schools, the Anglican clergy were tyrannous, rapacious, and disingenuous ; when they impugned the motives of the Bishops and Mr. Balfour, and by ez parts oratory aroused much animus against the Anglican Church, were they just ? were they merciful ? were they exercising faith in Him who calls Himself the Truth ? Two wrongs do not make a right. All this injurious rant about tyranny and cupidity and unconscientiousness was untrue and ill-tempered as applied to Mr. Balfour and the Anglican Bishops, and it is equally untrue and venomous as applied to Mr. Birrell and the Nonconformists. If our Christianity is not hypocrisy, we believe that each of us alone, each for himself, Bishop or poorest layman, must one day meet the solemn charge, "Inasmuch as ye slandered the least of these ye slander me." Shall any one of us then dare to say singly what we are now virtually saying in chorus : "Nay, Lord ; Thy teaching is sublime, but it does not meet the necessities of a Christian's life in the world." There is one Anglican priest in England—there may be many, but I have heard of one—who, although he holds extreme Church doctrine, gave an address to his people to explain the Nonconformist position, and did this so well that a thoughtful Free Churchman said that the case could not have been more justly put. That address was surely a noble act of Christian worship; justice, mercy, and faith were combined in it. Can any one call himself a Christian and doubt that God will bless such faith and truth? As a matter of fact, the schools belonging to that Church have been made independent of all public control by private subscription.
(3) Our Lord pronounced a solemn doom against those who should deny Him before men, and against those who teach men to break His commandments. No honest Anglican can study the Bible teaching given in the provided schools, and cry that it is a new religion, or an evil religion, or a moral monstrosity, without profaning the most sacred verities of his own faith. He may desire to teach something more ; he may think this somethinr, more the foundation on which this Bible teaching should rest's; but this Bible teaching, take it all in all, is such that he who studies it and denies it before men denies Christ before men,— denies the virtue of the Apostolic records, and the greater part of the truths of Christianity. Who is responsible for the fact that through the length and breadth of our land Christian men and women who have not studied this teaching are jeering and sneering at it, thereby jeering and sneering . publicly at the history of Jesus and the greater part of His teaching ? Whoever they are who have taught men to do this thing, it is of them that the tender-hearted Christ says that the depths of the sea were a safer place for them than the arena of life, and that it is not in His power to own them as His servants before the angels of God. If the battle we fight is to be the Lord's as well as ours, we must remember that to-day, as never before, the masses judge the Church by the Sermon on the Mount ; we must fight as those who mourn their own sins, not those of our adversaries ; as• poor in spirit who do not shout profanities about what we do not understand ; as peacemakers, as merciful, as pure in heart, not mistaking our own class interests and party passions for Christian 'zeal ; above all, let us hunger and thirst after righteousness. Practice will ever be more powerful than precept to attract and to repel.
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