ROMAN CATHOLIC EDUCATION AND MR. ARNOLD.
TN the July number of the Fortnigkly Review, Mr. Matthew 1 Arnold reads to the narrower Liberals of the day a very striking lesson on their silly and prejudiced cry against anything like a religious endowment,—a lesson which would certainly be less amusing, though it might, perhaps, be more effective, if it were less permeated by scorn. Mr. Arnold should remember that it is really only very exceptional men like himself, to whom it is given to feel the deepest admiration for religions in the obvious contents of which they find little but superstitious and unreal fancy. To some great minds, no doubt, it is possible to sympa- thise with men who are worshipping God under aspects in which they themselves see nothing but exaggerated and preter- natural distortions of such a man as Lord Shaftesbury, while they describe their own God as a "stream of tendency, not ourselves, that works for righteousness." But even Mr. Arnold must admit that it is not every man who can follow him in this grand effort of sympathetic magnanimity. Surely those,—and they are numerous,—who see much more in all types of reli- gion than Mr. Arnold sees, may be nevertheless permitted to lay more stress on the error in them which they desire to expose than Mr. Arnold lays, without earning quite so deep a scorn ? Assuredly if we agreed at all with Mr. Arnold as to the essence—or want of essence—of the Christian faith, we should be quite unable to agree with him as heartily as we do, concerning the narrowness of English Liberals towards Irish Catholics. It may be right to leave even abject superstitions alone, but it can hardly be right to vote substantial State assistance to an abject super- stition simply because to do so gratifies the majority of the people. It is because we hold that in all forms of the Christian religion,—the Catholic form included,—the amount of genuine truth and fact vastly preponderates over the amount of superstitious error, that we so heartily agree with Mr. Arnold in deprecating the narrowness which forbids a Catholic University, and in seeking to warn the English public against their vulgar and Philistine horror of even indirectly assisting the Roman Catholic religion. At the same time, when Mr. Arnold ridicules the Dissenters so mercilessly as he does, and compares the relation between their religious rites and those of any great historical Church, to the relation between the poetry of Eliza Cook and the poetry of Milton, he surely forgets that it is only he, and the handful like him, who can regard a mere form of worship, ,however noble and time-honoured, as the better part of religion. To most men, it seems that the religious form ehould be the most perfect expression of the belief, and that if a noble form is due to false, though noble, beliefs, the commonest and pitiablest of forms which embodies no such falsehood, is preferable to the grandest and most solemn which contains little but sweet echoes of a creed outworn. Mr. Arnold is nearly alone amongst thinking men,—and certainly we do not think this a sign of the intellectual strength, so ,much as of the natural refinement of his tastes,—in thinking that you may cut away almost every characteristic element of a faith, and yet go through all its ancient rites with the old fervour, as if nothing in it were changed. The Dissenters may well say to him that they have changed the form of their worship for one of less stately and dignified associations, only because they have changed the sub- stance too,—and that in abandoning the theory of a priesthood and the theory of sacramental grace, they could not but abandon
• a great proportion of the Anglican forms; finally, that, while well aware of their beauty,—and their worth to those who believe them,—there is no beauty, nothing but ugliness, in taking csa. their lips words which belie the faith in their hearts. This is what the Dissenters would say to Mr. Arnold's amusing malice concerning Eliza Cook and Milton, and we think the Dissenters would be in the right. They would regard even an inferior form founded on what they hold to be truth of worship as superior to the highest conceivable form founded on falsehood.
Nevertheless, we would urge the Liberals who do not agree with Mr. Arnold, and in some degree because they do not agree with him, to weigh well his words as to the Catholic University,—especially at the present time, when the alarm is being sounded in relation to Lord Cairns's admirable Intermediate Education Bill for Ireland, on the sole ground, as we under- stand the cry which is being raised, that it may tend to increase the efficiency and to foster the prosperity of Irish Catholic, as well as Irish Protestant schools. The case against the endowment of any particular religious work, weak as it is in the abstract, is not even at issue here. There is no proposal to give a shilling to a Catholic teacher which a Protestant teacher might not equally earn. There is no proposal to found a single chair or a single class, of which Catholic faith should be an essential condition. Lord Cairns's Bill is one which will benefit Protestant schools every bit as much as Catholic schools, and more, if they deserve it better by good teaching. It proposes to assist the children of the primary schools to reach the secondary schools,—all the exhibitions and scholar- ships being as open to children who come from the primary schools as any others, in spite of the false statements which have been inadvertently made in the English Press to the contrary. And it proposes at present to insist that in any school which gains a capitation grant for good teaching a conscience clause shall be enforced, exempting all pupils whose parents do not choose that they should share the religious instruction of the school, from the religious teaching ; though Lord Cairns expresses his doubt whether in middle-class schools such a conscience-clause might not do more harm than good. Thus there is no one respect in which even the extreme scruples, as they seem to us, of the Disestablishment party have not been respected in this Bill. And if Mr. Arnold is right, as we have always maintained, in ridiculing the scruples which will not accord the Irish Catholics a genuine Catholic education in a University of their own, ten times clearer is it that to crane at this small and almost prudishly scrupulous measure for encouraging secondary education, must be the mere caprice of fantastic bigotry. The issue is simply this :—Are Irish Catholics better for having good and learned teachers who are, at the same time, Catholics, than they are for having bad and ignorant teachers who are nothing but Catholics? We might just as well ask the same question of Protestants. Is it better to have for your teachers Protestants far too well-read to be bigoted and frantic Orangemen, or to have teachers who know little or nothing, except the evil inherent in the Scarlet Woman, and the true solution for the name and number of the Beast? Lord Cairns's Bill is a Bill which will aid the good schools, and will give them a new advantage over the bad ; which will help on the well-taught pupils, and give them a new advantage over the ill-taught,—and this entirely without relation to the creed which is combined with the teaching. Is it, then, to be condemned simply because it does not put any new difficulty in the way of combining a creed with secular teaching ? No Liberal of the slightest pretence to sound Liberalism can think so for a moment, unless, indeed, he thinks all religious teach- ing the teaching of mischievous falsehood. And even then he should reflect that he cannot prevent such teaching, that all he can do is to prevent its being combined with sound secular teaching,—that is, to keep it without the means of finding its way to the light. What a Liberal desires is to teach men to see things as they are, rather than as they are not. And this at least Lord Cairns's Bill will help on, inas- much as it helps the course of sound knowledge generally, and leaves every one in authority to give whatever religious instruction he thinks best.
To combine, then, with the narrow and bigoted Tories to place obstacles in the way of Lord Cairns's Bill, would be the most vulgar as well as the most violent act of party Liberalism. Here at last is a measure which will help to organise Irish society under men of better-trained in- tellect, to take some of the wind out of the sails of ignorant agitation, and to educate a class of men able to judge decently of statesmen, and to give efficient support to statesmen of the better class. Are we to reject it because the Tories have the credit of originating it I We trust and believe not. Liberals are fond of boasting of their desire to do justice to Ireland. No more unjust course could be taken than to avail ourselves of the passionate prejudices of the anti-Ronianist party, in order to defeat a Bill which promises to help Irish Roman Catholics and Protestants alike to understand each other better, and to discern better the common ground on which, in political social, and moral matters, they can contrive to take their stand.
Previous page
