On what day, if any, our souls are our own?
But this was practically the Swan-song of Punch's no-Popery campaign. Lord Salisbury, in his speech on the Public Worship Regulation Bill, had spoken of three schools of religious thought—the Sacramental, the Emotional and the Philosophical. Henceforth and for a good many years to come Punch was mainly concerned with the two latter schools, and most of all with the second. He reverted with undiminished vigour to his old campaign against the Sabbatarians, but his chief bête noire was the Salvation Army. Here he was at one with Huxley in his criticisms on "Corybantic Christianity," but for the rest he impartially combated the pretensions of scientific dogmatism, of Agnosticism (which he called the Nothingarian creed) and Positivism. He warns France against the danger of a purely secularist education:—
An Atheist's "The Fool"—the Psalmist saith:
Will France risk such a brood of Fools?
Irreverent youth, with neither Hope nor Faith,
Will be the product of your Godless Schools.
Sunday Observance
He satirizes the advocates of undenominationalism in the picture of the toy-shop man who declines to supply a Noah's Ark to a lady customer. He had given up keeping them since School Boards came in: "They was considered too denominational, M'um."
TOYS AND THEIR TEACHINGS