But what of the child's emotional faculties? Will not the beauty of the Gospel stories, will not the sublimity of the Old Testament poetry, make their own appeal to these? They might do so if they were allowed to exert their spiritual magnetism. But what chance have they? The chilling shadow of the impending examination falls upon them and cancels their educative influence. It is not because the Gospel stories are full of beauty and spiritual meaning that the child has to learn them, but because he will be questioned on them by the Diocesan Inspector. It is not because certain passages from the Old Testament are poetry of a high order that the child commits them to memory, but because he may have to repeat them to the Diocesan Inspector. We cannot serve God and Mammon,—the God of poetry and the inward life, the Mammon of outward results. The thing is not to be done, and the pretence of doing it is a mockery and a fraud. The compulsory preparation of the plays of Shakespeare and other literary masterpieces for a formal examination, too often gives the schoolboy, or the college student, a permanent distaste for English literature. The study of the Ancient Classics for the Oxford "Schools" or the Cambridge "Tripos" too often gives the studious undergraduate a permanent distaste for the literatures of Greece and Rome. Does it not follow a fortiori that to cram a young child, for the purposes of a formal examination, to cram him, year after year, with the idyllic stories of the New Testament and the poetic beauties of the Old, will in all probability go a long way towards blighting in the bud the child's latent capacity for responding to the appeal, not of the Bible alone, but of spiritual poetry as such?
I do not wish to suggest that the religious instruction given in our elementary schools is always formal and mechanical. There are teachers who can break through the toils of any system, however deadly, and give life to their teaching in defiance of conditions which would paralyse the energies of lesser men. As I write, I recall two teachers of elementary schools, who, in spite of having to prepare their pupils for diocesan inspection, succeeded in quickening their religious instincts into vital activity. The first was a schoolmaster,—a "strong Churchman," and a sincerely religious man. The second was a woman of genius, whose extraordinary sympathy with and insight into the soul of the child, enabled her to give free play to all his expansive instincts, and in and through the evolution of these to foster the growth of his religious sense. I can never feel quite sure that this teacher fully realised how deeply, and yet healthily, religious her children were. If she did not, I can but apply to her what Diderot said to David the painter, when the latter confessed that he had not intended to produce some artistic effect which the former had discovered in one of his pictures: "Quoi! c'est à votre insu? C'est encore mieux." To make children religious without intending to do so is a profoundly significant achievement, for it means that the fatal distinction between religious and secular education has been "utterly abolished and destroyed."
Both these teachers fell, as it happened, under the ban of the Diocesan Inspector's displeasure. The schoolmaster took over a school which was not only inefficient in the eyes of the Education Department, in respect of instruction and discipline, but was also tainted in its upper classes with moral depravity. He speedily restored it to efficiency, and reformed its moral tone. In accomplishing these salutary changes, he relied mainly on an appeal which he made, in all manly sincerity, to the religious sense of the older boys. The faith in human nature which prompted him to make this appeal was justified by the response which it evoked. In less than a year the school was transformed beyond recognition. In less than two years it was one of the best in its county; indeed in respect of moral tone and religious atmosphere it was perhaps the best. Meanwhile the work of cramming the children for the yearly diocesan examination must have fallen into arrears; for the school, which under my friend's incompetent predecessor had always been classed as "Excellent," sank to the level of "Good" in the year after he left, and in the following year to the level of "Fair." Any one who has any acquaintance with the reports of the Diocesan Inspector knows that the summary mark "Fair," when employed by him, is equivalent to utter damnation.
The schoolmistress always had a horror of formal teaching, and a special horror of cramming young children for formal examinations; and I can only wonder that her downfall was so long delayed. Sooner or later, if she was to remain true to her own first principles, her work was bound to incur the condemnation of the Diocesan Inspector.
Nevertheless, having read hundreds of diocesan reports, and realised how lavish of praise and chary of blame the Diocesan Inspector usually is, I am inclined to suspect that the comparative failure of the children on the examination day was not the sole or even the chief cause of the severe censure which these two schools received. I am inclined to think that in each case the inspector recognised in the exceptional religious vitality of a school which was deficient, from his point of view, in religious knowledge, an implicit challenge to his own preconceived notions, and that, without for a moment intending to be unfair, he responded to this challenge by giving the school a strongly adverse report. Immorality and irreligiousness as such are comparatively venial offences in the eyes of religious orthodoxy. What it cannot tolerate is that men should be moral and religious in any but the "orthodox" ways.
Apart from these two exceptional cases, there are of course hundreds and even thousands of teachers whose personal influence is a partial antidote to the numbing poison which is being distilled but surely, from the daily Scripture lesson. But the net result of giving formal and mechanical instruction on the greatest of all "great matters" is to depress the spiritual vitality of the children of England to a point which threatens the extinction of the spiritual life of the nation. My schoolmaster friend, who, besides being deeply religious (in the best sense of the word), is a man of sound judgment and wide and varied experience, has more than once assured me that religious instruction, as given in the normal Church of England school (his experience has been limited to schools of that type), is paganising the people of England,—paganising them because it presents religion to them in a form which they instinctively reject, accepting it at first under compulsion, but turning away from it at last with deep-seated weariness and permanent distaste.
The boy who, having attended two thousand Scripture lessons, says to himself when he leaves school: "If this is religion, I will have no more of it," is acting in obedience to a healthy instinct. He is to be honoured rather than blamed for having realised at last that the chaff on which he has so long been fed is not the life-giving grain which, unknown to himself, his inmost soul demands.
That England is relapsing into paganism is, as we have seen, the sincere conviction of many earnest Christians. Why this should be so, they cannot understand. In their desire to account for so distressing a phenomenon, they will have recourse to any explanation, however far-fetched and fantastic, rather than acknowledge that it is the Scripture lesson in the elementary school which is paganising the masses. If the Churches could have their way, they would doubtless try to mend matters by doubling the hours that are given to religious instruction, by making the Diocesan Inspector's visit a half-yearly instead of a yearly function, and by cramming the children for it with redoubled energy. In their refusal to reckon with human nature, they are true to the first principles of their religion and their philosophy. But it is possible to buy consistency at too high a price. The laws and tendencies of Nature are what they are; and it is madness, not heroism, to ignore them. To those who refuse to reckon with human nature, the day will surely come when human nature, evolving itself under the stress of its own forces and in obedience to its own laws, will cease to take account of them.[8]
When the hands of the clock point to a quarter to ten, the religious education of the child is over for the day, and his secular instruction has begun. That the religious education of the child should be supposed to end when the Scripture lesson is over, is the last and strongest proof of the fundamental falsity of that conception of religion on which, as on a quicksand, his education, religious and secular, has been based.
After Scripture comes as a rule Arithmetic. During the former lesson the teacher, acting under compulsion, does his best, as we have seen, to deaden the child's spiritual faculties. During the latter, he not infrequently does his best to deaden the child's mental faculties. In each case he is to be pitied rather than blamed. The conditions under which he works, and has long worked, are too strong for him. If we are to understand why secular instruction, as given in our elementary schools, is what it is, we must go back for half a century or so and trace the steps by which the "Education Department" forced elementary education in England into the grooves in which, in many schools, it is still moving, and from which even the most enlightened and enterprising teachers find it difficult to escape.