Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work

by Sir P. Chalmers Mitchell

This, humanitarianism as it was, was not the mere emotional sentiment of the typical humanitarian; he went on to give the soundest practical reasons for physical development.

"Whatever doubts people may entertain about the efficacy of natural selection, there can be none about artificial selection; and the breeder who should attempt to make, or keep up, a fine stock of pigs, or sheep, under the conditions to which the children of the poor are exposed, would be the laughing stock even of the bucolic mind. Parliament has already done something in this direction by declining to be an accomplice in the asphyxiation of school children. It refuses to make any grant to a school in which the cubical contents of the school-room are inadequate to allow of proper respiration."

He wished to see physical training put on the same system.

The second great point upon which he laid stress was the necessity of providing training in domestic economy, cookery, and other household accomplishments, for poor girls. These demands of Huxley seem simple and obvious, now that by his efforts and the efforts of others they have been accomplished, but in England, even thirty years ago, it required more than an ordinary prevision and boldness to insist upon them.

Huxley passed next to the burning question of the time. He treated it in the broadest and least sectarian spirit.

"The boys and girls for whose education the School Boards have to provide, have not merely to discharge domestic duties, but each of them is a member of a social and political organisation of great complexity, and has, in future life, to fit himself into that organisation, or be crushed by it. To this end it is surely needful, not only that they should be made acquainted with the elementary laws of conduct, but that their affections should be trained, so as to love with all their hearts that conduct which tends to the attainment of the highest good for themselves and their fellow-men, and to hate with all their hearts that opposite course of action which is fraught with evil."

He then proceeded to point out the distinction between the affection which is called religion, and the science which is called theology, and, without entering into the question as to whether the latter were or were not a true science, he insisted on the danger of a confusion between the two.

"We are divided into two parties—the advocates of so-called 'religious' teaching on the one hand, and those of so-called 'secular' teaching on the other. And both parties seem to me to be not only hopelessly wrong, but in such a position that if either succeeded completely, it would discover, before many years were over, that it had made a great mistake and done serious evil to the cause of education. For, leaving aside the more far-seeing minority on either side, what the religious party is crying for is mere theology, under the name of religion; while the secularists have unwisely and wrongfully admitted the assumption of their opponents, and demand the abolition of all religious teaching, when they only want to be free of theology—burning your ship to get rid of the cockroaches." ... "If I were compelled to choose for one of my own children, between a school in which real religious instruction is given, and one without it, I should prefer the former, even though the child might have to take a good deal of theology with it. Nine-tenths of a dose of bark is mere half-rotten wood; but one swallows it for the sake of the particles of quinine, the beneficial effect of which may be weakened, but is not destroyed, by the wooden dilution, unless in the case of a few exceptionally tender stomachs. Hence, when the great mass of the English people declare that they want to have the children in the elementary schools taught the Bible, and when it is plain from the terms of the Act, the debates in and out of Parliament, and especially the emphatic declarations of the Vice-President of the Council that it was intended that such Bible-teaching should be permitted, unless good cause for prohibiting it could be shewn, I do not see what reason there is for opposing that wish."

He went on to explain that, although he had always been strongly in favour of secular education, by that term he meant only education without theology, and he praised the English Bible in language as noble as has ever been applied to it by the most ardent of theologians.

"The Pagan moralists lack life and colour, and even the noble Stoic, Marcus Antoninus, is too high and refined for an ordinary child. Take the Bible as a whole; make the severest deductions which fair criticism can dictate for shortcomings and positive errors; eliminate, as a sensible lay-teacher would do, if left to himself, all that is not desirable for children to occupy themselves with; and there still remains in this old literature a vast residuum of moral beauty and grandeur. And then consider the great historical fact that, for three centuries, this book has been woven into the life of all that is best and noblest in English history; that it has become the national epic of Britain, and is as familiar to noble and simple, from Land's End to John-o'-Groat's House, as Dante and Tasso once were to the Italians; that it is written in the noblest and purest English, and abounds in exquisite beauties of mere literary form; and, finally, that it forbids the veriest hind who never left his village to be ignorant of the existence of other countries and other civilisations, and of a great past, stretching back to the furthest limits of the oldest nations in the world. By the study of what other book could children be so much humanised and made to feel that each figure in that vast historical procession fills, like themselves, but a momentary space in the interval between two eternities; and earns the blessings and the curses of all time, according to its effort to do good and hate evil, even as they also are earning their payment for their work."