In dealing with the question of religious education in public schools I propose first to give a brief account of the type of instruction that is usually given, and, secondly, to discuss the deficiencies and possibilities of the system, suggesting definite lines of policy.

I shall be pardoned if I draw my illustrations from a particular public school, Eton, with the system of which I am wholly familiar, as I spent seven years there as a boy, and nineteen as an assistant master. I do not imagine that the system in use there differs very markedly from the system in vogue at other public schools.

Before I embark on my main subject, there is nothing that I would more unhesitatingly affirm than that, in the course of the thirty years during which I have been familiar with the inner life of Eton, from first to last, the increase in personal religion, and the growth of religious life and religious influences among the boys has been extraordinarily marked. Not to travel far for instances, the celebrations of Holy Communion are far more frequent, and infinitely better attended, than was the case when I was a boy; and this is a very important fact, because there is not the slightest pressure put upon boys in the matter, and it may be unquestionably affirmed that a boy who is a regular communicant is a boy who is spontaneously trying to live a religious life. Again, when I was a house-master, it seemed to me that the number of boys who read the Bible in the evening, before going to bed, was far larger than I recollect to have been the case when I was a boy at school.

Thus it may be stated that, whether or no the formal religious instruction of the place is satisfactory, there is a

great increase in what is, after all, the object of religious instruction, namely, the sense of vital and practical religion. Let us now turn to the actual religious instruction given to boys at pub. lic schools. I think from what I have heard that more attention is given to the subject at Eton than at other schools, and I will therefore describe the system as it exists at Eton.

Every boy at Eton on Sunday has to answer a set of questions on paper, set by the master of his division. These are mainly on the Old Testament, with questions bearing on the portion of the Greek Testament that is being done in school; and there was supposed to be added a question on certain points of Church history, though this was in many cases practically neglected. The boy may use simple commentaries for the purpose of writing his answers, and he can consult his house-master in case of difficulty. He has also to prepare a certain portion of the Greek Testament for the first lesson on Monday.

The lesson on Monday consists partly in construing through the Greek Testament, with explanations, and partly in going through the questions on the Old Testament which have been done on the previous day. All this work is examined in at the end of the term. A boy thus gets a fair knowledge of the historical and narrative portions of the Old Testament, and he reads the greater part of the Gospels in Greek. Higher in the school the Acts and the Pauline Epistles are read.

In addition to this there is a system at Eton by which all boys go to their private tutors for a short period of religious instruction in the course of Sunday. There is no examination in this, and the choice of a subject is left entirely to the taste of the tutor: all sorts

of subjects are done; I used myself to read the Bible in English, selecting chapters, with the small boys; to do the Psalms with a middle set; and with the upper set I tried all sorts of subjects, the Pauline Epistles, religious biographies of every kind, Church history, religious or semi-religious poetry, and even religious art. It used to be a very difficult matter to get suitable subjects, and it was necessary to spend a considerable time in preparing the lesson, if one desired to interest the boys. I came to the conclusion that biography in the shape of informal lectures was the best chance, and that reading a book aloud was a very inadequate form of instruction, because so few books were written from the right point of view.

One other point I would mention. I always found that the Greek Testament lesson on Mondays was one in which the boys took a real interest; and I would say that, as I gained experience as a master, I treated the lesson more and more from the religious point of view, from the perception that the majority of the boys were interested in the religious application of it. Besides this there was the Sunday morning sermon, preached sometimes by a master, sometimes by an outsider. I used to feel that probably not enough care was taken in the selection of preachers; a good many people, including masters, were asked more because they had a right to expect an invitation, than because their sermons were likely to claim the attention of the boys; moreover, I think that the subjects ought to have been systematized, and some sort of a course outlined; as a matter of fact, the sermons tended to be rather vague moral discourses; and whereas certain subjects like foreign missions and the questions of purity were apt to be overhandled, there were many aspects of Christian life and character which were never touched

upon at all. The sermons, indeed, were too apt to be addressed to boys as boys, with an awkward condescension of thought, than addressed, as they should have been, to Christian soldiers and pilgrims, beginning the battle and the pilgrimage.

Some masters used, I believe, to give a little sermon on Sunday evenings at the house prayers; but this was, I think, a mistake, and was certainly the exception. The boys had already had quite enough religious instruction. Indeed, what with two full choral services and possibly an early celebration, with a set of written questions to do and a Greek Testament lesson to prepare, as well as some religious instruction from the tutor, the Sundays tended to be over-full at Eton, and instead of being days of rest, they were to boys who worked slowly one of the most laborious days in the week. Still it is a doubtful policy to leave boys too much unoccupied on a day when there is no active exercise to distract them. It was a hard day for the tutors as well, and what I used to feel was that it would have been better if both boys and masters had been more at leisure for informal things. I used to tell a story in the evenings to any boys in my house who cared to come, and usually had a fair audience; and at one time I had an evening hymn singing, which was fairly well attended.

Then there comes in the preparation of boys for Confirmation. The large majority of boys were confirmed. This preparation was in the hands of housemasters; but if they desired it, or if the parents desired it, they could transfer the task to one of the chaplains. Personally, I made a great point of preparing my own pupils myself, and I do not think that a house-master ought to give this up except for very cogent reasons. Of course there will always be house-masters who have no gift for such work, and indeed no particular in

terest in it; and thus a transference should be made possible. But it gave one the best chance, at a critical age, of speaking directly and with perfect naturalness to boys on the religious life. I used to prepare the boys on the lines of the Church Catechism, seeing them generally a dozen times together for instruction, and three or four times individually; and if necessary oftener. There were many subjects about which I felt it better to speak to the boys collectively, and I used to make it as unlike a lesson as possible, taking them quietly in my study in the evenings, and speaking as simply as I could; and when I saw the boys separately, not so much pressing them to talk, as making it as easy as possible for them to speak if they wished; but oftener asking them what they wished me to speak about, rather than catechising them on their own conduct and life.

That, I think, is a fairly complete account of the religious instruction given at Eton; and I imagine that a very similar system prevails at most of our public schools.

Now I suppose that the chief reason which makes parents satisfied on the whole with the type of religious instruction given at public schools is, that the parents are mainly moderate Anglicans, and they feel sure that the instruction given to boys at school may be formal and cautious, may be lacking in unction and even definiteness, but that it will be sound and simple and orthodox, and not likely to err on the side of daring, or on the side of speculativeness; and at the same time they are sure that it will not as a general rule be of an aggressive or party type. Thus the parents who do not hold very definite High Church views, or definite Protestant views, will think that the religious instruction will be safe, sensible and sound; while parents who have a definite religious position, and belong

to a particular school of Anglicanism, will feel that the substructure of teaching is fairly thorough, and that they can themselves communicate to their boys the special cachet which they desire. Even the highest Anglican, in this era of toleration, would hardly claim that all the boys of a public school should be instructed on High Anglican lines without reference to the tenets of their parents, though they may regret that they are not so instructed.

But where the chief difficulty comes in is in the fact that there are a good many parents who are vaguely sceptical, and even indifferent to religious questions; who hear on the one hand expressions of high Catholic opinion, and on the other hand find the higher criticism tending to rationalize and even discredit the historical truth of, at all events, parts of the Bible. They have not time or ability to go into the question for themselves; perhaps they have been brought up on simple oldfashioned lines, with a belief in the literal truth of the Old Testament. It dawns upon them in later life, to take a single instance, that the story of Noah's ark, and the preservation of all created species by the construction of a vast floating menagerie, is an event which does not come within the range of possibility; that a handful of human beings should have captured and immured and fed quadrupeds, birds, and insects of every species is plainly a simple legend; and then, perhaps, they become aware that other incidents described in the Old Testament are of the same character, and that though they may have an allegorical value. they can hardly be taken as matters of historical fact. Thus a dizzy intellectual prospect opens before them. They do not know what to believe and what not to believe. They have been educated very probably upon the melancholy system which treated the Bible as one book, not as a collection of

books of very different values; they have been brought up to suppose that it is all inextricably intertwined; that the truth of the New Testament largely depends upon its being a precise fulfilment of the types and prophecies of the Old; and thus they lose their simple faith, and are not sufficiently independent in mind to readjust their beliefs.

Such persons as these-and they are increasingly numerous among the better educated leisured classes-are often pathetically anxious that their children should have a religious education; but they do not know how to communicate it themselves; they do not feel able to teach the Bible, when they have lost confidence in the old methods of interpretation, and the mechanical theories of verbal inspiration; and further, they do not feel prepared to answer the puzzling questions of their children.

They thus leave the whole matter alone, not because they are indifferent. but because they are bewildered, and because they get so little direction in the matter. The clergy are unduly cautious and timid; rather than offend the stricter members of their flocks who cling to the literal truth of the Scripture, they prefer to leave the more intelligent without guidance; and thus it is quite possible to attend the ministrations of an earnest and devout clergyman, and never know whether he considers the whole of the Scriptures to be historically and literally accurate or not.

Such parents, as I have said, are often very sincerely anxious that their children should have a genuine Christian faith, and they think vaguely that schoolmasters are more capable of dealing with the situation than they themselves; but, as a matter of fact, this is not the case. Schoolmasters very often have no idea of the precise form of religious belief held by the parents of their boys; and even if they could LIVING AGE. VOL. XXXII.

discover, it cannot be expected that they can adapt their teaching sophistically to every shade of Church opinion; in the first place, a number of boys have to be instructed together; and in the second place, if instruction could be given individually, what should we think of the creed of a man who could instruct the children of high Anglicans in sacramental and sacerdotal views, the children of Broad-Church parents in higher critical views, and the children of Evangelicals on Evangelical lines? The position would be in the highest degree insincere; the most that a man can do is to instruct candidates for Confirmation on general lines, following, perhaps, the Church Catechism, and taking care to avoid any teaching that might give offence to a boy brought up in a definite religious school of thought.

There is one great advantage in the Anglican position from the point of view of religious instruction, and that is that the note of Anglicanism, we may be thankful to acknowledge, is a courageous and liberal elasticity. It is certainly true to say that there is no Church which holds so easily and so unitedly within itself such varying shades of ecclesiastical thought. Indeed, to my own mind, it is the surest proof of the truly Catholic and even primitive character of the Anglican communion, that it is a Church which permits a larger degree of Christian liberty of thought to its adherents than any other existing Church.

A boy then, at the time of his Confirmation, may be given very plain and simple reasons for being an Anglican; he may be told that Romanism has pushed its development far beyond the reasonable interpretation of the teaching of Christ, while the Nonconformist bodies have sacrificed too much of ecclesiastical tradition. Most boys will be able to understand that point of view. It is easy to show by an instance 1684

or two how much Romanism has added in the way of doctrine to the plain teaching of the Gospel; and it is possible to show, if necessary, from the Acts of the Apostles, that the Nonconformist bodies have sacrificed some of the advantages of the primitive order of the Church; or, that if they have not done so markedly, there is no reason for their disunion. It may be shown that the Reformation, in its religious aspect, was an attempt to disencumber the Church of a mass of auxiliary doctrines, which are in many cases inconsistent with the simplicity of the Christian revelation.

Further than this it is probably not advisable to go; a boy may be a very good Englishman on the strength of a very little knowledge of patriotic history; and the teaching of elaborate constitutional history is not likely to make him love his country more. So a boy may be a good Anglican without being initiated into the more subtle metaphysical and doctrinal differences between his own creed and the creed of other religious communities.

It may be safely stated that the acute forms of denominationalism are as a rule determined by the development of character and disposition in later life, and a boy of an aggressively ecclesiastical type is a rare specimen, and does not require to be specially considered; that is to say, that the instruction given to boys need not be designed with a view to satisfying youthful partisans, though the tutor of a boy of this type ought to be ready to discuss points with him, if he raises them, as justly and temperately as possible.

But the general object should be to make boys good Christians rather than good Anglicans. The instruction they receive should be of a positive and central kind, and should avoid as far as possible controversial aspects. If the Christian faith can be presented to a boy in such a form that it appeals to

his heart and conscience, moves him to admire noble and unselfish virtues. gives him a practical and effective power in life to resist temptation, to be brave, sincere and generous, it is the kind of faith that is far less likely to be troubled by the assaults of later scepticism than if he was inducted into the apprehending of heresies and schisms, and the minor doctrines which cause so much disunion and strife among Christians. The central fact of Christianity, after all, which lies far behind and beyond all denominationalism, is the Divinity of Jesus Christ; and if, in a boy's heart and mind, this core of faith is vital and strong, he may be trusted to array himself with any school of thought to which his later idiosyncrasies may direct him; though indeed the triumph of a schoolmaster would be if he could send out into the world a succession of manly and straightforward Christians, living on the lines of the Sermon on the Mount, rather than if he sent out a set of high Anglicans or of fervent Evangelicals. Only ardent partisans would prefer that a school should be deeply marked with a special shade of ecclesiastical thought, rather than that the tone should be Christian, high-minded and unselfish, even though the boys could not give any very precise reasons for being the type of Christians that they

were.

In fact, the thing to aim at for schoolmasters is to approach Christian truth on its moral and emotional side, rather than on its metaphysical and ecclesiastical side; and thus it seems clear that the best aim is to be sure that the boys are deeply familiar with the Gospel narrative; that must be the basis of the religious instruction of public schools.

But then comes in the difficulty of knowing what line the schools should take about Old Testament instruction; it is of high importance that boys