THE FREEDOM OF THE TEACHER TO TEACH RELIGION. 373 is presented that it, too, as so many technical institutes, will be severed from any broad humanism. But apart from this is the danger that the child receives the impression that religion is for the first day, and secularism for the remaining six. Let us recall the powerful words of Dr. Marti neau: We are not made upon the pattern to be children of nature at ten or eleven and children of grace at four ; nor is religion a separate business, a branch of study, a program lesson, that can be emptied out into an hour ; but a life of every time, a spirit of all work, a secret wonder in the thought, a manly duty in the will, a noble sweetness in the temper, which spreads from the eye of an earnest teacher, though seldom coming from his lips : but which would cease to burn in his silent looks, were these not sacred things represented by him, of which at any moment he might speak. With these words before us, let us pause before we say we want the secularisation of the schools without any qualifica- tion. Finally, let it be remembered as a matter for wonder and concern that in the conflict of sects and denominations, it is not the teachers who have asked to be relieved from re- ligious teaching. On the other hand, it is largely religious; people " outside " the art of education who are dictating to the whole body of teachers that the latter are to exercise the self-denying ordinance of severing all religious implications from the school in obedience to a political dogma of seculari- sation of the schools. Let it be remembered a teacher may have, and the best teachers will always have, a pedagogical conscience. If so Must the pedagogical conscience of the teachers necessarily give way to the political consciences of outsiders ? Should not teachers be consulted on a question which concerns their own art ? Plato would say that those who pursue the art ought to be both consulted and followed. But the teacher is a paid servant of the local Education Authority. It is a serious national question whether he is to be treated by those Authorities as a mechanic o'r as a master of the art of education. St. Ambrose is credited with saying: "The civil authority has no right to interdict the liberty of speaking, nor the sacerdotal to prevent speaking what you think ". The secularisation of the schools is a political call of expediency. What has that really to do with the educative process ? What we really want is the broadest and highest humanism in the schools. It is rightly con- sidered for those who pursue the art of education to deter^ mine what is necessary to the complete concept of education. Even the Board of Education is beginning to think that pro~ bably the teachers might be permitted to have a part in the examination of their own classes. But the question before 25
