passages into their lives." Queensland publishes in beautiful books a "Junior Course" and "Senior Course" of Bible Lessons. They are not arranged with any reference to consecutive use but each selection stands alone. (Practically all of these selections are included in our "Bible Selections No. 3," but we have arranged them in a chronological and topical order. See also "Victoria Graded Bible Readings."

These Bible lessons are not merely read, as in the United States, but taught in an unsectarian way. The comments allowed are not theological, but "grammatical, geographical and historical." Teachers are unreservedly trusted by the Parliaments, the parents, and the churches to give these lessons, and although the system is working in four Australian States, and has existed in New South Wales for nearly half a century, there is no case on record where a Roman Catholic, a Jewish, a Secularist, or any other teacher has taken an unfair advantage of the lessons to impart or suggest his own particular views. Rev. Joseph Nicholson, urging the adoption of this plan in Victoria, said in the Southern Cross: "We expect teachers to do only what they are well qualified to do, and what is being done by 11,000 teachers in Australia. They can surely teach Scripture history and narrative without obtruding denominational tenets. To forbid them make any comment or answer any question is derogatory to the Bible and the teacher, and disturbing to the child. It is contrary to the spirit and practice of true teaching."

The whole time occupied under the system usually averages not more than one hour and a half each week, which means three half hour Bible lessons.

The fact that the withdrawals are so few as to be negligible for statistical purposes is ample testimony of the approval of the system by the parents. The majority of the churches in Australia, including the Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian, Baptist, Congregational, Lutheran, Church of Christ and the Salvation Army, are unanimous in support of public education, so long as it includes this system of religious instruction. Once it has been introduced it has never been disturbed, plainly showing that it meets with the approval of the majority of the people.

By giving religious instruction during school hours, instead of before and after school, children are not punished by being "kept in" as if they had been disobedient or idle.

The Catholics generally oppose the New South Wales Plan in the vote, preferring the "dual system" under which parochial schools,

in Quebec for example, get a certain share of the school fund; but when the New South Wales system is adopted anywhere the result is quietly accepted, as many testimonies below prove, by Catholic teachers, parents and pupils.

The Legislature of Victoria has twice refused to submit the measure. New Zealand has excluded the Bible and all religious teaching since 1877, but 133,000 (up to December, 1913) have petitioned for a referendum, which is 33,000 more than was regarded sufficient in the case of prohibition.

THE NELSON SYSTEM

New Zealand has what is called "The Nelson System," which allows no Bible lessons in the public schools except through "local option," that is, by vote of two groups of local school authorities, who are permitted to allow only undenominational teaching by local clergymen acting unitedly. This shuts out the Catholic priest or any other religious teacher who does not act with the union ministerial association, and it also cuts off the trained teacher altogether from the privilege of giving such undenominational Bible teaching as teachers give in other parts of Australasia. Worst of all the "Nelson System" provides that the religious teaching must compete with a child's love of play. Children may go to the playground or remain to hear the Bible read as they or their parents choose. Whoever heard of making Arithmetic and play alternate electives? It is not surprising to hear that anly a few schools attempt to use the Nelson System.

The New Zealand Methodist Conference voted in 1914 in favor of the New South Wales plan 95 to 14, and the New Zealand Presbyterian Assembly, 132 to 13.

Here is the argument of a New Zealand Church of Christ leader, Mr. J. T. Bull, Ivercarjill, 1914, for the New South Wales Plan, as against the Nelson System: "The child knows now that all the authority of the State is back of his obligation to learn that two and two are four, and that an island is land surrounded by water, and that if caught stealing by a policeman he will probably have to go to gaol, etc., etc. And he knows, too, that all the authority of the State forbids that he shall be taught in the schools that 'In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,' that 'Blessed is the man whose delight is in the law of the Lord,' that 'God is love,' and that 'Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.' Why should Christian people consent that the whole weight of State influence should create in the child's mind such a false impression of values? While compulsion continues to be a principle in our State education system, any purely voluntary system of Bible

instruction must prove a failure, especially if the will of the child, instead of the will of the parent, is to be the ruling factor. Once I opposed the movement for the reintroduction of Bible lessons into the schools, but further consideration has convinced me that we are suffering loss by reason of the exclusion of the Bible, a loss not easy to calculate. We hear: 'Surely the State has no authority from God to teach religion.' How will this do for a parallel statement: 'Surely the State has no authority from God to compel me to send my child to school to learn that two and two are four?' 'Church' and 'State' cannot be placed in air-tight compartments. As Divine institutions they act and react on each other, and the 'State's' gravest danger to-day in every country is that through the indifference and indolence of the 'Church' it will forget that 'The Most High God ruleth in the kingdoms of men.' If a democracy is ever to be saved from such supreme folly it must be taught the lesson in its primary schools. The pitiful halfhour a week 'Nelson System' will never do that."

The testimonials to the favorable influences of the Australian system wherever it has been tried are great in number and strong in quality. Signed testimonials of premiers, cabinet officers, educational officials, teachers and parents, were published some years ago in two broadsides equal to six pages of the "Cincinnati Enquirer," brevier type, and twenty thousand of them were mailed to American leaders by a "Bible in State Schools League" in Wellington, New Zealand, a missionary society whose field was the "godless schools" of the United States. Their bad example was seen to be the chief obstacle to overthrowing the wholly secular system of New Zealand's national schools. This missionary literature was not sent to infidel secularists, but to those who are really responsible for the slur put upon the Bible by many educatorsthe Protestant ministers and reform leaders. The writer of these notes probably owes his present activity in this cause in a decisive degree to the consecrated persistency of the chief apostle to American "godless schools," Mr. Samuel Pearson, of Wellington, New Zealand. Like most other reformers, the writer thought his hands and heart already more than full of world problems, but he has at last been constrained to make room for this crusade for moral education as a constructive reform that is more vital than any other except evangelism. Even more than specific school lessons on intoxicants and sex, pupils need Bible teaching for character, which is the chief defense against all temptations, and the root of all altruistic work for the public good.

TESTIMONIALS TO THE HARMONIOUS AND EFFICIENT WORKING OF THE "AUSTRALIAN

SYSTEM"

A whole volume could be filled with the testimony of competent witnesses, but we can only select a few that are fairly representative of many more. Most of these are from New South Wales, where the experiment has had fullest trial, but there are others of the same tenor from Western Australia, Queensland, Tasmania, etc. When the New South Wales Plan was adopted in 1866 it was applauded by statesmen such as W. E. Foster, Earl Russell and Thomas Hughes. Thomas Carlyle, for example, wrote as follows, Sept. 21, 1870: "I congratulate you on having laid down a plan, judicious, clear, impartial, probably the only sound plan practicable in your colony, which plan is in vigorous practice there, and will be a blessing to millions and millions of your colonial countrymen, and indeed more or less a benefit to all men after we have gone. Well done! Well done!"

We make the following extracts from an article in the "Southern Cross," Melbourne, of March 1, 1912, published at that time to influence the State of Victoria to follow New South Wales, whose system had been in force 38 years when the conference here described occurred.

"In 1904 the Minister of Public Instruction in New South Wales, the Hon. J. Perry, called 'a conference of inspectors, teachers, departmental officers and prominent educationists,' to discuss 'the progress and development of education as a whole in New South Wales.' An 'Educational Congress' having precisely the same object is to be held in Melbourne in a few days; but the gentlemen who are getting it up bar out both Scripture and morals from the scope of their deliberations! This extraordinary position is discussed elsewhere; but, meanwhile, it is to be noted that the New South Wales Conference gave two whole days to the discussion of how to teach both Scripture and morals effectively to the children in the State schools of New South Wales; and we give the following extracts from some of the speeches delivered to show the spirit in which State education in New South Wales is administered, and as a contrast to the temper shown as regards the same subjects in Victoria.

"PRINCIPAL A. HARPER: The fundamental fact is that, if the State is going to undertake education, it must undertake morals, and, consequently, it must undertake the basis of morals as well. Of course, I know well that there are systems of utilitarian morality. But how many adherents have they got here? How many men are there here who thoroughly understand them? How

many parents would accept the Utilitarian System, even if it were of the high type taught by John Stuart Mill? Not one in a hundred. Our life is saturated with Christian morality, and if you are going to educate at all, you have to give the Christian basis of morality. If the State cannot do that it should not touch education. There was a man in Geelong, Victoria, who once wrote in a newspaper leader that education had nothing to do with morals, but I never knew another; and he lived in the same place where a man wrote another letter to the papers in which he said that the world is flat. We must teach morality. The question may trouble some of the teachers whether you cannot do better without any reference to religion. I would like to refer you to Heinrich Heine. Heine was a Jew without prejudices, who went to Paris, where he saw the people trying to hold on to morality by the bare poles of reason, and who tells us that he found it was absolutely powerless to help them. Matthew Arnold, the most experienced School Inspector England has had for many a day, said that you cannot teach morality in England among the English-speaking people except on the basis of the Scriptures. The thing cannot be done. And so the existing system in New South Wales is perfectly right and justifiable and I believe it to be absolutely just. I do not ask you to make the schools Protestant, or acceptable to me as a Presbyterian. If you did, I would be bound by my conscience to go against it. I cannot think that any Church has a right to demand that the State shall teach dogmatic theology; but the simple, original postulates of all religion stand on another footing, and those things that underlie every form of Christian faith, and which are in the very air we breathe, must be taught by the schoolmaster. State ought not to teach the other things, except in the way in which they are taught here -by letting those whose business it is to teach religion go to the schools and teach such as are desirous of learning. We are absolutely satisfied with this.

The

"There are some schoolmasters who do not believe in the inspiration of the Scriptures, and are agnostic in their belief. I have been asked: "Would you allow these lessons to be taught by such men?" I say most emphatically, "Yes." If a man cannot compose himself into decent reverence before the faith of nine out of every ten of his fellow-citizens, cannot respect the faith the parents have been imprinting upon their little children, he is not fit to be in the Service at all. I happened to be living in a Mohammedan country not long ago, and I was speaking with one of the natives to whom I was paying some money, and he declared he was going to get drunk with what I gave him. Though I was not a

Mohammedan, I quoted the Koran to him about the iniquity and wickedness of such conduct.'

"SENIOR SCHOOL INSPECTOR LOBBAN: "Taking ethics, how are we to teach them? We want our children to be so disciplined in their minds and hearts that they can restrain themselves. There are two forces in operation-a force for good and a force for evil. I am sorry to say that the force for evil frequently comes out strongest, and most of the teachers will agree with me that one of the greatest faults we find in children and in our schools is the tendency to evade telling the truth under all conditions. We must have a moral nation, and, of course, it is idle to say that morality can be based on anything else but truth, and we hold truth, as a Christian people, to be centred in the Bible.'

"SENIOR INSPECTOR WILLIS: 'Roman Catholics have found no fault with the way the laymen have been teaching the Scripture lessons, and I say that is a fruit of our labours that certainly deserves to be counted to our credit-that we laymen should teach those Scripture lessons, and all the doctrines included in those books, without offending the religious sensibility of one member of the community."

(Opinions following are taken from a valuable collection made by Rev. Canon Garland, formerly leader of Bible in State Schools movement in Queensland and now in New Zealand. It is greatly to be desired that he shall be brought to the United States to rouse America to follow where Australia has tested and proved the safety and blessing of the way.)

OPINIONS OF EDUCATIONAL OFFICIALS

Letter from Mr. P. Board, Under-Secretary New South Wales Educational Department, dated Sydney, Oct. II, 1906, when system had been in force 40 years:

"As you are aware, the teaching in our schools is strictly non-sectarian, but general religious teaching as distinguished from dogmatic theology forms part of the course of secular instruction as provided in Section 7 of the Public Instruction Act.

"This religious teaching is placed on exactly the same footing as geography, grammar, or any other subject, and at the annual inspection of schools Scripture receives the same consideration as any other subject. In the junior classes, when children are unable to read, all lessons are given orally in the form of stories drawn from the authorized Scripture lessons on the Old and New Testament. In classes above the second, the Irish National Board's Scripture Lesson Books are regularly read and lessons in Civics and Morals are given as pro

vided in the Syllabus of Instruction. All teachers, irrespective of creed, are required to teach these Scripture lessons, and in no case has any refusal to do so taken place, nor has any complaint been made to the Department that the lessons have been ridiculed or made light of. Section 18 of the Act and the Regulations framed thereunder allow a parent to withdraw his children from all religious instruction by notifying his wish in writing to the teacher. As a matter of fact, such notifications are so few that for statistical purposes they may be said not to exist. The general outcome of the instruction is that all pupils receive a substantial knowledge of Scripture history, and are made acquainted with the moral teaching contained in the Bible.

"With a view of obtaining a wide expression of opinion upon the question as to whether the Irish National Board's Scripture Lessons are advantageous in promoting the moral and intellectual education of the pupils in public schools, a circular was addressed to all Inspectors of Schools under this Department, requesting them to state their views upon the matter. It was found that the large majority of these officers expressed a decided opinion that the Scripture lessons are calculated to exercise a

beneficial effect upon the pupils both morally and intellectually. The following extracts from the report of one of our most experienced inspectors may be taken as representing the true value of the lessons:

"In cases where teachers deal with the books as they would with ordinary class books, giving an intelligent exposition of the subject matter of the lessons, testing by an examination to what extent the pupils comprehend its scope and meaning, and dwelling with judicious force and impressiveness upon such points of religion and morals as these lessons inculcate, there can be no doubt whatever of the benefits accruing.'

"Outside this [unsectarian] religious instruction, Section 17 of the Act provides for what is called religious instruction (meaning denominational). Any recognized clergyman or other teacher authorized by his church has the right to give to the children of his own denomination one hour's religious instruction daily. Unlike the general instruction, this may consist of worship and purely sectarian teaching. It is given during the ordinary school hours, and where two or more clergymen of different denominations visit, the teacher, the clergymen, and the School Board find no difficulty in making arrangements to suit all concerned. As a rule, no teacher of special religious instruction visits more than once a week. In the majority of cases the clergy

men visit the schools in the morning, but, should the hour prove inconvenient, the matter is one for mutual arrangement between the clergymen and the teachers, and is invariably settled without any friction. Although the time set apart for religious instruction is one hour, as a rule clergymen, on becoming aware that secular instruction is divided into lessons of 45 minutes each throughout the day, limit their instruction to a like period, in order to conform with the school time-table.

"I may add that no sectarian difficulties are found in working the clauses of the Public Instruction Act providing for general or special religious instruction to the children attending our State schools. The system has always formed a part of the school routine here, and probably only a very small percentage of parents would like any change made.

"During the year 1905 the total number of visits paid to State schools by clergymen or other religious teachers, for the purpose of imparting special religious instruction to children of their own denomination, was 42,481. Detailed information is given in the subjoined table:

Mr. Cecil Andrews, the Inspector-General of Schools, Western Australia, in letter dated Sept. 21, 1906: "No sectarian difficulty has been found by the Department in the working of the system. The State school teachers find no difficulty worth mentioning in giving the non-sectarian religious teaching, or in relation to the visits of ministers of religion for special instruction classes during school hours. Less than 5 per cent. of the children have been withdrawn from the nonsectarian religious instruction. This shows clearly that the system is generally approved."

Director of Education, Tasmania, in letter dated Sept. 14, 1906: "As far as I can ascertain, no difficulty arose from the system adopted in 1868. The system existing in Tasmania is accepted by all denominations as a happy solution of the religious difficulty."

Report of Department of Public Instruction for Queensland, presented to Parliament September, 1912 (after first complete year's working of the system of religious instruction); as to religious instruction in State schools, visits are paid by the following denominations: Baptist Church, Church of Christ, Church of England, Congregational, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Salva

tion Army, which churches have under regular religious instruction throughout the State nearly 27,000 children. Within the twelve months under review there was an increase of nearly 10,000 children coming under instruction from their churches in the State schools, an indication that the system has met with the approval of the churches and parents.

Inspector-General of Schools in special report to Parliament: "The Bible lesson books prepared by the Department for the use of Queensland schools have been received with a general approval that augurs well for their future utility. In most districts the introduction of these lessons has met with no opposition, and the applications for exemption from attendance have been comparatively few. Teachers should understand that, just as in the employment of other reading books, they are at liberty to

choose the lessons which commend themselves as most suitable, but that they must keep for the Inspector's guidance a list of the extracts read. Such explanation is to be given by the teacher as is necessary for the ordinary understanding of the lesson, but no attempt should be made to turn the lesson into a sermon, or into a discussion of dogmatic belief. The beauties of the language and the plain applications of the simple moral lessons conveyed in the extracts should be briefly dwelt upon. An earnest and common-sense effort should be made to render these lessons to our children, as they have been to us and to our forefathers, a source of inspiration alike in literary beauty and in moral ideas."

Mr. District Inspector Fox (in charge of a large country area): "Bible lessons were being given in most of the schools visited by me during the latter half of the year. I heard of no instance of friction arising from their introduction in my district."

The

Mr. R. H. Roe, M.A., Inspector-General of Schools, Queensland, in examination by the South Australian Royal Commission on Education, said, regarding religious teaching, that generally two half hours a week were devoted to this subject, and took the place of the ordinary reading lesson. teacher questioned the children as to their understanding of what they read, and pointed the moral involved; but was not allowed to indulge in any dogmatic teaching or preach a sermon, but to deal with literary beauties and a proper understanding of the context. The inspectors, later on, examined the scholars on their Scripture reading, just as they would any other reading. There was no objection on the part of Roman Catholic teachers to reading the lessons. The system was working well, and

with wonderfully little friction, and much less than was anticipated.

GOVERNOR'S OPINIONS

His Excellency Sir Harry Rawson, Governor of New South Wales, in a public address on October 15, 1906, said: "The Public Education Act showed that the statesmen who framed it had considered it very carefully, fairly, and discriminately; for, although they had very strictly laid down the rule that religious instruction in State schools was to be non-sectarian, they had, at the same time, opened the way for clergymen of every denomination to teach the children of their own church. Whatever may be said about State aid in religion, there could be no doubt that religion of any sort, or of any denomination, in teaching the young, was the chief factor in molding the moral character of a nation, and morality, in the end, meant prosperity. There was not a case in history where a nation had continued great after its religion had gone down to a low ebb."

OPINIONS OF PREMIERS AND CABINET OFFICERS

The Honorable J. S. T. MacGowen, Premier of New South Wales, on Bible in State schools.

During his visit to England, 1911, the Hon. James MacGowen, Labour Premier of New South Wales, explained his views in the "Treasury," an illustrated magazine published by G. J. Palmer and Son, London. Asked to tell something about the education system of New South Wales, he says: "It is rather a long story about the working of the education system if we begin at the beginning, and it really began in the 'sixties, when the watchwords of the party of popular education were 'Free, compulsory, and secular.' They were not irreligious nor hostile to religion when they said 'secular,' but they had not found an answer to the argument of those who said it was not the business of the State to teach any particular form of religion. But they held strongly that it was the duty of the State to make the most of its citizens, that education was a valuable national asset, and ignorance a national danger. Every child has the right to be taught the religion of his parents, if the religious body to which the parent belongs will claim that right. And it works. Teachers of religion in our schools need not always be clergymen, if they are accredited by their Church, that is enough for us. When their day comes round, the particular children whom they have to teach are taken to class