by the time he leaves school.

The question of religious education in elementary schools has long
been the centre of a perfect whirlpool of controversial talk. The
greater part of this talk is, to speak plainly, blatant cant. Every
candidate for a seat in the House of Commons thinks it incumbent upon
him to say something about religious education, but not one in a
hundred of them has ever been present in an elementary school while
religious instruction was being given. The Bishops of the Established
Church wax eloquent in the House of Lords over the wickedness of a
"godless education" and the virtue of "definite dogmatic teaching,"
but it may be doubted if there is a Bishop in the House who has in
recent years sat out a Scripture lesson in a Church of England
school. It would be well if all who talked publicly about religious
education could be sentenced to devote a month to the personal study
of religious instruction as it is ordinarily given in elementary
schools. At the end of the month they would be wiser and sadder men,
and in future they would probably talk less about religious education
and think more.

The Scripture lesson, as it is familiarly called, is supposed to make
the children of England religious, in the special sense which each
church or sect attaches to that word,--to make them good Catholics,
good Churchmen, good Wesleyans, good Bible Christians, good Jews. But
as those who are most in earnest about religion, and most sincere in
their religious convictions, unite in assuring us that England is
relapsing into paganism, it may be doubted if the religious education
of the elementary school child--a process which has been going on for
half a century or more--has been entirely successful. While the fact
that the English parent, who must himself have attended from 1,500
to 2,000 Scripture lessons in His schooldays, is not under any
circumstances to be trusted to give religious instruction to his own
children, shows that those who control the religious education of the
youthful "masses" have but little confidence in the effect of their
system on the religious life and faith of the English people.

They have good ground for their subconscious distrust of it. We have
seen that the vulgar confusion between information and knowledge is
at the root of much that is unsound in education. There is no branch
of education in which this confusion is so fallacious or so fatal as
in that which is called religious. The