s were only too familiar in
bygone days, are still rampant while religious instruction is being
given.[7] The Diocesan Inspector is an examiner, pure and simple, and
is never present when the Scripture lesson is in progress. Whether he
would find anything to criticise if he were present, may be doubted.
I have frequently been told by teachers that it is his demand for a
good volume of sound, when he is catechising the children, which
keeps alive during the Scripture lesson the pestilent habit of
collective answering, in defiance of the obvious fact that what is
everybody's business is nobody's business, and that an experienced
bell-wether can easily give a lead to a whole class. An inconvenient
train service may compel H.M. Inspector to be present when religious
instruction is being given; but though he may find much to deplore
in what he sees and hears, he must abstain from criticism, and be
content to play the _role_ of the man who looks over a hedge while a
horse is being stolen.

In most elementary schools religion is taught on an elaborate
syllabus which is imposed on the teacher by an external authority,
and which therefore tends to destroy his freedom and his interest in
the work. It is not his business to take thought for the religious
training of his pupils, to consider how the religious instinct may
best be awakened in them, how their latent knowledge of God may
best be evolved. His business is to prepare them for their yearly
examination, to cram them with catechisms, hymns, texts, and
collects, and with stories of various kinds,--stories from the
folk-lore of Israel, from the history of the Jews, from the Gospel
narratives. To appeal to the reasoning powers of his pupils would be
foreign to his aim, and foreign, let me say in passing, to the whole
tradition of religious teaching in the West. The burden of preparing
for an examination, whatever the examination may be, falls mainly on
the faculty of memory. This is a rule to which there are very few
exceptions. When the examination is one in "religious knowledge," the
burden of preparing for it falls wholly on the faculty of memory.
To appeal to the reasoning powers of the scholars might conceivably
provoke them to ask inconvenient questions, and might even give
rise to a spirit of rationalism in the school,--the spirit which
"orthodoxy" has always regarded as the very antipole to religious
faith.

But what of the child's emotional faculties? Will not the b