stressing
a phenomenon, they will have recourse to any explanation, however
far-fetched and fantastic, rather than acknowledge that it is the
Scripture lesson in the elementary school which is paganising the
masses. If the Churches could have their way, they would doubtless
try to mend matters by doubling the hours that are given to
religious instruction, by making the Diocesan Inspector's visit
a half-yearly instead of a yearly function, and by cramming the
children for it with redoubled energy. In their refusal to reckon
with human nature, they are true to the first principles of their
religion and their philosophy. But it is possible to buy consistency
at too high a price. The laws and tendencies of Nature are what they
are; and it is madness, not heroism, to ignore them. To those who
refuse to reckon with human nature, the day will surely come when
human nature, evolving itself under the stress of its own forces and
in obedience to its own laws, will cease to take account of them.[8]

When the hands of the clock point to a quarter to ten, the religious
education of the child is over for the day, and his secular
instruction has begun. That the religious education of the child
should be supposed to end when the Scripture lesson is over, is the
last and strongest proof of the fundamental falsity of that
conception of religion on which, as on a quicksand, his education,
religious and secular, has been based.

After Scripture comes as a rule Arithmetic. During the former lesson
the teacher, acting under compulsion, does his best, as we have seen,
to deaden the child's spiritual faculties. During the latter, he not
infrequently does his best to deaden the child's mental faculties. In
each case he is to be pitied rather than blamed. The conditions under
which he works, and has long worked, are too strong for him. If we
are to understand why secular instruction, as given in our elementary
schools, is what it is, we must go back for half a century or so and
trace the steps by which the "Education Department" forced elementary
education in England into the grooves in which, in many schools,
it is still moving, and from which even the most enlightened and
enterprising teachers find it difficult to escape.

In 1861 the Royal Commission (under the Duke of Newcastle as
Chairman), which had been appointed in 1858 in order to inquire into
"the state of popular education in England, and as to the measures
required for the exten