"may possibly have to be corrected as to their form," and must be "duly enlightened and made precise by an analytic intelligence" (pp. 167 and 173).

Disciple: That is just what I have done in this case.

Mr. S.: But no analysis can make injustice a better rule than justice. Justice is the general and standard means for the attainment of happiness, special and general, and it should therefore be the proximate aim.

Disciple: Yes. As you say, it is a means, but happiness is the end. And the securing of the end is always paramount to the use of the means. Right and wrong, as you have told us, vary with the environment. The family circumstances that form my environment in this instance demand a modification of the general rule.

If I should act with regard to justice alone in this case, and give up the estate, I should impoverish myself and my family, and render all of us miserable for the rest of our lives. Now, as you have pointed out in your book, called "The Study of Sociology" (p. 277), speaking of a similar case, that of the pursuit of liberty," the worth of the means must be measured by the degree in which this end is achieved. A citizen nominally having complete means, but partially securing the end, is less free than another who uses incomplete means to more purpose." So I say with reference to the means "justice" and "injustice" in reference to the end "happiness." Injustice is in this case the better means, as it better secures the surplus of pleasure over pain, which is the supreme good. Nay, in your "Data of Ethics" (p. 95), you have said the same thing in as many words. "If the rules of right living are those of which the total results, individual and general, direct and indirect, are most conducive to human happiness; then it is absurd to ignore the immediate results and recognise only the remote results." Now the immediate results in this case have one

together in numbers, all contribute. Moreover, education tends to make children realise clearly, and by thus enlarging their sympathies will develop in them a more active regard for the feelings of other human beings, and even of animals. We usually find criminals callous as well as uneducated, though of course there are exceptions, many of which can probably be accounted for by considerations of race.

On the other hand the advocates of the secular system have regarded the question rather as a political than an educational one, have been biassed by a natural jealousy of a predominant Church, or with praiseworthy religious earnestness setting before their minds an ideal and it is to be feared impracticable picture of an organisation for religious instruction outside the ordinary day-schools, have scmetimes been led to throw an undeserved slur on the religious qualifications of the ordinary school teacher, even going so far as to assert, or at least to imply, that he is not a fit person to give religious instruction.

I desire to make a warm protest against this assumption. Elementary teachers have small opportunity themselves of rebutting it. They do not appear much on platforms, and if they did they could not with delicacy discuss their own religious qualifications. No doubt the strong feeling frequently exhibited against the treatment of religion by the secular teacher has its source in many minds in real religious earnestness; but the danger to the cause of religion. that must follow from the preachers setting themselves in array against the teachers should surely make the former pause before they assert their right to a monopoly in religious teaching.

That there is an increasing number of conscientious men who do not accept the old forms of stating religious truths, and whose opinions are not fixed, is quite true. But it is also quite certain that in the essentials of religion, in devo

tion to the interests of truth and of the race, in the disciplined use of their faculties for the advancement of both, many such men may compare very favourably with those who have uninquiringly accepted and retained the traditional beliefs of their childhood.

As far as I

know, it has never been shown that such men have sought to give negative instruction to their pupils. It is likely that such positive teaching as they give will have a more enduring influence coming from the habitual teacher than could be asserted by any unsystematic teaching given by an amateur imported into the school. Practically, as was recently said by a writer in the Spectator, such men are content to enforce the precepts of religion, as far as they themselves honestly agree in and adopt them, and to exert as high a moral and spiritual influence as they can, keeping silence on subjects on which they cannot speak with real advantage to their pupils.

Moreover, the notion that the teacher is not a fit person to give religious instruction ignores the elementary fact of human nature strenuously and more than once insisted on by Christ, that the contact with children has a tendency to foster the religious sentiment. So that we might expect that the giving religious instruction to children would be more likely to foster a religious character than almost any other calling.

And experience here fortifies the speculations of theory. Two of the most popular and influential lives of the Founder of Christianity have been written by schoolmasters; an episcopal schoolmaster planned and executed in the metropolis the most gigantic scheme of Church extension we have known in our time; the great English Commentary on the Fourth Gospel is written by an ex-schoolmaster; sermons delivered by Head Masters in their school chapels form a literature in themselves. If religion gain by the exposition of its documents and the practical enforce

experience, that can maintain these virtues and destroy the vices which are their opposites. An ethical system which, whatever regard it may profess for these authorities, practically destroys them, is plainly unfit to be taken for the regulative agency of human society. If nature or past experience had left us no stronger moral system than this, we should have had forthwith to invent one ourselves.

JAMES T. BIXBY.

T

RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION IN SCHOOLS.

HE main object of this Paper is to exhibit a sketch of a scheme of religious instruction such as might be given with fairness and advantage to the children of parents of all Christian denominations, in which term I include all parents who profess to make the teaching of Christ the guiding principle of their lives.

It can hardly be asserted that the possibility of giving such religious instruction has ever yet been temperately discussed as an educational problem.

On the one hand the opponents of the secular system have been too ready to brand those who differ from them with the titles of infidels and atheists, and to threaten the judgments of God on the State and prophesy the downfall of morality if God be not recognised as King in the way they desire and if morality have not the sanction of religion in the school.

In their mistaken zeal those who argue in this way are apt to forget the cardinal precept of Christ that we should do unto others as we would they should do unto us, and to do disparagement to the attributes of God whom they represent as acting in a manner unworthy even of a chivalrous man. They underrate also the value of other influences, apart from the hours given to religious instruction, on the character of the pupils. To the formation of this the presence of the teacher, his acts, words, and tones, the habit of discipline and of deference to authority, and the renegation of self entailed on children by their living