ABSTRACT

Thus ethics and religion hold together as a complex of sentiments and sanctions which the child interweaves, as also do his elders, in a background of practical behaviour. We noticed in Chap. VIII how strenuously the Churches fought against the "secular" tendencies of State control. Now this struggle was in one aspect a duel between great corporations, each standing for a traditional principle which had maintained

itself ever since Pope and Emperor had contended for supremacy. But in the nineteenth century much more must be acknowledged as contributing to the earnestness with which men fought this battle and insisted on keeping religious instruction within the school curriculum. Men had come to see that the child was of importance, that his spiritual and moral nature craved some kind of sustenance : criticize as they might the formality, the insincerity of much that passed as religious teaching, nevertheless men agreed that the children should not be deprived of what they could get from it. Grown men and women claimed to be free both in the profession and practice of religion, but the great majority still felt that the child was not prepared for exemption from religious influence; and from this feeling sprang the wide support given to the "Church" as against the "S t a t e " in all the dreary controversies which embittered educational politics between 1860 and 1902.