ants later on have retaliated by introducing an expurgated Bible, compiled by order of the Minister of Education, into the mixed schools. In Victoria, Catholics and Protestant ministers agreeing to oppose secular teaching, are divided among themselves what is to be substituted. On the whole, however, it is probably correct to say, that the Churches everywhere distrust and oppose any educational system which they do not themselves administer or cannot meddle in freely; and that the State everywhere finds it impossible to leave the schools to the Churches. That experiment has in fact been tried in every country and has failed in all. In England it was so absolute a mockery that in 1838 an impostor or lunatic succeeded in passing himself off as the Messiah, almost under the shadow of Canterbury Cathedral, and in a county where Church influence ought to have been predominant. A year later the Archbishop of Canterbury carried an address to the Queen, protesting against grants in aid to any but Church schools. In Victoria, after twenty years of subsidies to the denominational system, it was found that thirty per cent of the children had no school teaching provided for them,[1] and that about forty per cent of the schools established had no religious instruction given in them at all.[2] In France the favour .shown to the Church under the Second Empire led to a complete paralysis of school-teaching, and in the day of trial France with one-third of its population illiterate was no
- ↑ Within a year after the passing of the Victorian Education Act, 1872, the school-attendance had increased from 68,436 children to 99,536.
- ↑ In the evidence taken before Mr. Higinbotham's Commission (1866) the Inspector-General testified, that in 39 out of 100 schools visited no religious instruction at all was given, while in three schools only was religious instruction given by the clergyman. Almost every witness spoke more or less to the same effect.
