In your person I respectfully salute the whole of the professors of the Modern School in Spain.
Gregorio Aglipay,
Supreme Bishop of the Independent Philippine Church.
It will be seen that a Liberal Catholicism of a remarkable type has evolved in the remote Philippines; but the lack of consecration from the Vatican does not affect the value of this testimony. Within two months of the receipt of this religious encouragement the Modern Schools were to be closed, on a scandalous pretext, their founder branded through the Press of Europe as "the Fagin of revolt," and savagely murdered in the prime of his life. It is true that the Bishop recognises anti-religious sentiments in the works; but there is not a word about those murderous phrases which Ferrer has been so widely accused of disseminating through his schools.
On the point of Rationalistic teaching the Modern Schools were perfectly open. Ferrer was what we should call in England an Agnostic. In the genial note he appends to the Bishop's letter in his Boletin he repudiates the idea that he and his friends opposed religion only because it persecuted. They oppose it, he says, from conviction. The manuals and the teaching were professedly Rationalistic, in the general pervading sense in which the text-books and teaching in a Roman Catholic school are Catholic; and there was a special Rationalistic manual on The Origin of Christianity. The idea that the schools could be suppressed on that account by any civilised Government is ludicrous. If an Agnostic cares to use his fortune in establishing schools, he has the same elementary right to have his ideas, provided they do not tend to violent disturbance, taught in them as has a Roman Catholic. Indeed, the contention of our Roman Catholics that, while the State here ought to pay practically the whole cost of their specific education, the State in Spain should not allow ideas opposed to theirs to be taught at private expense, is only remarkable for its audacity.
The children of Ferrer's schools came from Rationalist homes, and their parents desired this teaching. The alternative schools violated their consciences and merited their disdain. There was nothing secret or insidious in the teaching. The
