"With secular instruction only in the day school, religion will acquire freshness and new force. The clergyman and the minister will exercise a new influence, because their ministrations will have dignity and definiteness. They will no longer delegate things declared by them to be sacred to be taught second-hand by the harassed, overworked, and oft-reluctant schoolmaster and schoolmistress, who must contradict the gentleness of religion by the peremptoriness of the pedagogue, and efface the precept that 'God is love' by an incontinent application of the birch.... It is not secular instruction which breeds irreverence, but this ill-timed familiarity with the reputed things of God which robs divinity of its divineness." The Bible in the school-room will not always be to the advantage of clericalism, as it is thought to be now. Mr. Forster's Education Act created what Mr. Disraeli contemptuously described as a new "sacerdotal caste,"--a body of second-hand preachers, who are to be paid by the money of the State to do the work which the minister and the clergyman avow they are called by heaven to perform,--namely, to save the souls of the people. According to this Act, the clergy are really no longer necessary; their work can be done by a commoner and cheaper order of artificer. Mr. Forster insisted that the Bible be introduced into the school-room, which gives great advantage to the Freethinker, as it makes a critical agitation against its character and pretensions a matter of self-defence for every family. Another eminent preacher, Mr. C. H. Spurgeon, wrote, not openly in the _Times_ as Dr. Parker did, but in _The Sword and Trowel_ thus: "We should like to see established a system of universal application, which would give a sound Secular education to children, and leave the religious training to the home and the agencies of the Church of Christ." It is worthy of the radiant common sense of the famous orator of the Tabernacle that he should have said this anywhere. CHAPTER XIII. SELF-DEFENSIVE FOR THE PEOPLE "What suits the gods above Only the gods can know; What we want is This World's sense How to live below." BY its nature, Secularism is tolerant with regard to religions. I once drew up a code of rules for an atheistic school. One rule was that the children should be taught the tenets of the Christian, Catholic, Moslem, Jewish, and the leading theological systems of the world, as well as Secularistic and atheistic forms of thought; so that when the pupil came to years of discretion he might be able, intelligently, to choose a faith for himself. Less than this would be a fraud upon the understanding of a man. In matters which concern himself alone, he must be free to choose for himself, and know what he is choosing from. That form of belief which has misgivings as to whether it can stand by itself, is to be distrusted.