“It may be a slight shock to some people to hear that ‘Divinity’ should grapple with Capitalism and Imperialism.” Manchester Guardian.

“Politics, in the large sense, is one of the main gateways to the understanding of fellowship, and of that which lies beyond fellowship, and leads boys to express something further-reaching than the thought of the dear city of Cecrops.” Mr. Kenneth Richmond in The New Age.

This chapter will be as short as its subject-matter is important. Indeed, the problem of religion as it presents itself in a public school is so interesting and so difficult that one might well apologise for relegating it to a late chapter in a brief book upon an apparently quite alien subject. But we have set out to recount our experience of political education; and in our experience we found that politics and religion lay not so very far apart. Without any very direct suggestion from us, several of our pupils to whom the Kingdom of Heaven had been hitherto a somewhat uninteresting abstraction found that they could not think out to their satisfaction the problems of the city of Cecrops until they had formulated their ideas upon the city of God. The history of The School Observer illustrates this well enough. That journal showed a distinct tendency to become a religious organ. At the time of its suppression the embarrassed editor was confronted with three long articles the longest, it must be confessed, his own all of them bearing upon the nature of the Deity, and, lest we should be misunderstood, all of them broadly Christian in character.

Now, a certain type of clerical head master has often tried to impress upon his boys he would try it on his staff also did he not know that it would be waste of time and energy that the two hours devoted to “divinity” are the two most important school hours of the week. And he is quite right: they are the most important, or, rather, but for opportunities missed, they would be. For a liberal education without a foundation in religion is not merely defective, it is impossible. If the religious foundation offered by the teacher proves no foundation, proves a mere meaningless excrescence upon the time-table, then a religion will be sought and found elsewhere, even though it be, as is most likely, a religion such as is generally classed as no-religion, mere worship, as Ruskin called it, of Britannia Agoraia, Britannia of the Market Place, the Goddess of Getting-on. That, it is to be feared, is very much what we have at present, for the religion of the divinity lesson is usually nothing at all, and the religion of the school chapel has hardly got beyond the tribal stage, and does not suffice for the modern man in his maturity, nor for most types of thoughtful schoolboy. There are some old boys, perhaps many, who have a strong sentimental regard for “the old chapel”; but it is as a venerable symbol of the corporate life of their boyhood that they regard it, not as a place of divine worship. The religion they carry away from the school chapel has very little connection with the message of the gospel they heard there: it is a religion not of Jesus Christ, but of Alma Mater. Their attitude to it is not strictly religious at all, but romantic.

It is easy to write with a certain irony on this subject, but that is the last thing we want to do, for the problem of the public schools is here, as elsewhere, a profoundly difficult one, and many good men have devoted the best of their life’s energies to it, and have achieved here and there a fine measure of success. But their success has been personal and exceptional. The rule is what we have just described. Indeed, the problem of the schools is but a single aspect of the problem of the Church and the world at large. Two years ago the National Mission came, proclaiming that the Church had been a failure, and so much has recently been written on these lines by the leaders of the Churches themselves that it is unnecessary for us to enlarge upon the well-worn theme. Nominally the schools are “Church” schools. “Chapels” are as compulsory as football, and all boys, with a very few marked and conscious exceptions, are confirmed and expected to become communicants. But in actual fact, many of them come from homes where connection with the Church is purely nominal, even if it exists at all. Thus a dangerous element of formalism and make-believe is introduced from the start. The masters again; fifty years ago they were parsons almost without exception stern, godly, whiskered individuals singularly unlike, as it would seem, to our colleagues or ourselves. The masters of to-day are nearly all laymen, and laymen with as wide a variety of religious opinions as the members of the Stock Exchange; but and this is where they differ from the members of the Stock Exchange they will all be, during term time, formal members of the Church of England. Once again, formalism and make-believe. Yet what would you have? The schools are the schools of the nation, not of a sect; and to-day the Church of England is, within the nation, but a sect. And even supposing the schools were, or could be, genuinely Church of England schools, another problem would remain, for within the Church itself there is a wide variety of opinions, and beliefs without which Christianity is impossible to one will be mere blasphemy to another. It has been said with some truth that our religious ideas have undergone as great a revolution in the last hundred years as our knowledge of machinery, and that the sermons of 1820 are as obsolete as its stage coaches. For the author of this notion and he is a clergyman this may be true; but whereas none of his congregation travel in stage coaches, it is very likely that the theology of some of them is nearer to that of the sermons of 1820 than to his own.

Now, it is obvious that our experience of political education does not provide a way out of all these difficulties; but it seems to us to throw a certain glimmering of light upon them. Several of our boys who, in spite of schoolroom “divinity” and the school chapel, had more or less outgrown the religious faith of their childhood, and found nothing satisfactory to take its place, were led back towards religion by their interest in politics. In fine, they had discovered the intellectual need for a religion, and liberalism pointed the way to Christianity. As in the Middle Ages, philosophy had been the “ancilla Fidei.” The suggestion is that the fault of our religious teaching in school and chapel has been that it is not sufficiently philosophical. By a philosophical religion it need hardly be said that we do not mean the obtrusion of a remote and contentious theology, but a religion based upon a real understanding of political principles and crying social needs.

“It may be a slight shock to some people to hear that ‘divinity’ should grapple with capitalism and imperialism,” says the Manchester Guardian reviewer. It may: none the less we believe that it is with such problems that Christianity has to grapple if there is ever to be a Christian society upon earth. The last thing we wish to suggest is the off-hand conclusion that capitalism and imperialism are in all their manifestations anti-Christian. The world is not so simple a place. But we cannot go on applying one set of principles to our private lives and another set of principles to our politics and industry. Man is not so illogical a creature as that. There is bound to be, finally, either a levelling up or a levelling down towards a single uniform standard. No proverb is more dangerous than “Charity begins at home.” When it begins in the place most congenial to its exercise, it is apt to end there. Lord Melbourne is said to have complained, after hearing a sermon, “Things are coming to a pretty pass, when religion claims to interfere with a man’s private life.” We smile at Lord Melbourne’s honest indignation. Our turn come to be indignant when the sermon applies the Christian “paradoxes” to industry, commerce, and international relations.

And it is along these lines that religious teaching can be made absorbingly interesting. It all comes round to the old question, “Are we going to apply Christianity to the problems of modern society or are we not?” The case against doing so can be found every day in the press, so here, at any rate, is an issue worth facing, with a presumably infallible authority to support each side. The direction of most religious teaching hitherto has been too purely personal; the exhortation is too obvious and the appeal falls flat. Politics without religion lacks foundation; but religion without politics lacks quite half its content. Christianity is the leaven, but so also is politics the lump.

Along these lines, we believe, one might get in the middle and lower parts of the school results analogous to those we have described in the cases of some sixth form boys. The present writer used to teach Divinity to a middle form on the Modern Side, and whenever a Gospel happened to be scheduled, he found ample material to his hand. It is surprising how little, for all the sermons they have heard, most boys of sixteen have faced the ideas expressed in the most hackneyed texts. “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle....” “Love your enemies.” “Take no thought for the morrow.” A most mischievous half-truth has got about that these sayings are not to be taken literally. Boys have told me that a “rich man” means one who has grown rich by robbery. Well, what is robbery? “La propriete, c’est le vol”? “Love your enemies” means, I have been told, “Have no enemies: lead a peaceable life; but if...” There was a case apparently not provided for. “Take no thought for the morrow.” On this I once got the delightfully honest comment, “Christ must have said this to cheer the disciples when they were depressed. Taken literally it would be absurd.” With such candour on the pupils’ side, surely the teacher’s task is not hopeless. Here at last we have the atmosphere of honest controversy, and without controversy there is no freedom of thought; without freedom of thought no conviction; without conviction, no education and no religion.