, those who are duly authorized by the
Church, and are fully persuaded as to the truth of what they teach.
It is sometimes asked how the Church is to fulfil this obligation
without being subsidized in some way by the State. The principal
requisite is greater faith in its Divine mission. If the Bishops
and clergy had a stronger conviction that what they are divinely
commissioned to undertake they will be divinely assisted to fulfil,
this question need not be suggested. The first teachers of the
Christian religion performed their task without either "Rate-aid"
or "State-aid" and the result of their labour is still to be seen;
whereas now the object of leaders of religion seems to be to get
done for them what they ought to do for themselves. It may be well
to quote an utterance of the Bishop of Oxford at the time when the
Liberal Government was dealing with education. "We are now, more
or less, in the middle of a crisis. We are always in the middle
of a crisis. This crisis is about the religious question in our
day-schools. I would ask you, then, to get at the root of our
difficulty. What is it? The heart of our difficulty is partly that
we have _shifted on to the wrong shoulders_ the central function
of teaching children; secondly, that we have so lost the idea of
what the teaching of the Church is, and _the meaning of religious
education_, that we are considered by the public to be unreasonable
and uncompromising people if we are not disposed to admit that the
County Councils can settle the standard of sufficient religious
knowledge for everybody.
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