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III.] THE TESTIMONY OF M. PAUL BERT.

107

memorable occasion, is to banish religion from primary education.*

*"Les religions n'ont pas qualité pour parler de morale; car elles reposent sur des bases fausses, sur des hypothèses injustifiables, sur des conceptions erronées de la nature de l'homme, de son rôle dans la société et dans le monde physique. L'enseignement religieux est l'école de l'imbécillité, du fanatisme, de l'antipatriotisme et de l'immoralité. Nous avons bien fait de le chasser de l'école. Plus les sociétés s'acheminent vers la morale, plus

elles s'éloignent de la religion."

28th August, 1881.)

(Speech at the Cirque d'Hiver,

I will give an extract from another speech of M. Bert, which may with advantage be compared with some of the passages cited from Mr. Morley in this chapter:

"Ici, les abstracteurs de quintessences s'exclament de bonne ou de mauvaise foi. Ils nous disent: vous n'avez pas le droit de donner l'enseignement moral tant que vous n'aurez pas défini la base de la morale, tant que vous n'aurez pas catégorisé d'une facon nette ce qui est le bien, ce qui est le mal; tant que vous n'aurez pas trouvé le mobile et la sanction, vous ne pourrcz pas édifier votre enseignement morale. Et alors ils nous font cette condition étrange qui rappelle les contes de fées; il faut perforer à travers le marais de la métaphysique jusqu'à ce qu'on ait trouvé le roc solide-s'il y

en a un.

"A ceux qui sont de mauvaise foi, en parlant ainsi, il n'y a qu'à tourner le dos. Quant aux autres, if faut leur répondre et je leur réponds: vous avez pendant des siècles, reculé la marche de l'esprit humain. Je vous connais. . . . Nous laissons là votre métaphysique. Continuez à tourner votre roue d'écureuil ; quant à nous, nous avons fait une physique et une chimie qui se portent assez bien et qui font bonne figure dans le monde des sciences. Ce qu'on a fait pour les sciences physiques on le fera pour les sciences morales, et les métaphysiciens continueront pendant l'éternité cet étrange jeu qui ressemble à un jeu de bilboquet dont la boule n'aurait pas de trou." (Speech at a banquet of five hundred schoolmasters and schoolmistresses at Véfours, 18th September, 1881.)

What has been done in France to carry out this counsel we all know. We know also what it is desired to do in England. Let us hear what Mr. Morley has to say upon this momentous subject, in words written originally in 1874, and reprinted, unaltered, in 1886:

"A small and temporary improvement may really be the worst enemy of a great and permanent improvement, unless the first is made on the lines and in the direction of the second. And so it may, if it be successfully palmed off upon a society as actually being the second. In such a case as this-and our legislation presents instances of the kind the small reform, if it be not made with reference to some large progressive principle, and with a view to further extension of its scope, makes it all the more difficult to return to the right line and direction when improvement is again demanded. To take an example which is now very familiar to us all. The Education Act of 1870 was of the nature of a small reform. No one pretends that it is anything approaching to a final solution of a complex problem. But the Government insisted, whether rightly or wrongly, that their Act was as large a measure as public opinion was at that moment ready to support. At the same time it was clearly agreed among the Government and the whole of the party at their backs, that at some time or other, near or remote, if public instruction was to be made genuinely effective, the private, voluntary, or denominational system would have to be replaced by a national system. To prepare for this ultimate replacement was one of the points to be most steadily borne in mind, however slowly and tentatively the process might be conducted. Instead of that, the authors of the Act deliberately introduced provisions for extending and strengthening the very system which will have eventually to be superseded. They thus, by their small reform, made the future great reform the more difficult of achievement."*

*Compromise, p. 230.

III.]

THE "FUTURE GREAT REFORM."

109

These words seem to me especially worthy of being deeply pondered. Much might be said upon them. All I shall say at present is, that I have reason to think Mr. Morley ill-informed as to that "clear agreement" of which he speaks. I have myself been assured by the two statesmen chiefly responsible for the Education Act of 1870, that it was not designed as a step towards the supersession of voluntary and denominational schools; that neither of them had the least intention to bring about the "future great reform" which Mr. Morley so earnestly desires, and desires naturally enough, because he is well aware that it would supply the most effective means of undermining the Christianity of England, and of making straight the paths of the new gospel.

CHAPTER IV.

THE REVOLUTION AND SCIENCE.

M. VACHEROT, in the extremely interesting work from which I have more than once quoted in the course of this volume, tells us that the new ideal of the public order is a society where science will be allsufficient: "une société où la science suffise à tout, à la théologie, à la morale, à l'éducation, aussi bien qu'à l'industrie." * There is in the present day a great, I might say an almost unanimous, consensus of testimony to the same effect from Revolutionary publicists. On every side we hear that the Revolution must be, that it is, scientific. The word is almost invariably employed in that mutilated sense to which it is now so generally narrowed. Science, in the mouth of ninety-nine people out of a hundred-the proportion is probably larger-is used as a synonym for physics. The very use is a tacit, in most cases no doubt an unconscious, recognition of what Mr. Morley calls "the great positive principle that we can know only phenomena, and can know them only experien

*La Démocratie, p. 80. Of course so accomplished a metaphysician as M. Vacherot does not use "science" as a synonym for physics.

Iv.]

TWO PHASES OF THE NEW GOSPEL. 111

tially a principle which he accounts-as we have seen "the cardinal condition of strength for times when theology lies in decay."* This great positive principle is certainly very highly esteemed in the Revolutionary Church as a faithful saying and worthy of all acceptation. What chiefly distinguishes the latest from the earlier phases of the new gospel is, indeed, its proclamation of itself as scientific. The original Jacobins refused to defer, even for one brief hour, the pleasure of butchering Lavoisier, upon the ground that the Republic had no need of chemists. The Jacobins of to-day are wiser in their generation, and seek in the laboratory "a solid formula" for their politics. It is upon "natural truths," they urge, that the foundation of the public order must rest. Metaphysics and transcendentalism, and, still more, "all religion and all religiosity," they execrate as mere shadows serving but to divert men's attention from phenomenal realities, which are the sole realities, and to hinder progress in the material arts of life, which alone is progress. For them physical sciences are the only sciences. And the generalisation of those sciences, founded upon the teachings of the late Mr. Charles Darwin, and called after him, is preeminently dear to them.

Why this is so, we shall see presently. Here let me, in vindication of a great name, point out that,

p. 79.

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