The State consists of persons who profess all sorts of religion, and none.  If the State compels its citizens to pay for religious teaching in which they do not believe, it commits, in my opinion, a palpable injustice.  This is not merely a question between one sect and another sect.  It is, indeed, unjust to make a Quaker pay for teaching the doctrine of the Sacraments, or a Unitarian for teaching the Deity of Christ; but it is equally unjust to make an Atheist pay for teaching the existence of God, or a Churchman for teaching that curious kind of implied Socinianism which is called “undenominational religion.”

The only way out of these inequities is what is commonly called “Secularism.”  The word has some unfortunate associations.  It has been connected in the past with a blatant form of negation, and also with a social doctrine which all decent people repudiate.  But, strictly considered, it means no more than “temporal” or “worldly”; and when I say that I recommend the “Secular” system of education, I mean that the State should confine itself to the temporal or worldly work with which alone it is competent to deal, and should leave religion (which it cannot touch without inflicting injustice on someone) to those whose proper function is to instil it.

Who are they?  Speaking generally, parents, ministers of religion, and teachers who are themselves convinced of what they teach; but I must narrow my ground.  To-day I am writing as a Churchman for those Churchmen whom my previous articles disturbed; and I have only space to set forth some of the grounds on which we Churchmen should support the “secular solution.”

A Churchman is bound by his baptismal vows to “believe all the articles of the Christian Faith.”  These, according to his catechism, are summed up in the Apostles’ Creed.  He cannot, therefore, be satisfied with any religious instruction which is not based on that formula; and yet such instruction cannot rightly be enforced in schools which belong as much to unbelievers as to Christians.  A Churchman’s religious faith is not derived primarily from the Bible, but from the teaching of the Christian Church, who is older than the oldest of her documents.  There was a Church before the New Testament was written, and that Church transmitted the faith by oral tradition.  “From the very first the rule has been, as a matter of fact, that the Church should teach the truth, and then should appeal to Scripture in vindication of its own teaching.”  For a Churchman, religious instruction must be the teaching of the Church, tested by the Bible.  The two cannot be separated.  Hence it follows that, while the State is bound to respect the convictions of those who adhere to all manner of beliefs and disbeliefs, the Churchman cannot recognize religious teaching imparted under such conditions as being that which his own conscience demands.

And, further, supposing that some contrivance could be discovered whereby the State might authorize the teaching of the Church’s doctrine, the Churchman could not conscientiously be a party to it; for, according to his theory, there is only one Body divinely commissioned to decide what is to be taught—­and that Body is not the State, but the Church; and there is only one set of persons qualified to teach it—­viz., those who are duly authorized by the Church, and are fully persuaded as to the truth of what they teach.