to salvation, they want to force every teacher they can to acquire and
impart its indestructible, inflexible recipes, and they are prepared to
enforce this at the price of inefficiency in every other school
function. We must all agree--whatever we believe or disbelieve--that
religion is the crown of the edifice we build. But it will simply ruin
a vital part of the edifice and misuse our religion very greatly if we
hand it over to the excavators and bricklayers of the mind, to use as a
cheap substitute for the proper intellectual and ethical foundations;
for the ethical foundation which is schooling and the ethical
foundation which is habit. I must confess that there is only one sort
of man whose insistence upon religious teaching in schools by ordinary
school teachers I can understand, and that is the downright Atheist,
the man who believes sensual pleasure is all that there is of pleasure,
and virtue no more than a hood to check the impetuosity of youth until
discretion is acquired, the man who believes there is nothing else in
the world but hard material fact, and who has as much respect for truth
and religion as he has for stable manure. Such a man finds it
convenient to profess a lax version of the popular religion, and he
usually does so, and invariably he wants his children "taught"
religion, because he so utterly disbelieves in God, goodness, and
spirituality that he cannot imagine young people doing even enough
right to keep healthy and prosperous, unless they are humbugged into
it.

Equally unnecessary is the scholastic attempt to take over the
relations of the child to "nature," art, and literature. To read the
educational journals, to hear the scholastic enthusiast, one would
think that no human being would ever discover there was any such thing
as "nature" were it not for the schoolmaster--and quotation from
Wordsworth. And this nature, as they present it, is really not nature