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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 46

[The New Zealand Parliament Mistake: Namely, The Education Act of 1877]

By this Act the Creator of All is virtually shut out of the School-room. HIS name is not permitted to be mentioned,—the whole catalogue of heathen gods may be!

The most interesting of all interesting histories, the history of God's own ancient people, by order of this our N.Z. Parliament, must not be listened to by the children,—is forbidden; and it is further declared that this being a sacred history, there is no guarantee that the school teachers as a body are fit to have it trusted into their hands. (?) This paltry excuse is in truth nothing short of a libel.

Again, while the teaching of some kind of morality in the schools cannot by any possibility be avoided, yet this wisdom?) of our Parliament decides (by a bare majority, thanks!) that the youth of this land shall not even listen in the common schools to the bare reading of the book upon which the morality of the whole civilized world hangs; but they shall take the chance of receiving their flimsy morals, second-hand and diluted, in place of at the fountain itself.

Once more,—the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, and any of the words which came from His lips, may be heard anywhere else, but shall not be mentioned inside the doorways of our schools, except by an infringement of the education laws of the 19th century!

Truly mad legislation all this, legislation which must bring its national blight and curse upon the land. Can any Education Act page break with such a blank as this prove a blessing?—Never! Its tendency will be but to produce clever rogues, schemers or villains. It will bear its deadly fruit, it has already done so in some states of America, and is now working the same end in Australia. Bitter, bitter fruit, in an increase of more clever and genteeler crime! That is indeed a hateful system of education in a professed Christian country, which cannot admit even the ten commandments—upon which the British constitution itself is based—into its common schools! Shame upon such statesmen. Will any wise Government persist in shutting out from the minds of her public youth the very name of the Creator? and also the bare words of the divine Book,* which is the light of the whole world, and without which secular instruction is but darkness! If such continues in N.Z. it will cause many to blush and to tremble for this new colony—to be truly ashamed of the land of our adoption, and pre-eminently so of its Parliament of 1877!

Patriot.