Ferrer's Teachings.

"I remember seeing Ferrer, in Barcelona, some few years ago," writes the Rev. James Parle. "I even remember meeting his glance, and turning round to look at him, little thinking that, in days to come, nations would talk so much of him, and that at his death such revolutionary scenes would take place. I know well the place where his Modern School stood—in La Calle de Bailen. I have passed the door of that school, seen those boys and girls team out, and I can say that if the school taught them history and science, it did not teach them respect or manners."

"Ferrer's school was a Godless school," adds the same writer. "For him there was no God to give an account to; there was no sort of authority. Man was free. Furthermore, man was an animal; hence no moral restraint. . . . Such things as Heaven, Hell, Eternity, and dogmas did not exist, and were created by—Jesuits, of course." Ferrer "was the best type of Rationalist that I have known or read of," continues this clergyman. "He hated authority. He reached anarchy. He was even more the enemy of his country than he was of the Church." Ferrer's "modern" schools "struck out God from everything. Matter was their god, and free thought their method. Books that this country [England] would confiscate were there printed and read; and things took place, and things were said, which we do not find amongst the savages even, but which we may find, if books speak the truth, in the dens of immorality and filth of which we hear in Paris and London."

Ferrer's schools were [unclear: dens] of immorality, as well as hotbeds of Anarchism and Atheism. They could hardly be anything else, in view of Ferrer's flagitious principles and of his own scandalous life. To borrow a final extract from the clergyman already quoted:—"Suppose our celebrated Grayson started a school where he made inflammatory speeches against our Royalty, against the Established Church and its clergy. What would England do—or have to do? Close it, or run the risk of seeing its grand old churches burnt, its eminent Bishops insulted, and its esteemed King hailed with bombs. Our love for Church and Royalty would persuade us to close it. Spain did no different. She simply closed a school where religion (Christianity, remember, not merely Roman Catholicism) was not simply ignored, but ridiculed; where monarchy—in a word, all sorts of authority—was hated."^*

Ferrer's school system was meagre and vicious, from an educational point of view. This is asserted

^* "Catholic Times," October 29, 1909.

page 11 in the Chicago "Daily Tribune" of October 21, by Senor Eladio Horns, who was sent by the Municipality of Barcelona to inquire into the educational conditions in vogue in the United States. Ferrer's schools, this Barcelona gentleman declared, were "meagre and vicious, pedagogically considered."

"Ferrer," says Mr. Hilaire Belloc, "taught, in a sort of hotch-potch, both the ascertained truths and the hypotheses of physical science, side by side with the social doctrines consonant to his character; with these he propagated his views upon sexual relations, upon the nature of the Deity (or rather His non-existence), and all the medley of incoherent dogmas which formed the mixed foundations of his philosophy."^* This, indeed, is expressing the matter very mildly.