The Text-Book Takes the Literal View.

Neither on this, however, nor on any other question of theology or exegesis is this League able to take a side. Every extreme of dogmatism and rationalism finds common ground in opposing from divergent standpoints the endowment and enforcement of dogmatic teaching in the State Schools, and a League which stands for the public tolerance of all creeds and the public preference of none, whether in a State School or a State Church, is not concerned to fight for any of the conflicting interpretations of Genesis i.—iii., but merely to insist that there is this conflict, that the ques- page 6 tions involved rouse the deepest and intensest emotions of human nature, and that a State which has no theory of interpretation and no religion of its own has no right to give its sanction to one particular theory and to disqualify or penalise those who conscientiously hold another. The retort will probably be made that if the lesson is taught without comment, the State will be preserving its neutrality, since the bare teaching of the text will give no preference to one method of interpretation over the others; but a moment's reflection will reveal the fallacious nature of this contention. To teach the lesson without comment—and the text-book does not contain a single note on these chapters—will be to teach it according to its literal meaning; a child who learns the first lesson in the volume without contradictory or explanatory gloss will believe that the world was made in six days of twenty-four hours each. Later scientific knowledge, acquired perhaps in the physical geography lessons at the same school, may teach him something different; and it is obvious that if the foundation laid in his first religious lesson should be cut away, the whole of the superstructure may be seriously imperilled also.