Ezekiel 34:29 And I will raise up for them a plant of renown, and they shall be no more consumed with hunger in the land… What a tempting thing it is to try to put right some of the evils of the world by short and easy methods! To check some of the waste of natural wealth which keeps falling away. To take drastic measures for supplying the wants of the starving, and to cut, off occasion from those who misuse the privilege of plenty! To drain off vice into channels of virtue; to make the weary to lie down, the sufferer to rejoice, the ignorant to know, the oppressed to go free! We are tempted to think that it is, after all, only the involved complications of a novel, which a word of explanation and a mere handful of advice can rectify at once. And so, from time to time, people have descended, and do descend, into the arena of the world, whether sent by God directly, or by the prompting of their own heart. Reformers, states. men, theorists, philanthropists, each with their schemes of regeneration, amelioration, or progress. But, alas! a great number in the end find that they must retire, baffled by the almost superhuman wrong-headedness of mankind; and perhaps feel that an interference, well meant, has only complicated a problem which was sufficiently difficult before. Now, one of the most imposing panaceas for regenerating society (and rightly so) is education. Education means, I suppose, a drawing forth of the human powers by instruction, by training, by discipline, by rewards, by punishments, by fostering care; education, says the popular voice of utilitarian England, means furnishing a child with useful knowledge. "See the waste of material going on in the world, teach him how to use the advantages which come in his path; see the evils of intemperance and vice, show him the beauty of morality; see the political errors of former years, educate our masters in the thin principles of political history; see the squalor and penury and extravagance which is all around us, teach them thrift." "And what about religion?" Here we are told that there are so many hundred religious sects, and so much disputing, that it is a question which can be approached only with difficulty. It is one of the darkest blots in the religious world in England at the present day, that whereas the Church, the true mother yearning for all her children, is yet willing to give up the child to the mother that claims it, rather than that the child should be taught undenominationalism or no religion at all; there are found those who are not ashamed to betray their lack of true motherly feeling for the little ones of Christ's flock, by crying out in all the bitterness of sectarian partisanship, "Let the child be neither mine nor thine, divide it." Let it be taught no religion at all, let it be brought up on that desiccated, sterile, lifeless inanity known as undenominational religion — a supposed "residuum" of Christianity left from the contentious controversies of the sects, "to which no one has any particular objection," except the few who are allowed a separate treatment of unusual favour, and the Roman Catholics who are far too wise to be taken in by the offer of a stone which has not even the appearance of bread. The blasts of sectarian controversy ought to be kept away from the education question altogether. In the first place, is it right, is it fair, either to secular or to religious education, practically to divorce them, and to allow the child to see and draw his own conclusions from the fact that the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge are planted by different hands? The State ought not to be willing to part with religious teaching, and the Church ought not to be willing to part with secular teaching. They form one sacred responsibility. Again, is it fair that Sunday, the day of religious worship and real recreation, should be made a day of slavery to the child already overpowered by a burden of ever-increasing educational requirements? The question which we are being called upon to decide is really the question as between religious and irreligious education in the long run; between education and that which can only lay claim by sufferance to that name. It has its promise. It, too, says, "I will raise up unto you a plant of renown." A great future is in store for an instructed nation. "Ye shall no more be consumed with hunger"; material progress, intellectual progress, lie at the feet of an enlightened people; "ye shall not bear the shame of the heathen any more"; ye shall be emancipated from the swaddling bands of an effete superstition. Yes, but the response is inadequate; the uneducated passions rise up in rebellion against the educated reason. There are certain powers within which do not bow to reason. Vice in its rebellious fury, dishonesty, greed, idleness, these are not to be tied down with the two ropes of a mere intellectual education. God puts before the children in our schools a plant of renown — something higher than the example of a successful tradesman, or a provident saver, or a moral improver, or an example of self-help. God puts before each of our children — high and low, rich and poor — a plant of renown, a high and holy example of One who grew up before Him as a tender plant; who knew the sorrows and needs and joys of childhood, the trials and griefs of opening boyhood, the hardships and the triumphs of manhood, and the mystery of death Can you suppose for an instant the perfect man, Jesus Christ, dividing off His life into the sharp division of the religious and useful? His work was religious, and religion ran up into His work. It is an immense thing for children to have an enthusiasm, to read the lives of heroes, of inventors, of philanthropists, of self-elevated men. But of how far greater importance is it to have a life always put before them, in all its supernatural bearing, a life to which they may cling in prayer and praise, a life which shines through the pages of the Bible, as the sun through some painted window, mere lead and glass without it. There is a time when mere useful knowledge ceases to satisfy; there is a hunger for a comforter, for peace, for truth, for a Saviour, for a very present help in trouble. There is a hunger for God. Ah, how sad to think of our great philosopher, with his keen, magnificent intellect — no Atheist, as he himself has told us, because he had never been taught to believe in God, and therefore could not reject Him. With natural affections apparently stamped out of him, with a life written by his own hand, which has in it no mention of a mother's love; yet, strange to say, humanly speaking, sacrifices his life and health at the grave of one whom he loved with an affection which had satisfied his longing, only to leave the pang of a separation behind it, and leave him beating against the bars of death unillumined by a glimpse of eternity. Are we to send our children into the world where there is the famine of uncertainty and doubt and the shadow of death, with the hunger for peace and comfort and pardon unsatisfied; without showing them where alone the food can be found which will still the craving? If we part with our children, we are parting with the young blood of the Church. The Spartans were asked in a day of humiliation to hand over fifty children to be hostages to the enemy, and the answer was, We would rather give you a hundred of our best men. They may succeed where we have failed, they may conquer where we have been beaten, and live to retrieve our honour. So I would say, we would pinch and starve, if necessary, other things which seem almost necessary to the well-being of our parishes — our very beauty of worship itself, — but we will keep our children in our hands. When they are ours we know what to do with them. When we part with them, we part with them to that which is at the best a doubtful future, and then we are parting with the young blood of the Church. The teaching of the Church is something definite. Undenominational teaching, we fear, cannot grapple with the reproach, the famine, and the sin which leaps upon a fallen world. (Canon Newbolt.) Parallel Verses KJV: And I will raise up for them a plant of renown, and they shall be no more consumed with hunger in the land, neither bear the shame of the heathen any more. |
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