Mr. Alfred Lyttelton has lately said, 'A very large number of people were mainly satisfied with Cowper-Temple teaching, when given by a teacher who believed what he taught, and when supplemented by denominational teaching in school hours twice a week.' But in the proposed Compromise how was it proposed to secure teachers who believe what they teach? And under the CowperTemple system what is a teacher desired to believe? Should a teacher believe in the New Theology, his or her teaching three times a week is to be challenged twice a week in the case of a child of the Church of England by dogma of a different type! St. Paul's dogma as to sin and redemption, the need of grace and repentance; his passionate Gospel of Christ crucified and risen, of Christ Incarnate raising us from the death of sin to the life of righteousness, is to be met two to one by such teaching as this lately pronounced by Mr. Jerome K. Jerome (under the presidency of the Rev. R. J. Campbell, City Temple). 'He met with a very enthusiastic reception' (in other circumstances I, too, should like to thank him for his delightful humour). He said: Every man consciously or unconsciously made his own God. He was not sure that the whole business of humanity was not the making of Gods. All their history was one record of man's attempts to fashion Gods, and God was only the reflection of man's slowly-growing intellect.' Now, I could give ' Bible only' or CowperTemple teaching with the greatest ease in this sense-it would only need judicious selection, omissions and juxtapositions-and if I believed what I taught, what more could be desired?

·

Mr. Lough, indeed, declared that the Archbishop of Canterbury had said that he had always held Cowper-Temple teaching contained the backbone of Church teaching.' This must be an unintentional error on the part of Mr. Lough. The very raison d'être of the Cowper-Temple system is no backbone. The Rev. F. B. Meyer, of the United Free Churches, defines it as that from which dogma is excluded,' and the Rev. J. Scott Lidgett for that reason rejoiced in the establishment of Cowper-Temple teaching throughout the schools of England. It would be as reasonable to speak of the backbone of a fileted sole as of Cowper-Temple religion having any backbone, let alone the backbone of Church teaching. Why, that backbone starts with baptism, wherein I was made a member of Christ, a child of God, and an inheritor of the Kingdom of Heaven'! Doubtless, granted a free hand, and that no previous suspicions had been aroused, even I could teach the more theologically ignorant members of either House of Parliament on the Cowper-Temple system, or Bible only,' the full, unmutilated sacramental teaching of the Church of England; and provided I avoided certain words they would be thus instructed, greatly to their souls' profit, despite themselves.

But this is not the intention of the Cowper-Temple religious system,

which will most certainly not be allowed to be so taught; and while there can be no security for the authoritative teaching of Christian dogma-of the Incarnation and the Trinity-there is nothing whatever to prevent the inculcating of the dogmas of New Theology, or of disbelief in the inspired character of the Bible, or in all that concerns the supernatural in the Bible: nothing whatever.

The Times of the 27th of November, under the heading of 'Settlement Committee,' gives this.

The following letter illustrates the spirit of much of the correspondence:

'I am old-nearing 87—and my day is past, even for the small circle in which my life has been spent-my name, therefore, is worth nothing. Still, I will not let the chance slip away without joining, and I do so from my heart, in thankfulness for the arrangement suggested for settling the unhappy differences over the education scheme. Denominations-Church or Nonconformist-are small matters. Religion-duty-are the deepest and highest. I hail the promise that it is not to be excluded from the general school system; a danger, alas! only too near. Personally, too, I fell deeply grateful to the Archbishop of Canterbury and to Mr. Runciman (indeed to all), who have worked for a solution of the difficulties.

I cannot do better than adapt it to sum up an extremist's views.

I am old-going on for sixty-and my day is past, even for the circle in which my life has been spent-my name, therefore, is worth nothing. Still I will not let the chance slip of protesting; and I do so with all my being, against the suggested Compromise which must surely have perpetuated the unhappy differences over the education scheme; or if a peace be obtained, the peace by establishment, more or less quickly, in undisputed monopoly, of a new religion which, calling itself Christian, forbids the authoritative teaching that Christ is the Incarnate Son of God. Denominations-Church or Nonconformistare small or great matters in proportion to the importance attached to the Incarnation; for we who hold that Christian religion and duty depend entirely for their deepest possibilities and highest incentives, and for their fulfilment, in the fullest life of God, made available to the weakest, most ignorant and most sinful of us in the Incarnation; we hold no disaster comparable to that of establishing a new way of teaching religion, called Cowper-Temple, under the misleading names of 'undogmatic Christianity' or 'simple Bible teaching.'

Leslie Stephen said that to speak of unsectarian Christianity was absurd, and that the terms were contradictory; equally is it absurd to speak of 'undogmatic Christianity.' Personally, I shall feel deeply grateful to the Archbishop of Canterbury and to Mr. Runciman, indeed to Lord Cromer and to all (including, of course, the Times and the Spectator) who will work patiently for equality of treatment all round, with right of entry for Nonconformists into Church schools where Nonconformist parents desire it, and right of entry equally into Council schools where Church parents desire it.

May I add that the handing over of at least 6000 single-area parish country schools, built by Churchmen and for long solely maintained by Churchmen, without any opportunity for those chiefly interested and concerned, whether parents, clergy, owners of the schools or trustees or managers, to say, 'Yes' or 'No,' was surely a very revolutionary and high-handed proceeding? I come of a race who have worked themselves to the bone, generation after generation, in the service of man in God, in the Church of England. Our fathers, grandfathers, great-grandfathers built and maintained village schools -taught in them themselves with their wives and daughters, when the State did nothing; when only later the British schools took any share, and the Wesleyans and other denominations also; but all these accepted the Board schools as fairly meeting their needs, it is to be supposed, since they ceased to build and mostly to exist.

The following letter from Mr. J. G. Talbot to the Times will clearly show how inaccurate and misleading have been the statements as to the giving up of Church schools:

SIR,-A statement made a short time ago that three non-provided schools a week have been going under' has now become three Church schools a week are being lost.' As this latter statement has of late been advanced as a powerful reason for hastily adopting some speedy settlement and seems likely to dishearten many Churchmen who read it, I shall be much obliged if you will be so good as to publish the enclosed figures taken from the Board of Education's returns.

It should be noticed (1) that more than half the schools lost between August 1901 and 1907 have been Wesleyan and British and other undenominational schools; (2) that even if we were losing three Church schools a week it would still be eight years before our total would have been reduced to 10,000; and (3) that if administrative pressure is to be used against Church schools during the remainder of the present Government's term of office, the possibility of loss through that cause must be limited, whereas the late Bill would have taken away at least 6000 schools at a stroke from their present denominational position, for which they were built. Every Churchman will no doubt regret that 457 Church schools were lost within a period of six years, and, further, that the recognised accommodation provided by Church schools has decreased by 132,536. But it must be remembered that a considerable part of the latter decline is doubtless due to the reduction of the 'recognised accommodation' of schools still in existence in consequence of new standards of space per child enforced by the Board of Education. It will also be observed that over the whole six years the average attendance at the Church schools went down by less than 30,000. To this comparatively satisfactory feature of the returns an appreciable contribution was made by the new schools-of which four were founded in the twelve months, 1st of August 1906 to the 31st of July 1907-provided by public-spirited and generous Churchmen in times of great anxiety.

The net result is that the total service rendered by the Church of England to the education of the children of the working classes has declined by an amount which, though itself unquestionably regrettable, is relatively almost insignificant. The wonder is that through a period in which destructive legislation has been continuously impending over her schools the loss has not been many times as great. Your obedient servant,

Falconhurst, Edenbridge, Kent, December 11.

JOHN G. TALBOT.

NUMBER OF NON-PROVIDED SCHOOLS IN LAST FIVE RETURNS OF THE BOARD OF

It is impossible to estimate the debt of the nation up to 1870 to the Church of England for elementary education. As regards her schools, as regards her position as to disestablishment and disendowment, there is surely grave need at this present time of some of that spirit of sobriety, sense of responsibility, and whole-hearted faith in the power of prayer, in the work of the Holy Spirit, which so distinguished the noble generation which not long ago passed from their work in this world. They had their difficulties as we have ours; the Church of England is no more frozen now than then. It was in and by the Church of England that we, now old, learnt the love and service of man-learnt to possess only to share and give. It was there we learnt the nobleness of human nature to be realised in the Incarnation. And as in the past so now; if God be with us who shall be against us? Now, as then, the whole secret lies not in numbers nor in Governments, but in Faith and Prayer.

La Muette: December 15, 1908.

SOPHIA M. PALMER,

Comtesse de Franqueville.

MODERN OCCULTISM

WHEN eminent men of science announce discoveries of great interest it is an obvious general rule that their conclusions receive respectful consideration and, in the absence of strong reasons to the contrary, are accepted without serious question. But there is an exception to this rule so curious that it may well deserve our attention. Among the most important questions with which thought has been engaged are those of the possible modes of interaction between mind and mind. Coupled with this is the question of the direct action of mind upon matter, or of matter upon mind without physical agency. Ideas of this subject are older than civilisation, and arise so naturally that nothing but suggestion is necessary to implant them in the mind of the child. Discredited by the general trend of modern thought, the affirmative view has very generally been classed with superstition as belonging to a stage of intellectual development which the world has now left behind it. Belief in witchcraft vanished from the minds of civilised men more than two centuries ago, and with it disappeared the belief in every form of mental interaction otherwise than through the known organs of sense. But now men of eminence, whose opinion is entitled to the greatest respect, are informing us that the instincts of our ancestors did not err so greatly as we have supposed, and that beliefs which our fathers called superstitious are well grounded in the regular order of nature. At least three scientific philosophers of the highest standing have placed themselves on record as accepting this view. Two of them, Sir Oliver Lodge and Professor Barrett, have, during the past year, informed us that not only is the direct transference of impressions from one mind to another a fact, but the spiritual world, which the thought of our time has been removing further and further from our every-day experience until it seemed likely to vanish from intellectual sight, is a reality knocking at our doors.

If these are truths, we can scarcely exaggerate their importance. Our most cherished aspirations and the consolations which religion offers to the dying and the bereaved are taken from the realm of sentiment and placed on the sure pedestal of science. A new view of mind is opened out, to the development of which we can set no