At the end of the month they would be wiser and sadder men, and in future they would probably talk less about religious education and think more.
The Scripture lesson, as it is familiarly called, is supposed to make the children of England religious, in the special sense which each church or sect attaches to that word,--to make them good Catholics, good Churchmen, good Wesleyans, good Bible Christians, good Jews.

But as those who are most in earnest about religion, and most sincere in their religious convictions, unite in assuring us that England is relapsing into paganism, it may be doubted if the religious education of the elementary school child--a process which has been going on for half a century or more--has been entirely successful.

While the fact that the English parent, who must himself have attended from 1,500 to 2,000 Scripture lessons in His schooldays, is not under any circumstances to be trusted to give religious instruction to his own children, shows that those who control the religious education of the youthful "masses" have but little confidence in the effect of their system on the religious life and faith of the English people.
They have good ground for their subconscious distrust of it.

We have seen that the vulgar confusion between information and knowledge is at the root of much that is unsound in education.

There is no branch of education in which this confusion is so fallacious or so fatal as in that which is called religious.