Source.—Life of Thomas Henry Huxley, by his Son, vol. ii., pp. 342, 343. (Macmillan and Co., 1900.)

At the first meeting of the Education Committee of the London School Board, Mr. W.H. Smith, M.P., proposed, and Mr. Samuel Morley, M.P., seconded a resolution in favour of religious teaching. “That in the schools provided by the Board, the Bible shall be read, and there shall be given therefrom such explanations and such instruction in the principles of religion and morality as are suited to the capacities of children,” with certain provisos. Several antagonistic amendments were proposed; but Professor Huxley gave his support to Mr. Smith’s resolutions, which, however, he thought might “be trimmed and amended in a way that the Rev. Dr. Angus had suggested. His speech, defining his own position, was a very remarkable one. He said it was assumed in the public mind that this question of religious instruction was a little family quarrel between the different sects of Protestantism on the one hand, and the old Catholic Church on the other. Side by side with this much shivered and splintered Protestantism of theirs, and with the united fabric of the Catholic Church (not so strong temporally as she used to be, otherwise he might not have been addressing them at that moment), there was a third party growing up into very considerable and daily increasing significance, which had nothing to do with either of those great parties, and which was pushing its own way independent of them, having its own religion and morality, which rested in no way whatever on the foundations of the other two.” He thought that “the action of the Board should be guided and influenced very much by the consideration of this third great aspect of things,” which he called the scientific aspect, for want of a better name. “It had been very justly said that they had a great mass of low, half-instructed population which owed what little redemption from ignorance and barbarism it possessed mainly to the efforts of the clergy of the different denominations. Any system of gaining the attention of these people to these matters must be a system connected with, or not too rudely divorced from, their own system of belief. He wanted regulations, not in accordance with what he himself thought was right, but in the direction in which thought was moving.” He wanted an elastic system that did not oppose any obstacle to the free play of the public mind. Huxley voted against all the proposed amendments, and in favour of Mr. Smith’s motion. There were only three who voted against it; while the three Roman Catholic members refrained from voting. This basis of religious instruction, practically unaltered, has remained the law of the Board ever since.

There was a controversy in the papers between Professor Huxley and the Rev. W.H. Freemantle as to the nature of the explanation of the Bible lessons. Huxley maintained that it should be purely grammatical, geographical, and historical in its nature; Freemantle that it should include some species of distinct religious teaching, but not of a denominational character.