Editor’s Introduction
Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it (Prov. 22:6).
The history of Free Church of Scotland Missions in India redounds to the credit and splendour of the Christian work done in Calcutta and elsewhere in that country. In 1830, Dr. Duff (1806-1878) established the General Assembly’s Institution, now known as the Scottish Church College, with the expressed goal to train non-Christian young Indian men in the English language, literature, science, etc. At the forefront of his mind, Dr. Duff nurtured the hope that many of these young men would be converted to Christ and serve as missionaries to their enslaved countrymen shackled to the pagan darkness of Hinduism, Islam, and Parsiism. Dr. Duff said that, “while from the very first the Bible itself was made a school and class-book it was so made distinctly, avowedly and exclusively for religious and devotional exercises.”1Brenton Hamline Badley, Indian Missionary Directory and Memorial Volume, (Methodist Episcopal Church Press (New York: Phillips and Hunt, 1881), 118. Dr. Duff was able also to use the presence of the school as a springboard to conduct outside evangelistic and missionary services.
But educational work in India by men from the Free Church of Scotland was often hindered, when entangled with government work, for the fear of giving offence to the religious sensibilities of the native Indians. The British government was, in its colonial schools, glad to use Christians as instructors but insisted on a purely secular course of education with no reference to the great work of Christ in enlightening minds enslaved to sin. Many missionaries held grave reservations about such a system of education. The case of Professor William Henderson, a Free Church man, who held an appointment in a government college, is illustrative. Professor Henderson was a beloved teacher at Elphinstone College, which is now one of the oldest colleges of the University of Mumbai.
In the following letter, Prof. Henderson explains to Rev. Robert Nesbit, a Free Church minister engaged in India, why he felt constrained to tender his resignation from the Government Institution and to offer his services at great financial loss to the Missionary Institution of the Free Church at Bombay. Henderson had hoped that a Christian man teaching in a government school might do much Christian good. But after considerable experience to the contrary, he concluded that a Christian man could not in good conscience remain teaching in a school where expected practice was to conceal Christian truth beneath suffocating layers of secular instruction. He felt that secular government education was doing more evil than good, whether the teacher was purely a creature of government policy or a Christian missionary. Henderson’s letter provides food for thought about the present state of educational institutions throughout the world where compulsory government schooling without favourable reference to Christianity is the norm.
Systems of compulsory government education have not reformed, but have only worsened and become ever more explicitly atheistic and hostile to Christian truth. Our schools and society at large are teaching young people to march in lockstep with the almighty state which aspires to divine characteristics, contrary to Isaiah 33:22: “For the LORD is our judge, the LORD is our lawgiver, the LORD is our king; he will save us.”
– James Wanliss, Ph.D.
English Education without Religion
A letter excerpted from: J. Murray Mitchell, Memoir of the Rev. Robert Nesbit, Missionary of the Free Church of Scotland, Bombay, (Edinburgh: Johnstone, Hunter & Co., 1858), 229-231.
Bombay, 10th Sept. 1844 –My dear Mister Nesbit,–You requested me to state to you in writing the grounds of my dissatisfaction with my present engagement, and my desire to obtain some other employment. I might do so briefly by saying, that I feel uncomfortable under a conviction which is daily becoming stronger, that I am instrumental in working out a system which, whatever may be my intentions, or those of others, has hitherto done more harm than good, and must eventually, if not radically changed, or powerfully counteracted, produce the most fearful and pernicious results. I have sometimes heard it objected to the Government system of education, that it is doing evil that good may come. I do not regard it in that light. On the contrary I know that the intention has always been to do direct and immediate good; in fact, all the immediate good which it was believed could be done under existing circumstances. But under these narrow views of expediency, a misshapen and incongruous system, without principle and without object, is growing up into gigantic dimensions, giving shelter and nourishment, and support, to all manner of unsound and destructive opinions.
It is an undoubted fact, which is forcing itself upon my notice more and more every day, that young men educated in the government schools, whether through the medium of the English or native languages, grow up in disregard and contempt of all religion whatever—that all of them, with scarcely an exception, take up the idea that religion is a subject on which no information that is certain or worth having is attainable—that one religion is as good as another—that all inquiry into the truth of any religion is only vexation of spirit or waste of time, and any earnestness on the subject a mark of superstition and of a want of common sense. As they advance in years, they become more confirmed in these opinions, and in the practices to which they naturally lead; while the new desires to which their studies have given birth, and the new ideas they have got of their own importance, and of their superiority in knowledge to the mass of their countrymen, and, as they sometimes imagine, to the rulers of the country, tend to produce dissatisfaction with the existing state of things, and determined hostility to the government under which they live, and to whose bounty they owe the smattering of knowledge of which they are so proud, and many of them the means of their subsistence. In minds so constituted the fear of God can find no place, and into such the doctrines of the cross can find no entrance.
It therefore appears to me that the government system of education, in its anxiety to do a little immediate good, is opening the way to enormous evils, and throwing obstructions in the way of the greatest of all good—in short, that truth from which all earthly good flows, the belief that ‘God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son, that all who should believe on Him might have eternal life.’ Painful experience has convinced me that this great truth cannot be introduced by a side wind; that it cannot take root, if made a subordinate object in any system of education; and that it is not enough, then, that it be not directly excluded, or that it be indirectly held up to admiration as a doctrine which has done good, and may be proved to the satisfaction of those who will take the trouble of examining it; but that every system of instruction in which it is not assumed as a fundamental truth, to be confirmed and illustrated by every other, that God has been manifested in the flesh, and that men can become truly enlightened, amiable, and happy, only by becoming living members of His spiritual body, is radically wrong, and can eventually be productive only of that which is opposed to the glory of God in the highest on earth, peace on earth, and good will to men.
Footnotes
- 1Brenton Hamline Badley, Indian Missionary Directory and Memorial Volume, (Methodist Episcopal Church Press (New York: Phillips and Hunt, 1881), 118. ↩︎
