I8g3 LETTERS TO THE TIMES 367 



copious marks in his books of reference were the mere 

 guide-posts to a strong memory, which retained not words 

 and phrases, but salient facts and the knowledge of where 

 to find them again. 



I find only two occasions on which he wrote to the Times 

 this year; one, when the crusade was begun to capture the 

 Board Schools of London for sectarianism, and it was sug- 

 gested that, when on the first School Board, he had approved 

 of some such definite dogmatic teaching. This he set right 

 at once in the following letter of April 28, with which may 

 be compared the letter to Lord Farrer of November 6, 

 1894. 



In a leading article of your issue to-day you state, with per- 

 fect accuracy, that I supported the arrangement respecting re- 

 ligious instruction agreed to by the London School Board in 

 1871, and hitherto undisturbed. But you go on to say that " the 

 persons who framed the rule " intended it to include definite 

 teaching of such theological dogmas as the Incarnation. 



I cannot say what may have been in the minds of the framers 

 of the rule; but, assuredly, if I had dreamed that any such inter- 

 pretation could fairly be put upon it, I should have opposed the 

 arrangement to the best of my ability. 



In fact, a year before the rule was framed I wrote an article 

 in the Contemporary Review, entitled " The Board Schools — 

 what they can do, and what they may do," in which I argued 

 that the terms of the Education Act excluded such teaching as 

 it is now proposed to include. And I supported my contention 

 by the following citation from a speech delivered by Mr. Forster 

 at the Birkbeck Institution in 1870 : — 



" I have the fullest confidence that in the reading and ex- 

 plaining of the Bible, what the children will be taught will be 

 the great truths of Christian life and conduct, which all of us 

 desire they should know, and that no effort will be made to 

 cram into their poor little minds, theological dogmas which their 

 tender age prevents them from understanding." 



The other was on a lighter, but equally perennial point 

 of interest, being nothing less than the Sea Serpent. In 

 the Times of January 11, he writes, that while there is no 

 reason against a fifty-foot serpent existing as in Cretaceous 

 seas, still the evidence for its existence is entirely incon- 



