325 
of Edinburgh, Session 1870 - 71 . 
discouraged ; if taught at all, they must be limited to Heimaths- 
kunde, or information about the child’s native land. Drawing, if in- 
troduced, must be confined to linear freehand copying from the flat. 
Religion remained an essential and prominent element for the 
people’s schools, but the Regulative made a great change in regard 
to the mode of imparting it. Under the Pestalozzian system, 
religion had been taught not confessionally, but universally; not 
as a matter of Church formulas, but in a free and spiritual way, 
which, of course, depended for its characteristics very much on the 
individual master. When the time for confirmation arrived, the 
clergyman would find the children furnished with ideas, more or 
less orthodox, of natural religion and of Christianity, but perhaps 
never having seen the Church Catechism, and the labour would 
devolve on him of making them learn this. It appeared to the 
Government that the schools, though denominational in their 
foundation, were too independent of the Church in their religious 
teaching. The Regulative , by one stroke, altered all this. They 
laid down exactly what was to be taught in the shape of religion, 
namely, some fifty hymns were to be learnt by heart, the whole of 
the gospel portions which are read in the Lutheran churches were 
to be committed to memory, and the Catechism (either Luther’s or 
the Heidelberg) was to be learned off by rote, without any explana- 
tion. All explanation of the doctrine contained in it was to be 
reserved for the pastor, when the time of confirmation drew nigh. 
By these rules, the relative positions of the clergyman and the 
schoolmaster were completely subverted. All the charm of teaching 
religion to the children was taken away from the master, whose 
task was, in this respect, made mechanical, while he himself was 
made completely subordinate to the clergyman. 
The minutes on religious teaching had, doubtless, a political and 
ecclesiastical motive, and a reaction against them is possibly in 
preparation. Those regulating the secular subjects in the people’s 
schools are a specimen of the Prussian Government, as a powerful de- 
cisive will, proposing to itself certain definite ends, and going straight 
at these ends without compromise or collateral considerations. 
In the case of the elementary schools, there can be no doubt 
that the end aimed at is attained ; for the schools embrace the 
entire population, and the result is, that the children of every 
VOL. VII. 
