Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/284

272* carried on by clergymen; and clergymen in multitudinous cases take private pupils. Thus the differentiation of the teaching class from the priestly class is even now incomplete.

As significantly bearing on the evolution of the teacher, let us further note that at the present moment there is going on a struggle to reacquire that clerical control which a secularized system of public education had in chief measure thrown off. Even when established a quarter of a century ago, this public education was not completely secularized, since certain biblical lessons were given; and now a strenuous endeavor is being made to add to these biblical lessons certain dogmas of the Christian creed established by law, and so to make the teachers of Board Schools to a certain extent clerical teachers. Nor is this all. Clerics have striven and are still striving, to make the public help them to teach Church dogmas in Church Schools. At the present time (June, 1895), the Primate and clergy at large are fathering an Act which shall give them State-funds without State-control. With an arrogance common to Priesthoods in all times and places, no matter what the creed they say to the State—"We will say what shall be taught and you shall pay for it."

No more here than elsewhere do we meet with an exception to the segregation and consolidation which accompany differentiation; though, partly because of the more recent separation of the teaching class from the clerical class, this change has not been so conspicuous.

The tendency towards integration of the teaching class, and marking off of them from other classes, was first shown among theological teachers. At the University of Paris—

"half-learned persons, who had scarcely any knowledge of the elements of theology, took upon themselves the office of public teachers. The consequence was, that the theological teachers of better reputation united themselves, and formed a regular society; and they had sufficient influence to establish the rule, that no one should be allowed to teach without their approbation and permission. This of course led to an examination of the candidates, and to a public trial of their ability, and to a formal ceremony for their admission to the dignity of teachers or doctors."

In our own universities the like has happened. Knowledge, first of established Christian doctrine, and then of other things held proper for teachers of Christian doctrine to know, and then examinations testing acquisition of such kinds of knowledge, have served to create a mass of those qualified, and to exclude those not qualified: so forming a coherent and limited aggregate. Though dissenting sects have insisted less on qualifications, yet among them, too, have arisen institutions facilitating the needful culture and giving the needful clerical authorizations.

Only of late have secular teachers tended to unite. Beyond