rt of the artists, and a thoroughly
morbid one on the part of the artless. And the healthy state is
attainable in a cold country like ours only by familiarity with the
undraped figure acquired through pictures, statues, and theatrical
representations in which an illusion of natural clotheslessness is
produced and made poetic.

In short, we all grow up stupid and mad to just the extent to which we
have not been artistically educated; and the fact that this taint of
stupidity and madness has to be tolerated because it is general, and is
even boasted of as characteristically English, makes the situation all
the worse. It is becoming exceedingly grave at present, because the last
ray of art is being cut off from our schools by the discontinuance of
religious education.

The Impossibility of Secular Education

Now children must be taught some sort of religion. Secular education is
an impossibility. Secular education comes to this: that the only reason
for ceasing to do evil and learning to do well is that if you do not you
will be caned. This is worse than being taught in a church school that
if you become a dissenter you will go to hell; for hell is presented as
the instrument of something eternal, divine, and inevitable: you cannot
evade it the moment the schoolmaster's back is turned. What confuses
this issue and leads even highly intelligent religious persons to
advocate secular education as a means of rescuing children from the
strife of rival proselytizers is the failure to distinguish between
the child's personal subjective need for a religion and its right to
an impartially communicated historical objective knowledge of all the
creeds and Churches. Just as a child, no matter what its race and color
may be, should know that there are black men and brown men and yellow
men, and, no matter what its political convictions may be, that
there are Monarchists and Republicans and Positivists, Socialists and
Unsocialists, so it should know that there are Christians and Mahometans
and Buddhists and Shintoists and so forth, and that they are on the
average just as honest and well-behaved as its own father. For example,
it should not be told that Allah is a false god set up by the Turks and
Arabs, who will all be damned for taking that liberty; but it should be
told that many English people think so, and that many Turks and Arabs
think the converse about English people. It should be taught that Allah
is simply the name b