A Treatise on Parents and Children

We must make up our minds to it therefore that whatever measures we may / be forced to take to prevent the recruiting sergeants of the Churches, / free or established, from obtaining an exclusive right of entry to / schools, we shall not be able to exclude religion from them. The most / horrible of all religions: that which teaches us to regard ourselves / as the helpless prey of a series of senseless accidents called Natural / Selection, is allowed and even welcomed in so-called secular schools / because it is, in a sense, the negation of all religion; but for school / purposes a religion is a belief which affects conduct; and no belief / affects conduct more radically and often so disastrously as the belief / that the universe is a product of Natural Selection. What is more, the / theory of Natural Selection cannot be kept out of schools, because / many of the natural facts that present the most plausible appearance / of design can be accounted for by Natural Selection; and it would be so / absurd to keep a child in delusive ignorance of so potent a factor / in evolution as to keep it in ignorance of radiation or capillary / attraction.

Even if you make a religion of Natural Selection, and / teach the child to regard itself as the irresponsible prey of its / circumstances and appetites (or its heredity as you will perhaps call / them), you will none the less find that its appetites are stimulated by / your encouragement and daunted by your discouragement; that one of its / appetites is an appetite for perfection; that if you discourage this / appetite and encourage the cruder acquisitive appetites the child will / steal and lie and be a nuisance to you; and that if you encourage its / appetite for perfection and teach it to attach a peculiar sacredness / to it and place it before the other appetites, it will be a much nicer / child and you will have a much easier job, at which point you will, / in spite of your pseudoscientific jargon, find yourself back in the / old-fashioned religious teaching as deep as Dr. Watts and in fact / fathoms deeper.