From the pages of the Literary Guide (the original New Humanist) October 1902, comes a note under the heading 'Random Jottings' on the Education Bill passing through Parliament at the time:

"The fierce controversy now raging over the Education Bill may be short or long; the measure, in a modified form, will probably become law; but we venture to prophesy that the present action of the clerical party will, before many years have passed, prove the death-knell of religious education in State or national schools.

The London Daily News, the leading Nonconformist organ, fully recognises this, in the following remarkable words: 'For our part, we are quite prepared to admit that the time has come for the State to confine itself to secular education, and let the Churches do what supplementary religious work, outside of school hours, they please. But above all, the occasion demands that the State shall keep its own, and cry off to the grasping sectaries who would take all and yield nothing.'"