III. Is the Christianity of England Worth Preserving?

(Nineteenth Century, April 1883.)

IS THE CHRISTIANITY OF ENGLAND WORTH PRESERVING?

The rejoinder of Mr. Dale in the last number of this Review does not seem to me to answer my contention, (1) that the working of the Education Act of 1870 is unequal, and therefore unjust; (2) that this injustice ought to be redressed; (3) that all who pay the school rate ought to share in it; (4) that all who share the rate ought to obtain the aid of the State by voluntary efforts; and (5) that for the residual cases of absolute poverty the Government of the country must make adequate provision out of the public funds. Mr. Dale has not, in my judgment, shaken any one of these pro positions. This is, however, no personal contention. It is the most vital of our national interests. It must not be narrowed to any personality. What duels are when armies are in the field, personal controversies are in a conflict which affects the welfare and the Christianity of the English people. It is enough that he and I are agreed that the Board School system will, in the end, displace our voluntary and Christian schools. I have affirmed that this will undermine the Christianity and the national character of our people. This affirmation I now take up, and to this subject I confine myself.

Until the Act of 1870 was passed, the schools of England were Christian. By the Act of 1870 the Christian education of England has been launched upon an inclined plane. Its steady future descent, unless promptly and adequately checked, is certain. In the present paper I will endeavour to confirm this assertion by facts at this day before our eyes, that is, by the examples of the United States and of France. We will then review our advance in England.

1. In the North American Review for December 1880 is to bo found a very thoughtful article by Mr. Richard Grant White, entitled " The Public School Failure." The author gives the history of its origin and development. The system began in New England. In Massachusetts in 1G47, and in Connecticut three years later, it was enacted that every township of fifty householders should appoint a person to teach all children who should resort to him to read and write. He was to be paid by the parents or masters, or by the inhabitants in general. In every township of a hundred families there was to be a grammar school to fit youths for tho University. This system of compulsory support of common and grammar schools spread all over New England. It spread also partially into the Northern and Western States.

In 1812 the Common School Act was passed for the State of New York. This law applied to towns and villages, but not, with two or three exceptions, to chartered cities. In the City of New York public education was in tho hands of the " Public School Society," a voluntary and chartered association. In

1807 an Act was passed for its benefit, of which the following is the preamble:

" Whereas the trustees of the Society for establishing a free school in the City of New York, for the education of such poor children as do not belong to, or are not provided for by, any religious society, have by their memorial solicited the aid of the Legislature — therefore, &c."

The purpose of this Act was to provide education for poor children not provided for by any religious society. In the year 18-42 an Act was passed extending to the City of New York the public school system already existing since 1812 in the State of New York. But the Act did more than this. It created a Board of Education, and it placed the Public School Society, the Orphan Asylum, the Catholic Orphan Asylum, and other like societies, which were all voluntary, under the jurisdiction and supervision of the Board. The first effect of this is thus described by Mr. White: " Finding themselves in this position, the corporators of the Public School Society transferred their schoolhouses and all their other property with their rights to the Board of Education, and the society ceased to exist." Other societies before long followed this example. " This event was a public calamity not only to the City of New York, but to the State; not only to the State, but to the whole country. Nor has the blight of its effect upon morals, upon politics, and upon education been confined to the country in which it was lirst felt." " From that time public education passed rapidly into municipal politics, and became an engine at once of political corruption and social deterioration."

The author then goes on to give the evidence of inspectors and others as to the inefficiency of the normal schools, of the teachers, and of the pupils. But this I dismiss, as it maybe said that the efficiency of teachers and schools is within our power to control.

But a far graver allegation follows, which I will give in his own words.

He begins by quoting the words of the Superintendent of°the. Board of Education at New York in the Report for 1879, which are as follows:

" In our day, and in the condition of American life, we need all the power of an educated iuteUigence in order to lift the masses, as well as to maintain an equilibrium in the forces of society. The distribution of knowledge is as necessary as the distribution of light. AVe need the distributive power of systems of education which will rcacli the lowest abodes, and penetrate to the farther most hamlets of the land. The best education of the people will then become the best government of the people."

This fascinating doctrine Mr. White rightly affirms to be unsound and utterly false. He says:

" Knowledge will not lift the masses except as a balloon is lifted, because it is inflated with gas. Mere knowledge does not raise the quality of men's moral natures.... The light of a thousand suns will not sustain life without the genial warmth of one."

He then continues:

•• If ignorance were the mother office, and if our public-school system were what it is set up to be, the fruits of the latter would by this time have been manifest, plainly visible to the whole world, in our moral advancement as a people, in a higher tone in our society, in the greater purity of our politics, and the in corruptibility of our legislators, in the increased probity of tlu> executive officers of our State and Municipal Governments, and of our corporate financial bodies, in the superior wisdom and more solid integrity of our bench, in the sobriety of our matrons, the modesty of our maidens, in the greater faithfulness of wives, in the diminution of divorces, in the steady decrease of vice and crime and idleness, and vagrancy and vagabondage.. [After fifty years of common schooling] our large towns swarm with idle vicious lads and young men who have no visible means of support. Our rural districts are infested with tramps — a creature unknown to our fathers, and even to us in our youth."

I am afraid of going on. Mr. White adds:

" The corruption of legislative bodies, open bribery at elec tions, a notable decline in the character of the bench, dishonesty in business, betrayal of trust so common as to escape shame, politics becoming a trade, and falling year by year into lower-hands. Divorces have multiplied until they have become a stock jest in the facetious column of our newspapers. Crime and vice have increased year after year, almost pari passu with the development of the public-school system.... Filial respect and parental love have both diminished.... This is the condition in which we are after more than half a century of experience of our public-school systems."

Mr. White says truly: "Do not tell me that this would have been even without it. Your only justification for the system was that by it all this would be prevented."

I should not venture to quote these statements from any but an American hand; nor would I quote them from any periodical of less established authority and weight than the North American Review.

Our next American witness will be the editor of a periodical published in California under the title of the Family's Defender. Its object is to protect the rights of parents and the domestic life of the people. In an article of close argument the editor says:

" A candidate for governor who to-day ventured before the people on a platform of ' Christian Education for Christian Children' would be hopelessly beaten at the polls, the majority of voters who cast their ballots against him being themselves professed Christians, but brought up in the negative and essentially pagan atmosphere of the public schools.... According to this system every child is entitled to be educated at the public expense. and every parent is bound to send his children to the public schools.... Under this system it is not the parent, but the general public through its elected school directors, that select and dismiss the teachers, that rebuild and repair school-houses, &c The general public, and not the parent of the child, have the authority to determine, in all cases of alleged sickness or other ailment, whether the child has sufficient reason to absent itself from school.... to determine the course of study, the land of companions with whom it shall associate, and what particular books the child shall study. And for his conduct the teacher is answerable, not to the parents of his pupils, but to the public-school officials."

This system, the editor contends, " is essentially and intrinsically wrong;" it is " a palpable and perpetual violation of the moral law."

There are, the author goes on to say, three parti culars in which this system is intrinsically unjust, and therefore intrinsically and essentially bad, apart from all religious arguments.

First, it is unjust to the taxpayer, who is forced to pay for the education of children whose parents can and ought to pay for the education of their offspring. Every parent is as much bound by the law of nature to educate his children as he is bound to feed and clothe them.

Secondly, it is unjust to parents. By the law of nature fathers and mothers have by right the guardian ship of their own children. Parents have the right to control the education of their children. They are bound to select such schools and instructors as they believe to be safest and best for their children. They are bound also in duty to watch over the associations of their children, and to control them with entire independence.

The Common School system violates all these rights, and obstructs all these duties. Parental authority is defeated, and filial affection and obedience are thereby diminished and destroyed. " The relaxation of parental authority has always been found one of the surest indications of the decline of social order, and the un failing precursor of public turbulence and anarchy."

Thirdly, this system is unjust to the children. It strikes at their most vital and sacred rights. The Common School system withdraws the child from the influences which the law of nature has provided for its moral training and formation; and it substitutes, and can substitute, nothing in the place of the parental conscience, responsibility, love, and interest in the welfare and moral formation of the child. Children have a natural right to be trained a,nd formed by the moral law. Schools without religion cannot give this formation; for morals are the relations between God and man, and between man and man. And these relations cannot be taught without teaching at least the religion of nature, and a knowledge of the Divine Lawgiver to Whom we must give account. This the State refuses to teach, and yet it withdraws the child from the control of the parent, thereby making it impossible for the parent to confide the child to teachers of his own choice. "If God has made parents to prize the honour, the moral purity, the spotless virtue of their children to such a degree that no greater earthly calamity could befall them than its degradation and moral ruin, was it not in order that through parental vigilance and guardianship the child might be protected from the contamination and touch of vice?" The law of nature has invested parents with these responsibilities. Nature knows nothing of "school directors." But the Common School system robs the children of this parental guardianship, and commits them by compulsion to the school directors, the repre sentatives of the " general public."

The editor sums up his case as follows:

" First, we ask of every taxpayer that he assist us in the work of exonerating himself from the unjust burden of paying for the education of children — not his own — whose parents are abundantly able t»> pay for their education. Secondly, we ask every father and mother... to assert and maintain the true dignity and authority of the parental office. We ask that they, and not somebody else, be allowed to determine for their children who shall be their teachers, and who their companions."

I am obliged most reluctantly to omit much that is of great force and value in this remarkable impeachment. I can only add the words of the Bishop of St. Paul, Minnesota, in a letter of the 3rd of October 1882. He says to the writer of the article here quoted:

" If you need any words of mine to encourage you in the course you are pursuing, you have them from my heart. Every day convinces me more and more that the ground you have taken in defence of the rights of a family against the encroachments of the State is really the ground upon which the opposition to the State school system should have been based from the beginning. Natural rights as involved in this question no legitimate Government will infringe or allow to be infringed upon due proof. The law of majorities, the vox pojntli, has no weight against the claims of natural family rights."

Such is the Common School system in the American Republic, over which as yet the Platonic and communistic theory that the children of a State belong not to their parents but to the State has never yet exerted its malignant spell. The American commonwealth has in it too much of English and Puritan blood, its vital relation to our seventeenth century is too vivid and powerful, to endure the theory that the children belong to " the general public," and that the State may create them to its own image and likeness. Nevertheless, in its zeal for education it has admitted the false principles which legitimately lead to this conclusion. Education that is only secular dooms religion to gradual extinction. Education that is common violates conscience. Education that is secular, common, and compulsory violates the rights both of parents and of children. Logically, on these principles the schools are schools of the State, the children are the children of the State, and their formation is at the will of the State against all rights, parental or divine. As yet these syllogisms are dormant beyond the Atlantic. They are awake and in pride of place beyond the British Channel. And to this we will turn next.

II. Most opportunely at this crisis of religious education in England, M. Jules Simon has published an account of the state of education in France. The parallel is so exact that all who desire to preserve our Christianity as a people ought to read and lay it to heart. I can only give a very brief and rapid summary of it.

In 1808 the Imperial University of France was founded. M. Simon calls it " uue sorte d'eglise laique," a kind of lay Church.1 The whole education

1 Dieu, Patrie ft Libertt, p. 115.

of the French people was centralised in this omnipresent and omnipotent authority. No man could teach without holding its faculties.2 From that day to this the liherty to found schools and to teach has existed only twice, and for a brief moment. It was granted by the Republic in 1848 and by the Assembly in 1871. Since then the Imperial revolutionary system has revived in its supreme power. The Bishops in 1809-10 formed colleges for youths destined for the priesthood; the fathers of families, to save their sons from a Yoltairean education, sent them to these colleges. A decree of 1811 at once subjected them in all things to the control of the University. In 1814 and 1815 religions education became once more possible, and it was energetically restored. The Revolution of 1880 placed once more in the hands of the philosophers what M. Simon calls " the great instrument of intellectual servitude."3 They revived the University in all its omnipotence. It passionately vindicated its monopoly to teach. The professors and licensed teachers of the University were of all religions and of no religion. Then came the Revolution of 1848. The first act of the Assemblee'Constituante was " to inscribe the name of God at the head of the Constitution." Liberty to teach was proclaimed as a right of nature, of which no citizen without injustice could be deprived, except for moral and personal unworthiuess, judicially proved. After the law of 1850 free schools were multiplied and State schools di minished in number. The Second Empire instinctively

» Dieut Patrie et Libertt, p. 120, note. * Ibid. p. 136.

returned to the ways of the First; nevertheless it permitted much liberty of teaching, and it diminished the majesty of the University by creating colleges in the departments depending upon the prefcts. The number of professors was increased, their salaries augmented. It respected the liberty to teach in primary schools which had existed since 1833, and in secondary schools granted in 1850. But the hand of the State was upon all. M. Simon says that the Second Empire was despotic over the liberty of the press, but favourable to the liberty of teaching. He goes on to say that the Assembly of 1871 took up the tradition of the Assembly of 1848. Liberty of instruction and liberty of religious teaching were completely restored. From this date begins the conflict and the crisis to which I would call attention. The last twelve years have been an incessant assault of the so-called Liberal party against what was called Clericalism and the Sacristy; that is to say, in plain English, Christianity in politics and in education. The Assembly, nominally Republican, contained within itself every shade of difference, from reactionary Monarchists to Red Republicans. The amnesty of the Communards registered its degree of red heat.

On the 4th of September 1874, and on a motion to permit the free foundation of universities, M. Challemel-Lacour sounded the first note in a speech of extreme frankness. He began by saying, " I will tell you that for my part I do not believe in that liberty," i.e. of instruction. " That question involves the highest interest, not only of the intellectual honour of our country, but even of the moral unity of France!'

M. Simon says that at these words there " was great applause from the Left, for these words have a vast reach, and give the programme of the campaign afterwards opened by M. Gambetta and executed by M. Ferry." M. Simon adds: " To accomplish the moral unity of France, to hinder all who would interfere with the moral unity of France, all this either means nothing, or it means the religion of the State. All the difference between the ancient religion of the State and the new is, that the name of the old religion is Christianity and the name of the new is Nihilism." In a word, M. Chullemel-Lacour foresaw that these new universities would be explicitly and energetically religious, or, as-he said, "philosophical." He denned this as "an obscure region which envelops that which is certain in science," and as " a domain delivered over to conjecture and the supernatural." This is a peril to the " intellectual honour " of France. And for the " moral unity " such universities "would every day multiply a race believing in one faith, one God, one Baptism," 4 which would interfere with the moral unity of France — that is, " the unity of unbelief, the unity of positivism, the unity of independent morality." This moral unity has not yet been made in France, but it is rapidly making. It is the inevitable end, and the deliberate intention of those who at this hour sway the destinies, or rather are swayed by the lurchings, of that once great Christian people.

The next advance in this assault was made by M. Jules Ferry. In a Bill to amend the Act of 1875, he

« Ditu, Patrie ft Libcrtt, pp. 178-9, 182-8.

introduced the now famous Article 7, which took away the liberty to teach from all members of congregations or bodies not authorised by the State. This struck at once between 7000 and 8000 persons, the great majority of the best instructors engaged in teaching the French people. When Article 7 had been rejected, came the decrees of March 1880. These took away the liberty to teach from fourteen thousand of the best educators of the women of France. They broke up numberless orphanages and works of chanty.

We are not now concerned with the general antireligious policy of the party at this time in power. It is enough to enumerate the series of attempts or acts which in the last two years have followed so rapidly. The abolition of chaplains for the army, of the judicial oath, of the emblems of religion in schools, the enlistment of ecclesiastics, the attack upon the grants for public worship, upon the Concordat, upon the civil condition of the clergy — all these are but signs of one and the same deliberate and downward movement, destroying every remnant of the ancient Christianity of the French people. Over all this we must now pass. We will come at once to the last words of this atrocious policy. They are Laicisation and Ecole Ncutrc. The French language lends itself with a singular promptness to the irony of cynics. Our tongue is slow and cumbrous. The nearest approach is the word Sectarian to describe the schools of Christendom. Laicisation is clear enough. To laicise a school is to put out priest, brother, minister, and rabbi, and put in a lay man. The University is, as M. Simon says, an Eglise laique, a lay Church. And the schools of the State must be lay, for the State is the lay society of the world, and the clergy belong to the sacristy. M. Ferry does not ask which are the better teachers. The instructors of the people must be laymen. There is an intensity of tyrannical malevolence in this: above all in France, where the great majority of the people still believe in Christianity. But the other phrase is less explicit. The neutral school is not one in which Catholic and Protestant may learn the alphabet together, nor where Christian and Jew may meet, nor where Christian and Deist may sit side by side. It is a school in which there is neutrality as to the existence of God, and therefore the State prohibits the pronouncing of His Name.

In 1882 a president of the schools, in making his official visit, said to the children, " People pretend that we wish to have schools without God. But you cannot turn a page of your books without finding there the name of a god, that is, of a man of genius, a bene factor, a hero of humanity. In this point of view we arc true pagans, for our gods are many.'' •

Another president, addressing the masters and mistresses of schools, said: " You will oppose with success to the thick darkness with which teaching has always tried to veil and starve the minds of students, the teaching of science, which alone is true, for it gives to man the certainty of his proper worth, and impels him towards progress and light; while religious teaching plunges him fatally into an obscure night, and into an abyss of lamentable superstitions."

• Dicu, Patrie et Libcrtc, p. 350. • Ibid. p. 351.

Once more, another president said: " Young citizenesses and young citizens, you have just been told that we have driven God out of the school. It is-an error. Nobody can drive out that which does not exist. No, God does not exist. We have only suppressed emblems."

The Prefect of the Seine in the Senate said of the most sacred of all emblems, "It is only a question of school furniture."

It will perhaps be said that all this is mere official chatter. We will therefore close this dismal narrative-with a scene from Senators and Prefets.

The Minister of Public Instruction maintained in the Senate that "the name of God is an equivocal term, because it was equally applicable to the God of Christians and to the God of Descartes." 7

In the Conseil-General of the Seine, on the 22nd of December 1882, M. Kobinet moved; "That the ministerial instruction of the 27th of July 1882, which renders obligatory the teaching of Deism, is in absolute opposition to the text and the spirit of the law."" This was signed by six other members of the Conseil, one of whom said: " Nobody can prove the existence of God, and teachers must not be forced to affirm the existence of an imaginary being." The Conseil finally voted: "That the teaching in all degrees of schools must be essentially lay." Is, then, a belief in the existence of God the essential difference between clericalism and laicism? M. Simon well says, " This neutrality has been imposed by atheists, and voted solely for their " Dieu, Patrie ct Liberte.'y.

own interests against the faith and conscience of the immense majority of the French people."

I will give only one more fact hefore summing up the warning of the last ten years in France. On the 2nd of July 1881, M. Simon addressed the Minister of Instruction in the Senate in these words: " You will not have the words ' religious morality.' You say they are equivocal/' " Say the teachers shall instruct their pupils in their duties towards God and towards their country."

Some of the Senators cried out: " There is no such thing as morality." Two days after this the Commission reported that the amendment was " useless, equivocal, and even dangerous." Nevertheless, the Senate passed it l>y a great majority. It was foreseen that the Chamber would reject it, because the name of God was suspect de cU'ricallsme. It was rejected: on b(fa Dicu. God was struck out. M. Simon adds:

" They had put out ecclesiastics and religious from the primary education. They had banished from the communal schools the symbols and emblems of religion. They had pursued the neutral isation of the schools to the most minute details. They had officially declared from the tribune that to speak of God without specifying whether it was of the God of Christians, or of the Jews, or of the Mohammedans, was equivocal, and that the introduction of that word into u law is a public danger.8 The atheists make the law. Tliis is pushing the respect for minorities very far." <J

Well may M. Simon say:

" "We have abased those who have intelligence by subjecting them to the mob. and we have abased the mob by taking its faith from it. There, in two words, is our history.

The elected wield over the ministers the despotism that the electors wield over them. The ministers obey the deputies, the deputies the electors, the electors the demagogues, and what is

• Diru, Patrif ft Libfrtt, p. 371. Ibid. p. 258.

the result? It is that at home there is no government, and abroad there is no France." 1

I will add only one remark. Such is the development of godless education in France since the year 1871 — that is, in the same twelve years that the Board School system has been confirming its grasp upon the English people. We will go on to the parallel.

III. In the year 1700 the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge was founded. One of its first and chief efforts was the religious education of youth. The popular education of children had not as yet become systematic. The domestic life of the people had not as yet given way as it has since. Home life still survived. Our great peril at this day is the home less state of our masses. In the year 1808 the British and Foreign School Society was founded, to give elementary secular learning with the reading of the Bible. In 1811 the National Society was founded by the Established Church. Until 1833 the Government seems to have done nothing. In that year 20,OOOL was voted to be divided between the British and Foreign and the National Societies. For six years this vote was continued. In 1839 the subject was taken up in the House of Commons. No one at that time dreamed of separating religious from secular instruction. The battle was between those who contended that the State ought to help in education, and those who denied that the State had anything to do with education. This theory was not the contention of Anglicans or of Catholics, but of the Congregationalists. In this pro- 10 Dieu, Patrie et Li&ert£,pp. 372, 378.

VOL. III. f longed conflict, in the year 1847, Lord Macaulay made one of bis most powerful speeches, rejecting with indignation both the theory that the State should do nothing in education, and that the State should do everything, which is the revolutionary or communistic doctrine now troubling America, tyrannising over France, and threatening England.

Parliament in 1839 fully recognised that the whole popular education of England had been created and sustained by the religious instincts and Christian self-denial of the English people. It therefore wisely and justly so framed its legislation as to give State aid to voluntary efforts, respecting as sacred the rights of conscience. This is, in fact, what is called the Denominational system or State co-operation with religious liberty. From 1847 to 1851 the Government was engaged in making separate concordats with the several religious bodies. But the whole negotiation was based upon the principle enunciated by the Lords of the Privy Council in a letter of the 4th of July 1840:

" Their Lordships are strongly of opinion that no plan of education ought to be encouraged in which intellectual instruction is not subordinate to the regulation of the thoughts and habits of the children by the doctrines and precepts of revealed religion."

Lord John Russell was the author and prime mover in this whole policy. What was enunciated in 1840 he repeated on April 11, 1856 111

" One and all maintain that it is the duty of the Government, that it is part of the functions of the Government, to endeavour to teach somewhat of their duty to God and man, to the young M well as to the old."

" Harward, oxli. 390.

A commission under the presidence of the late Duke of Newcastle reported as follows:

" It (the education system) has enlisted in the promotion of education a large amount of religious activity; and avoiding all unnecessary interference with opinion, it has practically left the management of the schools in the hands of the different religious denominations. In these respects it has been most successful."12

Such was the system of popular education down to the year 1870.

The first disturbing question in this settlement was the Conscience Clause. The demand was most reason able on the part of Nonconformists in places where they could have no school of their own. But it was the grit which set the wheel on fire. And " the religious difficulty " was used by those who desired a pure secular system as a wedge to split in two the religious and secular instruction in our schools.

The Birmingham Education League led the assault. Its programme was as follows:

" NATIONAL EDUCATION LEAGUE.

Object.

The establishment of a system which shall secure the education of every child in England and Wales.

Means.

1. Local authorities shall be compelled by law to see that sufficient school accommodation is provided for every child in their district.

2. The cost of founding and maintaining such schools as may be required shall be provided out of the local rates, supplemented by Government grants.

3. All schools aided by local rates shall be under the management of local authorities, and subject to Government inspection.

4. All schools aided by local rates shall be unsectarian.

» Report, p. 327.

6. To all schools aided by local rates admission shall be free.

C* School accommodation being provided, the State or the local authorities shall have power to compel the attendance of cliildren of suitable age not otherwise receiving education."

The Act of 1870 was brought in and justified on the ground of the vast numbers of schoolless children outside of the voluntary education of the country. Rather than describe the Act and its intentions in any words of mine, I will give it in the words of its authors.

In Committee on the Bill on the 16th of June 1870, Mr. Gladstone, then Prime Minister, said:

" The machinery of voluntary schools we found not only existing in this country, but overspreading it to an immense extent, and on every ground, whether of that which is due to the promoters of those schools, to their benevolent and self-denying labours and the success which they have obtained, or whether on the ground of that which is due to the purpose which we have in view, and its effectual, speedy, uniform, and economical attainment, we adopted this principle also as a fundamental principle of this Bill, that we would frankly and without jealousy endeavour to employ the machinery of voluntary schools, as far as it was available, in aid of our object. But feeling that that large deficiency which is now observable in the country could not be made up by means of voluntary schools alone, we propose to fall back on the principle of rating, and to make use of it by way of sup plementing the gap which we saw before us.... We may either forbid or compel a local board to aid voluntary schools; bat if we forbid them, and make them leave voluntary schools, as they are, dependent on the modicum of aid which they now obtain from the Privy Council, that would not be consistent with the view with which this BUI was brought forward, and it would not fulfil the engagement under which all along we have admitted ourselves to lie— namely, that of giving fair terms to voluntary schools, so as to enable them to lend us aU the aid they are capable of lending in the accomplishment of this great work, in which there is plenty for us all to do. Therefore, as our sole measure for dealing with that part of the case, we cannot forbid >• Report of the Firet General Meeting of the National Education League, Birmingham, 1869.

the local boards to give aid to voluntary schools, because the promoters of those schools would be liable, equally with others, to contribute to the rate, and, contributing to it, to aid and found schools to compete with and beat down the school for which they were paying out of their own private resources. This is a state of things we do not desire to bring about, and cannot be responsible for."

On the 24th of June 1870, Mr. Gladstone used these words:

" As regards the existing denominational schools, it is a very grave and important question which we have to ask ourselves — whether we are frankly, ungrudgingly, willingly, and systematic ally to make use of that powerful agency for the purpose of good secular instruction, which is placed at our command in a great degree, if not exclusively, through the vigorous action of religious zeal and love? Let us not disguise from ourselves that this is a question of the greatest moment. The answer to it, I own, appears to me to be perfectly clear. The answer is, that nothing but folly could induce us to refuse to avail ourselves of an opportunity so valuable. If we do not avail ourselves of it, if we treat those voluntary schools as institutions either to be pro scribed, or, at the best, only to be tolerated, limited, hemmed in, permitted to exist merely because they do exist — as things which it is not worth our while to recognise, or honour, or encourage, on what principle can we justify such a policy? On none that I know of, but that secular instruction becomes tainted by being brought into the neighbourhood of specific religious teaching. Under the provisions of the Bill the secular instruction given in the voluntary schools will be severely tested, and care will be taken that it shall be of as high a quality as that given in the rate-supported schools. It will be cheaper to the public, though it be dearer to the individual. On what principle, then, can we refuse to avail ourselves of the advantages which it is calculated to confer?"

On the 28th of June 1870, Mr. Gladstone said:

" Of course it was desirable that the promoters of voluntary schools should have full confidence in the general principles on which Parliament proceeded, and the Government admitted the necessity of the motion of the hon. member for Oldham (Mr. Hibbert), and of showing that it was in the mind of Parliament, as a part of the measure, to provide increased means for the support of voluntary schools."

On the 22nd of July 1870, on the third reading of the Bill, Mr. Gladstone said:

"It was with us an absolute necessity— a necessity of honour and a necessity of policy— to respect and to favour the educational establishments and machinery we found existing in the country. It was impossible for us to join in the language or to adopt the tone which was conscientiously and consistently taken by some members of the House who look upon these voluntary schools, having generally a denominational character, as admirable passing expedients, fit, indeed, to be tolerated for a time, deserving all credit on account of the motives which led to their foundation, but wholly unsatisfactory as to their main purpose, and therefore to be supplanted by something they think better. That is a perfectly fair and intelligible theory for any gentleman tc enter tain, but I am quite sure it will be felt that it has never been the theory of the Government."

Such were the assurances of the Prime Minister in 1870.

Perhaps I shall be ascribing too much importance to a chance and extra-Parliamentary utterance if I quote the following words spoken by the present President of the Board of Trade at Birmingham, as reported in the Daily Post of the 16th of January in this year. They are so diametrically at variance with the words of Mr. Gladstone, they are so hostile and so full of menace — they are also a declaration so explicit of the Gambettist programme for England — that it may be well to draw out their full meaning. The italics are mine:

" It seems to me that this is neither more nor less than a great revolution affecting all our social prospects and conditions, and in view of such a change as that, I confess I am less inclined now to go back upon die defects and omissions of the Act of 1H70 than I am to congratulate all who were concerned in that measure, beginning with its author, down to those who took the smallest part in the agitation which made the introduction of the measure possible; to congratulate them on the results which have been attained, and the success which has attended its operations. In this stage of success we may well be content to wait without impatience until the example which is being set us by other coun tries, and our own experience, may bring about those further developments and reforms which will be shown to be necessary and expedient. The only question is, however, whether the controversy may not be reopened from another quarter, and in that case I daresay we shall not shrink, as my friend Mr. Dale has very recently shown, from a discussion we shall not have pro voked. But I would be inclined to ask our old opponents — our friends, I will call them now — the advocates of denominational education — whether they are wise to raise again a controversy to the settlement of which we have, with considerable reluctance, and for a time, at all events, submitted. I do not wonder that they are occasionally a little uneasy. They see their voluntary contributions diminishing, although not very materially; they find the competition of the Board Schools every day more vigorous; and under those circumstances it has suggested itself to some of them, perhaps not unnaturally, that it would be convenient that they should put their hand into the pocket of the ratepayer as well as of the taxpayer; and that it would relieve them from a good deal of difficulty if they could have a share of the School Board rate. / would beg them to remember how much they have got already, and how little right they have to it.... We thought in 1870 that when the State undertook national education for itself, the partnership which had up to that time existed with the State might be very well dissolved; and that the State having provided national schools, if there were any people who were unwilling to avail themselves of the education which was there provided, and wanted anything else, they must pay for it entirely by themselves. But still we submitted, with more or less willingness according to the graciousness of our disposition, to the compromise under which at the present time something like 1 J million sterling is annually taken from the public taxes of the country, and paid over to the private managers of schools, which are mainly kept up by them, and avowedly kept up by them for sectarian purposes. I say that if the controversy is reopened we are bound to point out that there are also two sides to the question. It is interesting to observe in what direction public ©pinion is tending. Mr. Mundella has spoken of the gigantic efforts trhich are being made in France in order to further national education in that country. The present position of the question owes much to that great Republican who has just died, and the premature termination of whose illustrious career is a loss not to France only, but to the Liberal cause throughout the country* But in France M. Gambetta made it a chief point in Ms policy to draw a sharp line of distinction between the Church and the State in all matters of education; and it is in that direction, I do not hesitate to say, that the thoughts of men and the action of l&julttture* are constantly tending"

I need not point out the contrast of these speeches. In the utterances of 1870 we have the intentions of men whose goodwill was perhaps greater than their foresight. In the Birmingham speech we have the aspirations of 18G9 verified by the twelve years of our experience. Mr. Chamberlain gives voice to the confident hopes of those who have during that time made the Act of 1870 their own. We have no right, they say, to exist but by the graciousness of dispositions. The present working of the Act is a prelude to a time when Christian schools shall be in England as in France, outside the law. The Birmingham scheme is-the first instalment of " the Lay Church of England." Let us briefly contrast the two systems.

In the French system the whole education of the people, from the University to the primary schools, is,, like the army and navy, governmental. Colleges, lycees, schools secondary and primary, belong to the State. The professors, masters, mistresses are patented by the State. The youth and children of France are claimed by the State. The formation of the citizens is the right and prerogative of the State. This policy is the legacy of paganism left by the First Revolution, transmitted with modifications and checks hy the First Empire to the Voltairean monarchy of 1830, and now developed once more by the Extreme Left of the Republic into its original Communistic excess by M. Challemel-Lacour and M. Paul Bert. The " moral unity of France " means the extinction of all forms of religion, belief, thought, consciousness, or moral life, which resist the uniform type of the French citizen taught, trained, shaped, fashioned, and drilled, by an education in which the existence of God is a superstition, the name of God an equivocal term, and the moral law a group of conventional usages. The apostles of the First Revolution had read their Plato. The Com munists of to-day have inherited his Republic without the trouble of reading. Children are not the children of their fathers and mothers, but of the State. The State is loco parentis. Citizens are to be reared like cattle, and to be broken like horses. Parental rights are absorbed in the State; the rights of the State are supreme. It is the State that forms men in its own image and likeness, and stamps them with its own superscription. M. Simon says, " The miserable and sterile society that such education would produce would be in France an edition of one man in thirty-six millions of copies."14 Such unity, he truly says, is-death. The government that does everything in education destroys parental rights, energies, and sense of responsibility. Parents are no more responsible for the intellectual and moral formation of their offspring: than they are, as we are told, for the gaslight in th& " Dieu, Patrie et Liberte, p. 252.

public streets. If the people of England are prepared for this condition of domestic and national life, I do not know them. But if the present working of the Act of 1870 he perpetuated, to this they will come; for the perpetuity of the Board School system means its extension, and its extension means the gradual extinction of the voluntary efforts and the self-providing and self-governing character of our people.

There still exists at this time in full vigour our great national system of education springing from the free will of the people, and maintained, as it was created, by their generosity and self-denial. This system, which I take leave still to call National, as distinguished from governmental, is both voluntary and Christian. It represents the mind and the Christianity of England from the time when England was made. No " universal, secular, gratuitous, and compulsory education " made our forefathers to be what they were, nor has it made Englishmen to be what they are now. We have no wish to be unmade and to be made over again. With all our faults we choose rather to remain a self-governing and a Christian people. We believe what has hitherto made us will continue its work. And we are convinced by the experience of the last ten or twelve years that a change is stealthily coming over our education. We have no wish for a " moral unity of England " to be brought about by universal Board Schools. I cannot refrain from here giving the words of M. Simon, which for eloquence and force can hardly be surpassed:

"We deceive ourselves (he says) about our schools, about their purpose and their importance, if we see in them only the propagation of knowledge. We ought to seek and to plant in them the propagation of courage and of virtue. For a century we have been transforming the forces of nature and subjecting them to the service of man; but man himself is, and will be to the end of time, the greatest force under heaven. Not because he knows he must die, but because he has the will to die for his duty.... To learn not to fail when our brethren or our country call is to learn our duty as man and as citizen. Let us found schools to enlighten the intellect, but above all to strengthen the will. A people innumerable, with a vast extent of soil, however fertile, if they lack initiative and courage, is destined to decline, defeat, and contempt, but a handful of men with heart of oak, cast upon an ungrateful soil, will either find or make a way to success and a future.... They will be like Rome, or Venice, or England, or Holland, starting from a corner of the earth to conquer the world. It is not the loss of a battle or the annihilation of an army, or a province torn away, that begins the fall of a people; a people dies only by the relaxation of its morals, by abandoning its manly habits, by the effacement of its character through the invasion of egoism and scepticism. It dies of its corruption. It cannot die of its wounds." 15

Such are the fears of a Frenchman for France under an education without religion. Such is his appreciation of England. If we betray or surrender our Christian schools, how long shall we deserve his words? I may be asked, What then would you have? I answer equality for all schools before the law, and equal participation for all schools in the help of public aid, so far as their secular education demands and deserves it. I ask not a shilling for religions, much less for " Churches," as I have said, and as they ought to know who have brought this charge. They ought to know because they can know it; but such knowledge would ruin a cry. The inequality, and I must there 's Dieu, Patrie et Libcrtt, pp. 295, 296.

fore say the injustice, of the present working of the Act of 1870 is patent, and cannot be disproved. Why should those who do nothing for themselves receive twofold aid, and they who tax themselves to the utmost receive nothing hut what they earn? This has not been answered.

This inequality does not, I believe, exist in the Act itself. It results from subsequent minutes and codes and bye-laws.

The Act of 1870 embodies certain principles which all accept, that education shall be universal, and that it shall be provided for those who cannot provide for themselves.

The Act of 1870 does not embody the principle of excluding any schools, efficient in secular teaching, from State aid; nor does it purpose to destroy voluntary schools, nor does it desire to desecrate education by the exclusion of religion, nor does it accept even by instalment the French governmental despotism for the education of free England. All these things may be the aims, desires, and intentions of individuals ia private and in public life. They were not the inten tions of the Legislature. They are not yet to be read in our laws.

No one, therefore, asks for the repeal or the rescind ing of the Act of 1870. As it was first drafted it would have met with wide acceptance. If it be restored now to what it was, a readjustment to the actual needs and rightful claims of the people at large might be easily effected.

We have in full action now, in the matter of education, the same two principles which pervade OUT public life — the one the aid of Government, the other the voluntary efforts of the people. Down to the year 1870 these two worked harmoniously and efficaciously in <jo -operation, and, though distinct,yet in undivided unity. The first breach between them dates from the year 1870. The Education Act gave occasion for the separation, and the subsequent working has not only completed the separation, but has brought the two agencies, hitherto mutually helpful, into antagonism.

The effects of restoring once more the equal and just co-operation of the State and the voluntary efforts of the people would be:

First, to lighten the rates by eliciting more abundant voluntary contributions throughout the whole population.

Secondly, to awaken still more powerfully through out the country a zeal, energy, and effort in the work of education which has already done so much, and, if it had been more largely stimulated and encouraged, would have done incalculably more. It was the par simony of Government, first with its 20,000^., and at last with its 600,OOOL, that dwarfed and discouraged the voluntary efforts of the people. What men think they can do they will try to do; what they think is impossible they will not attempt.

The extension and efficiency of education would be promoted by this large, equal, and just treatment of all classes and conditions of the people.

But a deeper good also would be insured, that is, the undiminished vigour of our national character, which, with all its faults, is the most law-abiding, self-governed, and mutually equitable character in the old or the new world.

The " moral unity" of a people when no " religious difficulty " divides them is the highest, happiest, and best. But this cannot be.

The "moral unity" of a people drilled by State education and State pedagogues and State police is spectral and lifeless.

The moral union of a free people educating themselves by self-help and the public aid of the commonwealth in liberty of conscience and a healthy diversity of culture is the vigour and maturity of a nation. This is still within our reach. If we hold fast by our English and Christian inheritance of freedom and faith, it is ours, and it will uphold us. If by our inertness we suffer the theories of Paul Bert, or, I must add, of Birmingham, to fascinate our minds or our legislature, we shall steadily descend the inclined plane on which not the Act, but the working of the Act, of 1870 has placed the Christian education of England.

APPENDIX.