It is, we repeat, to the people of Scotland, and not to any one of the Churches of Scotland, that our scheme of a widely-based and truly popular franchise would restore the Scottish schools. Mr. George Combe is, however, quite in the right in holding that religion is too intimately associated with the educational question, and too decidedly a force in the country, to be excluded from the national seminaries, 'unless, indeed, Government do something more than merely omit the religious element.'{7} All is lost, Mr. Combe justly infers, on the non-religious side of the question, if the introduction of the Bible and Shorter Catechism be not prohibited by Act of Parliament; for, if not stringently prohibited, what Parliament merely omits doing, a Bible and Catechism loving people will to a certainty do; and the conscience of the phrenologist and his followers will not fail to be outraged by the spectacle of Bible classes in the national schools, and of State schoolmasters instilling into the youthful mind, by means of the Shorter Catechism, the doctrine of original sin and the work of the Spirit. Nay, more; as it is not in the power of mere Acts of the Legislature to eradicate from the hearts of a people those feelings of partiality, based on deep religious conviction and the associations of ages, with which it is natural to regard a co-religionist, more especially in the case of the teacher to whom one's children are to read their daily chapter and repeat their weekly tale of questions, denomination must and will continue to exert its powerful influence in the election of national schoolmasters popularly chosen. And as there are certain extensive districts in Scotland in which some one Church is the stronger, and other certain districts in which some other Church is the stronger, there are whole shires and provinces in which, if selected on the popular scheme, the national teachers would be found well-nigh all of one religious denomination. From John O'Groat's to Beauly, for instance, they would be all, or almost all, Free Churchmen; for in that extensive district almost all the people are Free Church. In the Scottish Highlands generally, nearly the same result would be produced, from, of course, the existence of a similar constituency. In Inverness, and onwards along the sea-coast to Aberdeen, Montrose, St. Andrews, and the Frith of Forth, the element of old dissent would be influentially felt: the great parties among the people would be three—Establishment, Free Church, and Voluntary; and whichever two of them united, would succeed in defeating the third. And such unions, no doubt, frequently would take place. The Voluntaries and Free Churchmen would often unite for the carrying of a man; and occasionally, no doubt, the Free Church and the Establishment, for the carrying of a principle,—that principle of religious teaching on which, in the coming struggle, the State Church will be necessitated to take her stand. To the south of the Frith of Forth on to Berwick, and along the western coast from Dumbarton to the Solway, there would be localities parcelled out into large farms, in which the Establishment would prevail; and of course, wherever it can reckon up a majority of the more solid people, it is but right and proper that the Establishment should prevail; but who can doubt that even in these districts the national teaching would be immensely heightened by a scheme which gave to parents and ratepayers the selection of their teachers, and restricted their choice to intelligent and qualified men? Wherever there is liberty, there will be discussion and difference; and the election of a schoolmaster would not be managed quite as quietly under the anticipated state of things, with the whole people of a parish for his constituency, as in the present, by a minister and factor over a social glass. But the objection taken by anticipation to popular heats and contendings in such cases is as old as the first stirrings of a free spirit among the people, and the first struggles of despotism to bind them down. We ourselves have heard it twice urged on the unpopular side,—once when the rotten burghs were nodding to their fall, and once when an unrestricted patronage was imperilled by the encroachments of the Veto. There will, and must be, difference; and difference too, Scotland being what it is, in which the religious element will not fail to mingle; but not the less completely on that account will the scheme restore the Scottish schools to the Scottish people, as represented by the majority, and to the membership of the Free Church, in the de facto statistical sense and proportion in which the Free Church is national. It will not restore them to us in the theoretic sense; but then there are at least three other true original Churches of Scotland, which in that respect will be greatly worse off than ourselves,—the true national Cameronian Church, the true national Episcopalian Church, and a true compact little Church of the whole nation, that, in the form of one very excellent minister, labours in the east.

Meanwhile, we would fain say to our country folk and readers of the north of Scotland: You, of all the Free Churchmen of the kingdom, have an especial stake in this matter. Examine for yourselves,—trust to your own good sense,—exercise as Protestants your right of private judgment,—and see whether, as Christian men and good Scotchmen, you may not fairly employ the political influence given you by God and your country, in possessing yourselves of the parish schools. There will be deep points mooted in this controversy, which neither you nor we will ever be in the least able to understand. You will no doubt be told of a theocratic theory of the British Government, perfectly compatible, somehow, with the receipt of educational grants from which all recognition of the religious element on the part of the State is, at the express request of the Church, to be thoroughly discharged, but not at all compatible with the receipt of an educational endowment of exactly the same character, from which the same State recognition of the same religious element is to be discharged in the same degree. You will, we say, not be able to understand this. The late Dr. Thomas Chalmers and the late Rev. Mr. Stewart of Cromarty could not understand it; we question much whether Dr. William Cunningham understands it; and we are quite sure that Dr. Guthrie and Dr. Begg do not. And you, who are poor simple laymen, will never be able to understand it at all. But you are all able to understand that the parish schools of your respective districts, now lying empty and useless, belong of right to you; and that it would be a very excellent thing to have that right restored to you, both on your own behalf and on that of your children.

——-

{7} 'The sixth resolution [of the Educational Manifesto], in which the opinion of Dr. Chalmers is quoted, that Government [should] abstain from introducing the element of religion at all into their part of the scheme, must, as here introduced, be presumed to mean, that in the Act of the Legislature which shall carry the views of the resolutionists into practical effect, nothing shall be said about religious instruction; but that power shall be given to the heads of families to manage the schools, and prescribe the subjects to be taught, according to their own convictions of what is sound in religious and useful in secular instruction. But this would leave the religious rights of the minority completely unprotected. Government must do something more than omit the religious element: it must limit the power of the majority to introduce this element into their schools to the injury of the minority.'—Letter of Mr. George Combe on the Educational Movement.



CHAPTER FOURTH.

Objections urged by the Free Church Presbytery of Glasgow against the Educational Movement—Equally suited to bear against the Scheme of Educational Grants—Great superiority of Territorial over Denominational Endowment—The Scottish People sound as a whole, but some of the Scottish Sects very unsound—State of the Free Church Educational Scheme.

'Whereas attempts are now being made to reform the parish schools of Scotland, on the principle of altogether excluding religion from national recognition as an element in the national system of education, and leaving it solely to private parties to determine in each locality whether any or what religious instruction will be introduced into the parochial schools,—it is humbly overtured to the Venerable the General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland, to declare that this Church can be no party to any plan of education based on the negation of religion in the general, or of the national faith in particular,' etc.

Such is the gist of that 'Overture on Education' which was carried some three weeks ago by a majority of the Free Church Presbytery of Glasgow. It has the merit of being a clear enunciation of meaning; of being also at least as well fitted to express the views of the Established as of the Free Church courts in Glasgow and elsewhere, and a great deal better suited to serve as a cloak to their policy; and, further, by a very slight adaptation, it could be made to bear as directly against State grants given for educational purposes, if dissociated from the religious certificate, as against State endowments given for the same purpose, when dissociated from statutory religious requirement. It is the religious certificate—most anomalously demanded of denominations diametrically opposed to each other in their beliefs, and subversive of each other in their teachings—that constitutes in the affair of educational grants the recognition of religion on the part of the State. Educational grants dissociated from the religious certificate are educational grants dissociated from the State recognition of religion. The fact that the certificates demanded should be of so anomalous a character, is simply a reflection of the all-important fact that the British people are broken up into antagonistic Churches and hostile denominations, and that the British Government is representative. And that men such as those members and office-bearers of our Church who hold the middle position between that occupied by Mr. Gibson of Glasgow on the one hand, and Dr. Begg of Edinburgh on the other, should see no other way of availing themselves of the educational grants, with a good conscience, than by getting rid of the religious recognition, only serves to show that they are quite as sensible as their opponents in the liberal section of the enormous difficulty of the case, and can bethink themselves of no better mode of unlocking it. For it will not be contended, that if in the matter of grants there is to be no recognition of religion on the part of the State, the want of it could be more adequately supplied by sects, as such, denominationally divided, than by the people of Scotland, as such, territorially divided; seeing that sects, as such, include Papists, Puseyites, Socinians, and Seceders,—Muggletonians, Juggletonians, New Jerusalemites, and United Presbyterians,—Free-thinking Christians, Free-Willers, and Free Churchmen. Nor can we see either the wisdom or the advantage of any scheme of Government inquiry into the educational destitution of a locality, that, instead of supplying the want which it found, would merely placard the place by a sort of feuing ticket—destined, we are afraid, in many instances to be sadly weather-bleached—which would intimate to the sects in general, that were any one of them to come forward and enact the part of school-builder and pedagogue, the State would undertake for a portion of the expenses. We suppose the advertisement on the ticket would run somewhat as follows:—'WANTED BY THE GOVERNMENT, A CHURCH TO ERECT A SCHOOL. TERMS LIBERAL, AND NO CERTIFICATE OF RELIGIOUS TEACHING DEMANDED. N.B.—PAPISTS, PUSEYITES, AND SOCINIANS PERFECTLY ELIGIBLE.'{8}

Leaving, however, to profounder intellects than our own the adjustment of the nice principles involved in this matter, let us advert to what we deem the practical advantages of a territorial scheme of educational endowments over a denominational scheme of educational grants. At present, all or any of the sects may come forward as such, whatever their character or teaching, and, on fulfilling certain conditions, receive assistance from the Government in the form of an educational grant; whereas, by the scheme which we would fain see set in its place, it would be only the more solid people of districts—let us suppose parishes—that would be qualified to come forward to choose for themselves their parochial State-endowed teachers. And at least one of the advantages of this scheme over the other must be surely obvious and plain. Denominationally, there is much unsoundness in Scotland; territorially, there is very little. There exist, unhappily, differences among our Scottish Presbyterians; but not the less on that account has Presbyterianism, in its three great divisions—Voluntary, Establishment, and Free Church—possessed itself of the land in all its length and breadth. The only other form of religion that has a territorial existence in Scotland at all is Popery, and Popery holds merely a few darkened districts of the outer Hebrides and of the Highlands. It would fail, out of the one thousand one hundred parish schools of the country, to carry half-a-dozen; and no other form of religious error would succeed in carrying so much as one parish school. There is no Socinian district in Scotland; old Scotch Episcopacy has not its single parish; and high Puseyism has not its half, or quarter, or even tithe of a parish. That Church of Scotland which Knox founded, with its offshoots the Secession and Relief bodies, has not laboured in vain; and through the blessing of God on these labours, Scotland, as represented by its territorial majorities, is by far the soundest and most orthodox country in the world. A wise and patriotic man—at once a good Scot and a judicious Churchman—would, we think, hesitate long ere he flung away so solid an advantage, won to us by the labours, the contendings, the sufferings of reformers, confessors, martyrs, and ministers of the truth, from the days of Melville and of Henderson, down to those of the Erskines and of Chalmers. He would at least not fail to ask himself whether that to which what was so unequivocally substance was to be sacrificed, was in itself substance or shadow.

Let us next remark, that the Scottish national schools, while they thus could not fail to be essentially sound on the territorial scheme—just because Scotland is itself essentially sound as a nation—might, and would in very many instances, be essentially unsound on a denominational one. There is no form of religious error which may not, in the present state of things, have, as we have said, its schools supported in part by a Government grant, and which may not have its pupil-teachers trained up to disseminate deadly error at the public expense among the youthhead of the future. Edinburgh, for instance, has its one Popish street—the Cowgate; but it has no Popish parish: it has got very little Popery in George Square and its neighbourhood,—very little at the Bristo Port,—very little in Broughton Street; and yet in all these localities, territorially Protestant, Papists have got their religion-teaching schools, in which pupil-teachers, paid by the State, are in the course of being duly qualified for carrying on the work of perversion and proselytism. St. Patrick's school, in which, as our readers were so lately shown, boys may spend four years without acquiring even the simple accomplishment of reading, has no fewer than five of these embryo perverters supported by the Government. Puseyism has, in the same way, no territorial standing on the northern shores of the Frith of Forth; and yet at least one Free Church minister, located in one of the towns which stud that coast, could tell of a well-equipped Puseyite school in his immediate neighbourhood, supported in part by the Government grant, that, by the superiority of the secular education which it supplies, is drawing away Presbyterian, nay, even Free Church children, from the other schools of the locality. On the territorial principle, we repeat, schools such as these, which rest on the denominational basis alone, could not possibly receive the support and countenance of the Legislature. And let the reader remark, that should the Free Church succeed in getting rid of the anomalous religious certificate, and yet continue to hold by the denominational basis, something worse than mere denomination would scarce fail to step in. The Combeite might then freely come forward to teach at the public expense, that no other soul of man has yet been ascertained to exist than the human brain, and no other superintending Providence than the blind laws of insensate matter. Nay, even Socialism, just a little disguised, might begin to build and teach for the benefit of the young, secure of being backed and assisted in its work by the civil magistrate. Further, should the grant scheme be rendered more flexible, i.e. extended to a lower grade of qualification, and thus the public purse be applied to the maintenance and perpetuation of a hedge-school system of education,—or should it be rendered more liberal, i.e. should the Government be induced to do proportionally more, and the school-builders be required to do proportionally less,—superstition and infidelity would, in the carrying out of their schemes of perversion, have, in consequence, just all the less to sacrifice and to acquire. According to the present arrangement, a schoolmaster must realize, from salary and fees united, the sum of forty-five annual pounds, and be, besides, furnished with a free house, ere he can receive from the Government a grant on its lowest scale, viz. fifteen pounds;{9} and whatever judgment may be formed of the proportion in which the State contributes, there can be no question that the general arrangement is a wise one. Sermonizing dominies could be had, no doubt, at any price; and there can be as little doubt that, at any price, would the great bulk of them turn out to be 'doons hard bargains;' but it is wholly impossible that a country should have respectable and efficient teachers under from sixty to eighty pounds a year. The thing, we repeat, is wholly impossible; and the State, in acting, as in this arrangement, on the conviction, does but its duty to its people. The some sixty or seventy pounds, however, would be as certainly realized as under the present arrangement, were it Government that contributed the forty-five pounds, and the denomination or society the fifteen and the free house; and this, of course, would be eminently liberal. But what would be the effects of so happy a change? It might in some degree relieve the Free Church Scheme from financial difficulty; but would it do nothing more? There are Puseyite ladies in Scotland, high in rank and influence, and possessed of much wealth and great zeal, who are already building their schools, in the hope of unprotestantizing their poor lapsed country, spiritually ruined by the Reformation. The liberality that might in part enable the Free Church Education Committee to discharge its obligations at the rate of twenty shillings per pound, would be a wonderful godsend to them; seeing that they would have little else to do, under a scheme so liberal, than simply to erect schoolhouses on the widespread domains of their husbands or fathers, and immediately commence perverting the children of the nation at the national cost. It would be no less advantageous to the Society of the Propaganda, and would enable it to spare its own purse, by opening to it that of the people. The Socinian, the Combeite, the semi-Socialist—none of them very much disposed to liberality themselves—would all share in that of the Government; and their zeal, no longer tied down to inactivity by the dread of pecuniary sacrifice or obligation, would find wings and come abroad. Surely, with such consequences in prospect, our Free Church readers would do well to ponder the nature and demands of the crisis at which they have now arrived. Our country and our Church have in reality but one set of interests; and a man cannot be a bad Scot without being a bad Free Churchman too. Let them decide in this matter, not under the guidance of an oblique eye, squinted on little temporary difficulties or hypothetical denominational advantages, but influenced by considerations of the permanent welfare of their country, and of their abiding obligations to their God.

But why, it may be asked of the writer, if you be thus sensible of the immense superiority of a territorial scheme of educational endowments over a denominational scheme of educational grants,—why did you yourself urge, some three years ago, that the Free Church should avail herself of these very grants? Our reply is sufficiently simple. The denominational scheme of grants was the only scheme before us at the time; these grants were, we saw, in danger of being rejected by the Free Church on what we deemed an unsound and perilous principle, which was in itself in no degree Free Church; and last, not least, we saw further, that if the Church did not avail herself of these grants, there awaited on her Educational Scheme—ominously devoid of that direct divine mandate which all her other schemes possessed—inevitable and disastrous bankruptcy. But circumstances have greatly changed. The Free Church is no longer in any danger from the principle which would have rejected Government assistance. There is now a territorial scheme brought full before the view of the country; and, further, the Government grants have wholly failed to preserve our Educational Scheme from the state of extreme pecuniary embarrassment which we too surely anticipated. Salaries of L15 and L20 per annum are greatly less than adequate for the support and remuneration of even the lower order of teachers, especially in thinly-peopled districts of country, where pupils are few and the fees inconsiderable. But at these low rates it was determined, in the programme of the Free Church Educational Scheme, that about three-fourths of the Church's teachers should be paid; and there are scores and hundreds among them who regulated their expenditure on the arrangement. For at least the last two years, however, the Education Committee has been paying its L15 salaries at the reduced rate of L10, and its L20 salaries at the rate of L13, 13s. 4d.; and those embarrassments, of which the reduction was a consequence, have borne with distressful effect on the Committee's employes. However orthodox their creed, their circumstances have in many instances become Antinomian; nor, while teaching religion to others, have they been able in every instance to conform to one of its simplest demands—'Owe no man anything.'

There were several important items, let us remark, in which we over-estimated the amount of assistance which the Scheme was to receive from the Government; and this mainly from our looking at the matter in the gross, as a question of proportion—so much granted for so much raised—without taking into account certain conditions demanded by the Minutes of Council on the one hand, and a certain course of management adopted on the part of our Education Committee on the other. The grant is given in proportion to salary of one to two (we at present set aside the element of fees): a salary of thirty pounds is supplemented by a grant of fifteen pounds,—a salary of forty pounds by a grant of twenty,—a salary of fifty by a grant of twenty-five,—and so on; and we were sanguine enough to calculate, that an aggregate sum of some ten or twelve thousand pounds raised by the Church for salaries, would be supplemented by an aggregation of grants from the Government to the amount of some five or six thousand pounds more. The minimum sum regarded as essentially necessary for carrying on the Free Church Educational Scheme had been estimated at twenty thousand pounds. If the Free Church raise but twelve thousand of these, we said, Government will give her six thousand additional in the form of grants, and some two thousand additional, or so, for the training of her pupil-teachers; and the Church will thus be enabled to realize her minimum estimate. We did not take the fact into account, that of our Free Church teachers a preponderating majority should fail successfully to compete for the Government money; nor yet that the educational funds should be so broken up into driblet salaries, attached to schools in which the fees were poor and the pupils few, that the schoolmaster, even though possessed of the necessary literary qualification, would in many cases be some twenty, or even thirty, pounds short of the necessary money qualification, i.e. the essential forty-five annual pounds. We did not, we say, take these circumstances into account,—indeed, it was scarce possible that we could have done so; and so we immensely over-estimated the efficacy of the State grant in maintaining the solvency of our Educational Scheme. We learn from Dr. Reid's recent Report to our metropolitan church court, that of the forty-two Free Church teachers connected with the Presbytery of Edinburgh, and in receipt of salaries from the Education Committee, only thirteen have been successful in obtaining Government certificates of merit. And even this is a rather high average, compared with that of the other districts; for we have ascertained, that of the six hundred and eighty-nine teachers of the Free Church scattered over the kingdom, not more than a hundred and twenty-nine have received the Government grant. There are, however, among the others, teachers who have failed to attain to it, not from any want of the literary qualification—for some of them actually possess the parchment certificate bearing the signature of Lansdowne—but simply because they are unfortunate enough to lack the pecuniary one.

That which we so much dreaded has come, we repeat, upon our Educational Scheme. The subject is a painfully delicate one, and we have long kept aloof from it; but truth, and truth only, can now enable the Free Church and her people to act, in this emergency, as becomes the character which they bear, and the circumstances in which they are placed. Let us not fall into the delusion of deeming the mere array of our Free Church schools and teachers—their numbers and formidable length of line—any matter of congratulation; nor forget, in our future calculations, that if the Free Church now realizes from L10,000 to L12,000 yearly for educational purposes, she would require to realize some L5000 or L6000 more in order to qualify her to meet her existing liabilities, estimated at the very moderate rates laid down in the programme. The L5000 or L6000 additional, instead of enabling her to erect a single additional school, would only enable her to pay in full her teachers' salaries. And so it is obviously a delusion to hold that our Free Church Educational Scheme supplies in reality two-thirds of our congregations with teachers, seeing that these teachers are only two-thirds paid. We are still some L5000 or L6000 short of supplying the two-thirds, and some L6000 or L7000 more of supplying the whole. And even were the whole of our own membership to be supplied, the grand query, How is our country to be educated,—our parish schools to be restored to usefulness and the Scotch people,—and Scotland herself to resume and maintain her old place among the nations?—would come back upon us as emphatically as now. Judging from what has been already done, and this after every nerve has been strained in the Sisyphisian work of rolling up-hill an ever-returning stone, it seems wholly impossible that we should ever succeed in educating the young of even our own congregations; and how, then, save on some great national scheme, is a sinking nation to be educated?

——-

{8} The following portion of a motion on the educational question, announced in the Edinburgh Presbytery of the Free Church on the 6th of February last, is specially referred to in this paragraph:—

'That the successful working of the present Government plan would be greatly promoted by the following amendments:—

'1st, The entire omission in all cases (except, perhaps, the case of the Established Church) of the certificate regarding religious instruction, and the recognition of all bodies, whether Churches or private parties and associations, as equally entitled to receive aid.

'2d, The adoption of a rule in proportioning Government grants to local efforts more flexible, and admitting of far more liberal aid in destitute localities, as compared with those which are in a better condition.

'3d, The institution, on the part of Government, of an inquiry into the destitution confessedly existing in large towns, populous neighbourhoods, and remote districts, with a view of marking out places where elementary schools are particularly needed; and the holding out of special encouragement to whatever parties may come forward as willing to plant such schools.

'That the preceding suggestions, if adopted, would go far to render the present Government plan unobjectionable in principle, and also to fit it in practice for ascertaining the educational wants of the country; but that a much more liberal expenditure of the public money would seem to be indispensable, as well as a less stringent application, upon adequate cause shown, of the rules by which the expenditure is regulated.'

In bringing the motion forward in the following meeting of Presbytery, the clause recommending the 'entire omission in all cases of the certificate regarding religious instruction' was suffered to drop.

{9} Such are the proportions laid down in the official document for Scotland of the Committee of Her Majesty's Privy Council on Education. We understand, however, that the Government inspectors possess certain modifying powers, through which the Government grant is occasionally extended to deserving teachers whose salary and fees united fall considerably short of the specified sum of forty-five pounds.



CHAPTER FIFTH.

Unskilled Labourers remunerated at a higher rate than many of our Free Church Teachers—The Teaching must be inferior if the Remuneration be low—Effect of inferior Teaching on the parties taught—Statutory Security; where are the parties to contend for it?—Necessity of a Government Inquiry—'O for an hour of Knox!'

That higher order of farm-servants which are known technically in Mid-Lothian as 'sowers and stackers,' receive, as their yearly wages, in the immediate neighbourhood of the house of the writer, eighteen pounds in money, four bolls oatmeal, two cart-loads of potatoes, and about from twenty to thirty shillings worth of milk. The money value of the whole amounts, at the present time, to something between twenty-three and twenty-four pounds sterling. We are informed by a Fifeshire proprietor, that in his part of the country, a superior farm-servant, neither grieve nor foreman, receives eight pounds in money, six and a half bolls meal, three cart-loads of potatoes, and the use of a cow, generally estimated as worth from ten to twelve pounds annually. His aggregate wages, therefore, average from about twenty-four to twenty-six pounds ten shillings a year. And we are told by another proprietor of the south of Scotland, that each of the better hinds in his employment costs him every year about thirty pounds. In fine, to the south of the Grampians, the emoluments of our more efficient class of farm-servants range from twenty-three to thirty pounds yearly. We need not refer to the wages of railway navvies, nor yet to those of the superior classes of mechanics, such as printers, masons, jewellers, typefounders, etc. There is not a printer in the Witness office who would be permitted by the rules of his profession, to make an arrangement with his employers, were he to exchange piece-work for wages, that did not secure to him twenty-five shillings per week. To expect that a country or Church can possibly have efficient schoolmasters at a lower rate of emolument than not only skilled mechanics, but than even unskilled railway labourers, or the 'stackers and sowers' of our large farms, is so palpably a delusion, that simply to name it is to expose it. And yet of our Free Church schoolmasters, especially in thinly-peopled rural districts and the Highlands, there are scores remunerated at a lower rate than labourers and farm-servants, and hundreds at a rate at least as low; and if we except the fortunate hundred and twenty-nine who receive the Government grant, few indeed of the others rise to the level of the skilled mechanic. Greatly more than two-thirds of our teachers were placed originally on the L15 and L20 scale of salaries: these are now paid with L10 and L13, 13s. 4d. respectively. There are many localities in which these pittances are not more than doubled by the fees, and some localities in which they are even less than doubled; and so a preponderating majority of the schoolmasters of the Free Church are miserably poor men: for what might be a competency to a labourer or hind, must be utter poverty to them. And not a few of their number are distressfully embarrassed and in debt.

Now this will never do. The Church may make herself very sure, that for her L10 or L13 she will receive ultimately only the worth of L10 or L13. She may get windfalls of single teachers for a few months or years: superior young men may occasionally make a brief stay in her schools, in the course of their progress to something better,—as Pilgrim rested for a while in the half-way recess hollowed in the side of the Hill Difficulty; but only very mediocre men, devoid of energy enough of body or mind to make good masons or carpenters, will stick fast in them. We have learned that, in one northern locality, no fewer than eight Free Church teachers have since Martinmas last either tendered their resignations, or are on the eve of doing so. These, it will be found, are superior men, who rationally aspire to something better than mere ploughman's wages; but there will of course be no resignations tendered by the class who, in even the lowest depths of the Scheme, have found but their proper level. These, as the more active spirits fly off, will flow in and fill up their places, till, wherever the L10 and L13 salaries prevail,—and in what rural district do they not prevail?—the general pedagogical acquirements of our teachers will present a surface as flat, dull, and unprofitable as ditch-water. For what, we again ask, can be expected for L10 or L13? And let the reader but mark the effect of such teaching. We have seen placed side by side, in the same burgh town, an English school, in which what are deemed the branches suitable for mechanics and their children, such as reading, writing, and arithmetic, were energetically taught, and a grammar school in which a university-bred schoolmaster laboured, with really not much energy, especially in those lower departments in which his rival excelled, but who was fitted to prepare his pupils for college, and not devoid of the classical enthusiasm. And it struck us as a significant and instructive fact, that while the good English school, though it turned out smart readers and clever arithmeticians, failed to elevate a single man from the lower to the middle or higher walks of life, the grammar school was successful in elevating a great many. The principle on which such a difference of result should have been obtained is so obvious, that it can scarce be necessary to point it out. The teaching of the one school was a narrow lane, trim, 'tis true, and well kept, but which led to only workshops, brick-kilns, and quarries; whereas that of the other was a broad, partially-neglected avenue, which opened into the great professional highways, that lead everywhere. And if the difference was one which could not be obviated by all the energy of a superior and well-paid English teacher, how, we ask, is it to be obviated by our Free Church L10 and L13 teachers? Surely our Church would do well to ponder whether it can be either her interest or her duty to urge on any scheme, in opposition to a national one, which would have all too palpably the effect of degrading her poorer membership, so far as they availed themselves of it, into the Gibeonites of the community—its hewers of wood and drawers of water. Never will Scotland possess an educational scheme truly national, and either worthy of her ancient fame or adequate to the demands and emergencies of an age like the present, until at least every parish shall possess among its other teachers its one university-bred schoolmaster, popularly chosen, and well paid, and suited to assist in transplanting to the higher places of society those select and vigorous scions that from time to time spring up from the stock of the commonalty. The waking dream of running down the ignorance and misery of a sinking country by an array of starveling teachers in the train of any one denomination—itself, mayhap, sufficiently attenuated by the demands of purely ecclesiastical objects—must be likened to that other waking dream of the belated German peasant, who sees from some deep glade of his native forests a spectral hunt sweep through the clouds,—skeleton stags pursued by skeleton huntsmen, mounted on skeleton horses, and surrounded by skeleton beagles; and who hears, as the wild pageant recedes into the darkness, the hollow tantivy and the spectral horns echoing loud and wildly through the angry heavens.

It is of paramount importance that the Free Church should in the present crisis take up her position wisely. We have heard of invaders of desperate courage, who, on landing upon some shore on which they had determined either to conquer or to perish, set fire to their ships, and thus shut out the possibility of retreat. Now the Free Church—whether she land herself into an agitation for a scheme of Government grants rendered more liberal and flexible than now, and dissociated from the religious certificate, or whether she plant her foot on a scheme of national education based on a statutory recognition of the pedagogical teaching of religion—is certainly in no condition to burn her ships. Let her not rashly commit herself against a third scheme, essentially one in principle with that which the sagacious Chalmers could regard, after long and profound reflection, as the only one truly eligible in the circumstances of the country, and which she herself, some two or three years hence, may be compelled to regard in a similar light. The educational agitation is not to be settled in the course of a few brief months; nor yet by the votes of Presbyteries, Synods, or General Assemblies, whether they belong to the Free or to the Established Churches. It rises direct out of the great social question of the time. Scotland as such forms one of its battle-fields, and Scotchmen as such are the parties who are to be engaged in the fight; and the issue, though ultimately secure, will long seem doubtful. And so the Free Church may have quite time enough to fight her own battle, or rather her own two battles in succession, and, when both are over, find that the great general contest still remains undecided.

For what we must deem by much the better and more important battle of the two—that for a statutory demand on the part of the State that the Bible and Shorter Catechism should be taught in the national schools—we are afraid the time is past; but most happy would we be to find ourselves mistaken. The Church of Scotland, as represented by that majority which is now the Free Church, might have succeeded in carrying some such measure ten years ago, when the parish schools were yet in her custody; just as she might have succeeded seven years earlier in obviating the dire necessity which led to the Disruption, by acting upon the advice of the wise and far-seeing M'Crie.{10} But she was not less prepared at the one date to agitate for the total abolition of patronage, than at the other to throw open the parish schools on the basis of a statutory security for the teaching of religion. In both cases, the golden opportunity was suffered to pass by; and Old Time presents to her now but the bald retreating occiput, which her eager hand may in vain attempt to grasp. Where, we ask, are we to look for the forces that are to assist us in fighting this battle of statutory security? Has the Establishment become more liberal, or more disposed to open the parish schools, than we ourselves were when we composed the majority of that very Establishment? Alas! in order to satisfy ourselves on that head, we have but to look at the decisions of her various ecclesiastical courts. Or is it the old Scottish Dissenters that are to change their entire front, and to make common cause with us, in disregard, and even in defiance, of their own principles, as they themselves understand them? Or are we to look to that evangelical portion of the Episcopacy of England, with whom Establishment means Church, and the 'good of the Establishment' a synonyme for the 'good of the Church,' and who, to a certainty, will move no hand against the sister Establishment in Scotland? Or are we to be aided by that portion of English Independency that has so very strangely taken its stand equally against educational grants and educational endowments, on the ground that there is a sort of religion homoeopathically diffused in all education—especially, we suppose, in Lindley Murray's readings from the Spectator and Dr. Blair—and that, as the State must not provide religious teaching for its people, it cannot, and must not, provide for them teaching of any kind? Scientific Jews are they, of the straitest sect, who, wiser than their fathers, have ascertained by the microscope, that all meat, however nicely washed, continues to retain its molecules of blood, and that flesh therefore must on no account be eaten. We cannot, we say, discern, within the wide horizon of existing realities, the troops with which this battle is to be fought. They seem to be mere shadows of the past. But if the Free Church see otherwise, let her by all means summon them up, and fight it. Regarded simply as a matter of policy, we are afraid the contest would be at least imprudent. 'It were well,' said a Scotch officer to Wolfe, when Chatham first called out the Highlanders of Scotland to fight in the wars of Britain,—'It were well, General, that you should know the character of these Highland troops. Do not attempt manoeuvring with them; Scotch Highlanders don't understand manoeuvre. If you make a feint of charging, they will throw themselves sword in hand into the thick of the enemy, and you will in vain attempt calling them back; or if you make a show of retreating, they will run away in right earnest, and you will never see them more. So do not employ them in feints and stratagems, but keep them for the hard, serious business of the fight, and you will find them the best troops in the world.' Now, nearly the same character applies to the Free Church. To set her a-fighting as a matter of policy, would be very bad policy indeed. She would find out reasons, semi-theological at least, for all her positions, however hopeless, and would continue fixed in these long after the battle had been fought and lost, and when she ought to be engaged in retrieving her disasters on other ground, and in a fresh and more promising quarrel. But if the Free Church does enter into this battle, let her in the meantime not forget, that after it has been fought, and at least possibly lost, another battle may have still to be begun; nor let her attempt damaging, by doubtful theology, the position which a preponderating majority of her own office-bearers and members may have yet to take up. For, ultimately at least, the damage would be all her own. Let her remark further, that should her people set their hearts pretty strongly on those national seminaries, which in many parts of the country would become, if opened up, wholly their own de facto, and which are already their own de jure, they might not be quite able to feel the cogency of the argument that, while it left Socinians and Papists in the enjoyment of at once very liberal and very flexible Government grants, challenged their right to choose, on their own responsibility, State-paid teachers for their children; and which virtually assured them, that if they did not contribute largely to the educational scheme of their own Church, she would be wholly unable to maintain it as a sort of mid-impediment between them and their just rights, the parish schools. They would be exceedingly apt, too, to translate any very determined and general preference manifested by our church courts for the scheme of educational grants, into some such enunciation as the following:—'Give us to ourselves but a moiety of one-third of the Scottish young, and we will frankly give up the other two-thirds,—the one-half of them to be destroyed by gross ignorance, and the other half by deadly error.'{11}

There is at least one point on which we think all Free Churchmen ought to agree. It is necessary that the truth should be known respecting the educational condition and resources of Scotland. It will, we understand, be moved to-day [February 27th], in the Free Church Presbytery of Edinburgh, as a thing good and desirable, that Government should 'institute an inquiry into the educational destitution confessedly existing in large towns, populous neighbourhoods, and remote districts, with a view to the marking out of places where elementary schools are particularly needed,' etc. Would it not be more satisfactory to move instead, the desirableness of a Government Commission of Inquiry, 1st, into the educational condition of all the youth of Scotland between the years of six and fifteen, on the scheme of that inquiry recently conducted by a Free Church Educational Association in the Tron parish of Glasgow; 2d, into the condition, character, and teaching of all the various schools of the country, whether parochial, Free Church, or adventure schools, with the actual amount of pupils in attendance at each; and 3d, into the general standing, acquirements, and emoluments of all the teachers? Not only would the report of such a Commission be of much solid value in itself, from the amount of fact which it would furnish for the direction of educational exertion on the part of both the people and the State; but it might also have the effect of preventing good men from taking up, in the coming contest, untenable and suspicious ground. It would lay open the true state of our parish schools, and not only show how utterly useless these institutions have become, from at least the shores of the Beauly to those of the Pentland Frith, and throughout the Highlands generally, but also expose the gross exaggeration of the estimate furnished by Mr. Macrae, and adopted by Dr. Muir.{12} Further, it would have the effect of preventing any member of either the Free Church or the Establishment from resorting to the detestable policy of those Dissenters of England, who, in order to secure certain petty advantages to their own miserable sects, set themselves to represent their poor country—perishing at the time for lack of knowledge—as comparatively little in need of educational assistance. But we trust this at least is an enormity, at once criminal and mean, of which no Scotchman, whatever his Church, could possibly be guilty; and so we shall not do our country the injustice of holding that, though it produced its 'fause Sir Johns' in the past, it contains in the present one such traitor, until we at least see the man. Further, a State Report of the kind would lay open to us, in the severe statistical form, the actual emoluments of our own Free Church teachers. We trust, then, that this scheme of a searching Government inquiry may be regarded as a first great step towards the important work of educating the Scottish people, in which all ought to agree, however thoroughly at variance in matters of principle or on points of detail.

It is of mighty importance that men should look at things as they really are. Let us remember that it is not for the emergencies of yesterday that we are now called on to provide, but for the necessities of to-day,—not for Scotland in the year 1592, nor yet in the year 1700, but for Scotland in the year 1850. What might be the best possible course in these bygone ages, may be, and is, wholly an impracticable course now. Church at both these earlier dates meant not only an orthodox communion, but also that preponderating majority of the nation which reckoned up as its own the great bulk of both the rulers and the ruled, and at once owned the best and longest swords, and wore the strongest armour; whereas it now means, legally at least, merely two Erastianized Establishments, and politically, all the Christian denominations that possess votes and return members to Parliament. The prism seizes on a single white ray, and decomposes it into a definitely proportioned spectrum, gorgeous with the primary colours. The representative principle of a Government such as ours takes up, as if by a reverse process, those diverse hues of the denominational spectrum that vary the face of society, and compounds them in the Legislature into a blank. Save for the existence of the two Establishments—strong on other than religious grounds—and the peculiar tinge which they cast on the institutions of the country, the blank would be still more perfect than it is; and this fact—a direct result of the strongly marked hues of the denominational spectrum, operated upon by the representative principle—we can no more change than we can the optical law. Let there be but the colour of one religion in the national spectrum, and the Legislature will wear but one religious colour: let it consist of half-a-dozen colours, and the Legislature will be of none. 'O for an hour of Knox!' it has been said by a good and able man, from whom, however, in this question we greatly differ,—'O for an hour of Knox to defend the national religious education which he was raised up to institute!' Knox, be it remembered, was wise, prudent, sagacious, in accordance with the demands of his time. A Knox of the exact fashion of the sixteenth century, raised up in the middle of the nineteenth, would be but a slim, long-bearded effigy of a Knox, grotesquely attired in a Geneva cloak and cap, and with the straw and hay that stuffed him sticking out in tufts from his waistband. 'O for an hour of Knox!' The Scottish Church of the present age has already had its Knox. 'Elias hath already come.' The large-minded, wise-hearted Knox of the nineteenth century died at Morningside three years ago; and he has bequeathed, as a precious legacy to the Church, his judgment on this very question. 'It were the best state of things,' he said, 'that we had a Parliament sufficiently theological to discriminate between the right and the wrong in religion, and to endow accordingly. But failing this, it seems to us the next best thing, that in any public measure for helping on the education of the people, Government were to abstain from introducing the element of religion at all into their part of the scheme; and this not because they held the matter to be insignificant,—the contrary might be strongly expressed in the preamble of their Act,{13}—but on the ground that, in the present divided state of the Christian world, they would take no cognizance of, just because they would attempt no control over, the religion of applicants for aid,—leaving this matter entire to the parties who had to do with the erection and management of the schools which they had been called upon to assist. A grant by the State on this footing might be regarded as being appropriately and exclusively the expression of their value for a good secular education.'

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{10} To demand of that Parliament which carried the Reform Bill the repeal of the Patronage Act, instead of enacting, on her own authority, the Veto Law.

{11} 'I see,' said Knox, when the Privy Council, in dividing the ecclesiastical revenues of the kingdom into three parts, determined on giving two of these to the nobility, and on dividing the remaining part between the Protestant ministry and the Court,—' I see two-thirds freely given to the devil, and the other third divided between God and the devil: if the end of this order be happy, my judgment fails me!' Our church courts, if they declare for the system of denominational grants, in opposition to the territorial endowments of a scheme truly national, will be securing virtually a similar division of the people, with but this difference, that God's share of the reserved moiety may be a very small share indeed. And can it possibly be held that the shame and guilt of such an arrangement can be obviated by the votes of Synods or Assemblies? or that, with an intelligent laity to judge in the matter, the 'end of this order' can be other than unhappy? The schools of the Free Church have already, it is said, done much good. We would, we reply, be without excuse, in taking up our present position—a position in which we have painfully to differ from so many of the friends in whose behalf for the last ten years we deemed it at once a privilege and an honour to contend—did we believe that more than six hundred Protestant schools could exist in Scotland without doing much good. Of nothing, however, are we more convinced, than that the good which they have done has been accomplished by them in their character as schools, not in their character as denominational. We know a little regarding this matter; for in our journeyings of many thousand miles over Scotland, especially in the Highlands and the northern counties, we have made some use of both our eyes and ears. We have seen, and sickened to see, hordes of schoolboys of ten and twelve years bandying as nicknames, with boys whose parents belonged to the Establishment, the terms of polemic controversy. 'Moderate' has become in juvenile mouths as much a term of hatred and reproach in extensive districts of our country, as we remember 'Frenchman' used to be during the great revolutionary war. Our children bid fair to get, in their state of denominational separatism, at least religion enough heartily to hate their neighbours; and, we are afraid, not much more. Now, it may be thought that the Editor of the Witness, himself long engaged in semi-theological warfare, ought to be silent in a matter of this kind. Be it remembered, we reply, that it was men, not children, whom the Editor of the Witness made it his business to address; and that when, in what he deemed a good cause, he appealed to the understandings of his adult country-folk, he besought them in every instance to test and examine ere they judged and decided. He did not contemplate a phase of the controversy in which unthinking children should come from their schools to contend with other children, in the spirit of those little ones of Bethel who 'came forth out of their city' to mock and to jeer; or that immature, unreasoning minds should be torn by the she-bears of uncharitable feeling, at an age when the points really at issue in the case can be received only as prejudices, and expressed only by the mere calling of names. And seeing and knowing what he has seen and knows, he has become sincerely desirous that controversy should be left to at least the adult population of the country, and that its children of all the communions should be sent to mingle together in their games and their tasks, and to form their unselfish attachments, under a wise system of national tuition, as thoroughly Christian as may be, but at the same time as little as possible polemical or sectarian.

{12} To the effect that there are a hundred thousand children in attendance at the parish schools of Scotland.

{13} 'We are aware,' says a respected antagonist, 'that Mr. Miller is no Deist; his argument, nevertheless, rests on a deistical position,—a charge to which Dr. Chalmers' letter is not liable to be exposed, in consequence of its first sentence, and of what it recommends in a Government preamble.' If there be such virtue in a preamble, say we, let us by all means have a preamble—ten preambles if necessary—rather than a deistic principle. We would fain imitate in this matter the tolerance of Luther. 'A complaint comes that such and such a reformed preacher will not preach without a cassock. "Well," answers Luther, "what harm will a cassock do the man? Let him have a cassock to preach in; let him have three cassocks, if he find benefit in them.'"



CHAPTER SIXTH.

Our previous Statement regarding the actual Condition of the Free Church Educational Scheme absolutely necessary—Voluntary Objections to a National Scheme, as stated by the Opponents of the Voluntaries; not particularly solid—Examination of the matter.

Our episode regarding the Free Church Educational Scheme now fairly completed, let us return to the general question. The reader may, however, do well to note the inevitable necessity which existed on our part, that our wholesome, though mayhap unpalatable, statements respecting it should have been submitted to the Church and the country. The grand question which in the course of Providence had at length arisen was, 'How is our sinking country to be educated?' We had taken our stand, as a Scotchman, in behalf of the Scottish people; and as the belief seemed widely to exist that our own Free Church scheme was adequate, or at least nearly so, to the education of the children of our own membership, and that our duty as Scotchmen could be fulfilled, somehow, by concentrating all our exertions upon it, it had become essentially necessary that the delusion should be dispelled. And so we have showed, that while our scheme, in order fully to supply the educational wants of even our own people, would require to exist in the proportion of nine, it exists nominally in but the proportion of six, and in reality in but the proportion of four,—seeing that the six, i.e. our existing staff of teachers, amounting to but two-thirds of the number required, are but two-thirds paid;—in short, that our educational speculation is exactly in the circumstances of a railway company who, having engaged to cut a line ninety miles in length, have succeeded in cutting forty miles of it at their own proper expense, and then having cut twenty miles more on preference shares, find their further progress arrested by a lack of funds. And so it became necessary to show that the existence and circumstances of our Free Church schools, instead of furnishing, as had been urged in several of our presbyteries, any argument against the agitation of the general question, furnished, on the contrary, the best possible of all arguments for its agitation; and to show further, that the policy which brought a denominational scheme, that did not look beyond ourselves, into a great national engagement, in the character of a privateer virtually on the side of the enemy, was a most perilous policy, that exposed it to damaging broadsides, and telling shot right between wind and water.

Let us now pass on to the consideration of a matter on which we but touched before,—the perfect compatibility of a consistent Voluntaryism with religious teaching in a school endowed by the State, on the principle of Dr. Chalmers. The Witness is as little Voluntary now as it ever was. It seems but fair, however, that a principle should be saddled with only the consequences that legitimately arise from it; and that Voluntaryism should not be exposed, in this contest, to a species of witchcraft, that first caricatures it in an ill-modelled image, and then sticks the ugly thing over with pins.

The revenues of the State-endowed schools of this country—and, we suppose, of every other—are derived from two distinct sources: from Government, who furnishes the schoolmaster's salary, and erects the building in which he teaches; and from the parents or guardians, who remunerate him according to certain graduated rates for the kind of instruction which he communicates to their children or wards. And the rationale of this State assistance seems very obvious. It is of importance to the State, both on economic and judicial grounds, that all its people should be taught; but, on the adventure-school principle, it is impossible that they should all be taught, seeing that adventure schools can thrive in only densely peopled localities, or where supported by wealthy families, that pay largely for their children's education. And so, in order that education may be brought down to the humblest of the people, the State supplements, in its own and its people's behalf, the schoolmaster's income, and builds him a school. Such seems to be the principle of educational endowments. Now, if the State, in endowing national schoolmasters, were to signify that it endowed them in order that, among other things, they should teach religion, we can well see how a Voluntary who conscientiously holds, as such, that religion ought not to be State-endowed, might be unable to avail himself, on his children's behalf, of the State-enjoined religious teaching of any such functionaries; just as we can also see, that if the State forbade its schoolmasters on any account to teach religion, a conscientious holder of the Establishment principle might be perhaps equally unable to avail himself of services so restricted. We can at least see how each, in turn, might lodge an alternate protest,—the one against the positive exclusion of religion by the State, the other against its positive introduction. But if, according to Chalmers, the State, aware of the difficulty, tenders its endowment and builds its schools 'simply as an expression of its value for a good secular education,' and avowedly leaves the religious part of the school training to be determined by the parties who furnish that moiety of the schoolmaster's support derived from fees—i.e. the parents or guardians—we find in the arrangement ground on which the Voluntary and the Establishment man can meet and agree. For the State virtually wills by such a settlement—and both by what it demands, and by what it does not demand, but permits—that its salaried functionary should stand to his employers, the people, simply in the relation of an adventure schoolmaster. The State says virtually to its teacher in such circumstances: 'I, as the general guardian of your pupils, do not pay you for their religious education; but their particular and special guardians, the parents, are quite at liberty to make with you on that head whatever bargain they please. Fully aware of the vast importance of religious teaching, and yet wholly unable, from the denominational differences of the time, at once to provide for it in the national seminaries, and to render these equal to the wants of the country, I throw the whole responsibility in this matter on the divided people, whom I cannot unite in their religion, but whose general education I am not on that account at liberty to neglect.' On grounds such as these, we repeat, Voluntaryism and the Establishment principle may meet and agree.

There can be little doubt, however, that there are men on both sides sparingly gifted with common sense: for never yet was there a great question widely and popularly agitated, that did not divide not only the wise men, but also the fools of the community; and we have heard it urged by some of the representatives of the weaker class, that a Voluntary could not permit his children to be taught religion under a roof provided by the State. Really, with all respect for the cap and bells, this is driving the matter a little too far. We have been told by a relative, now deceased, who served on shipboard during the first revolutionary war, and saw some hard fighting, that at the close of a hot engagement, in which victory remained with the British, the captain of the vessel in which he sailed—a devout and brave man—called his crew together upon the quarter-deck, and offered up thanks to God in an impressive prayer. The noble ship in which he sailed was the property of the State, and he himself a State-paid official; but was there anything in either circumstance to justify a protest from even the most rabid Voluntary against the part which he acted on this interesting occasion, simply as a Christian hero? Nay, had he sought to employ and pay out of his private purse in behalf of his crew an evangelical missionary, as decidedly Voluntary in his views as John Foster or Robert Hall, would the man have once thought of objecting to the work because it was to be prosecuted under the shelter of beams and planks, every one of which belonged to the Government? Would a pious Voluntary soldier keep aloof from a prayer-meeting on no other ground than that it was held in a barrack?—or did the first Voluntaries of Great Britain, the high-toned Independents that fought under Cromwell, abstain from their preachings and their prayers when cooped up by the enemy in a garrison? Where is the religious Voluntary who would not exhort in a prison, or offer up an unbought prayer on a public, State-provided scaffold, for some wretched criminal shivering on the verge of the grave?

Now the schoolmaster, in the circumstances laid down by Chalmers, we hold to be in at least as favourable a position with respect to the State and the State-erected edifice in which he teaches, as the ship-captain or the non-commissioned missionary—the devout Voluntary soldier, or the pious Independents of Cromwell's Ironsides. He is, in his secular character, a State-paid official, sheltered by an erection the property of the State; but the State permits him to bear in that erection another character, in relation to another certain employer, whom it recognises as quite as legitimately in the field as itself, and permits him also—though it does not enjoin—to perform his duties there as a Christian man. Though, however, the objection to religious teaching under the State-erected roof may be suffered to drop, there may be an objection raised—and there has been an objection raised—against the teaching of religion in certain periods of time during the day, for which it is somehow taken for granted the State pays. Hence the argument for teaching religion in certain other periods of time not paid for by the State—or in other words, during separate hours. Now the entire difference here seems to originate in a vicious begging of the question. It is not the State that specifies the hours during each day in which State-endowed and State-erected schools are taught; on the contrary, varying as these hours do, and must, in various parts of the town and country—for a thinly-peopled district demands one set of hours, and a densely-peopled locality another—they are fixed, as mere matters of mutual arrangement, to suit the convenience of the teachers and the taught. It is enough that the State satisfy itself, through its inspectors, that the secular instruction for which it pays is effectually imparted to its people: it neither does nor will lay claim to any one hour of the day as its own, whether before noon or after it. It will leave to the English Establishment its canonical hours, sacred to organ music and the Liturgy; but it will set apart by enactment no pedagogical hours, sacred to arithmetic or algebra, the construing of verbs, or the drawing of figures. If separate hours merely mean that the master is not to have all his classes up at once—here gabbling Latin or Greek, there discussing the primer or reciting from Scott's Collection, yonder repeating the multiplication table or running over the rules of Lindley Murray—we at once say religion must have its separate hour, just as English, the dead tongues, figuring, writing, and the mathematics, have their separate hours; but if it be meant that the religious teaching of the school must be restricted to some hour not paid for by the State, then we reply with equal readiness that we know of no hour specially paid for by the State, and so utterly fail to recognise any principle in the proposed arrangement, or rather in the objection that would suggest it.

As to the question of a separate fee for religious tuition, let us consider how it is usually solved in the adventure schools of the country. The day is, in most cases, opened by the master with prayer, and then there is a portion of Scripture read by the pupils. And neither the Scripture read nor the prayer offered up fall, we are disposed to think, under the head of religious tuition, but under a greatly better head—that of religion itself. It is a proper devotional beginning of the business of the day. The committal of the Shorter Catechism—which with most children is altogether an exercise of memory, but which, accomplished in youth, while the intellect yet sleeps, produces effects in after years almost always beneficial to the understanding, and not unfrequently ameliorative of the heart—we place in a different category. It is not religion, but the teaching of religion; not food for the present, but store laid up for the future. With the committal to memory of the Catechism we class that species of Scripture dissection now so common in schools, which so often mangles what it carves.{14} And religion taught in this way is and ought to be represented in the fee paid to the teacher, and is and ought to be taught in a class as separate from all the others as the geography or the grammar class. Such is, we understand, a common arrangement in Scottish adventure schools; nor does there exist a single good reason for preventing it from also obtaining in the Scottish national schools. If the parentage of Scotland, whether Voluntary or Establishment, were to be vested with the power of determining that it should be so, and of selecting their schoolmasters, the schools would open with prayer and the reading of the Word—not because they were State-endowed, but because, the State leaving the point entirely open, they were the schools of a Christian land, to which Christian parents had sent their children, and for which, on their own proper responsibility, they had chosen, so far as they could determine the point, Christian teachers. And for this religious part of the services of the day we would deem it derogatory to the character of a schoolmaster to suppose that he could receive any remuneration from the parents of his pupils, or from any one else. For the proper devotional services of the school we would place on exactly the same high disinterested level as the devotional exercises of the family, or as those of the gallant officer and his crew, who, paid for but the defence of their country, gave God thanks on the blood-stained quarter-deck, in their character as Christians, that He had sheltered their heads in one of their country's battles, and then cast themselves in faith upon His further care. We would, we say, deem it an insult to the profession to speak of a monetary remuneration for the read word or the prayer offered up. Nay, if either was rated at but a single penny as its price, or if there was a single penny expected for either, where is there the man, Voluntary or Free Church, that would deem it worth the money? The story of the footman, who, upon being told, on entering on his new place, that he would have to attend family prayers, expressed a hope that the duty would be considered in his wages, has become one of the standard jokes of our jest-books. We would, however, place the religious teaching of the school on an entirely different footing from its religious services. We would assign to it its separate class and its separate time, just as we would assign a separate class and time to the teaching of English grammar, or history, or the dead languages. And whether the remuneration was specified or merely understood, we would deem it but reasonable that this branch of teaching, like all the other branches which occupied the time and tasked the exertions of the teacher, should be remunerated by a fee: in this department of tuition, as in the others, we would deem the labourer worthy of his hire. We need scarce add, however, that we would recognise no power in the majority of any locality, or in the schoolmaster whom they had chosen, to render attendance at even the devotional services of the seminary compulsory on the children of parents who, on religious or other grounds, willed that they should not join in the general worship. And, of course, attendance on the religion-teaching class would be altogether as much a matter of arrangement between the parent and the schoolmaster, as attendance on the Latin or English classes, or on arithmetic, algebra, or the mathematics.

While, however, we can see no proper grounds for difference between Voluntaries and Free Churchmen, on even these details of school management, and see, further, that they never differ regarding the way in which the adventure schools of the country are conducted, we must remind the reader that all on which they have really to agree on this question, as Scotchmen and franchise-holders, is simply whether their country ought not, in the first place, to possess an efficient system of national schools, open to all the Christian denominations; whether, in the second, the parents ought not to be permitted to exercise, on their own responsibility, the natural right of determining what their children should be taught; and whether, in the third, the householders of a district ought not to be vested in the power, now possessed by the heritors and parish minister, of choosing the teacher. Agreement on these heads is really all that is necessary towards either the preliminary agitation of the question, or in order to secure its ultimate success. The minor points would all come to be settled, not on the legislative platform, but in the parishes, by the householders. Voluntaryism, wise and foolish, does not reckon up more than a third of the population of Scotland; and foolish, i.e. extreme Voluntaries—for the sensible ones would be all with us—would find themselves, when they came to record their votes, a very small minority indeed. And so, though their extreme views may now be represented as lions in the path, it would be found ultimately that, like the lions which affrighted Pilgrim in the avenue, and made the poor man run back, they are lions well chained up—lions, in short, in a minority, like the agricultural lion in Punch. Let us remark, further, that if some of our friends deem the scheme proposed for Scotland too little religious, it is as certain that the assertors of the scheme now proposed for England, and advocated in Parliament by Mr. Fox, very decidedly object to it on the opposite score. Like the grace said by the Rev. Reuben Butler, which was censured by the Captain of Knockdunder as too long, and by douce Davie Deans as too short, it is condemned for faults so decidedly antagonistic in their character, that they cannot co-exist together. One class of persons look exclusively at that lack of a statutory recognition of religion which the scheme involves, and denounce it as infidel; another, at the religious character of the people of Scotland, and at the consequent certainty, also involved in the scheme, that they will render their schools transcripts of themselves, and so they condemn it as orthodox. And hence the opposite views entertained by Mr. Combe of Edinburgh on the one hand, and Mr. Gibson of Glasgow on the other.{15}

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{14} It is not uninstructive to remark how invariably in this matter an important point has been taken for granted which has not yet been proven; and how the most serious charges have been preferred against men's principles, on the assumption that there exists in the question a certain divine truth, which may be neither divine nor yet a truth at all. Wisdom and goodness may be exhibited in both the negative and positive form—both by avoiding what is wicked and foolish, and by doing what is good and wise. And while no Christian doubts that the adorable Head of the Church manifested His character, when on earth, in both ways, at least no Presbyterian doubts that He manifested it not only by instituting certain orders in His Church, but also by omitting to institute in it certain other orders. He instituted, for instance, an order of preachers of the gospel; He did not institute an order of popes and cardinals. Neither, however, did He institute an order of 'religion-teaching' schoolmasters; and the question not yet settled, and of which, without compromising a single article in our standards, either side may be espoused, is, whether our Saviour manifested His wisdom in not making use of the schoolmaster, or whether, without indicating His mind on the subject, He left the schoolmaster to be legitimately employed in an after-development of the Church.

Indeed, so entirely in this matter is the Free Church at sea, without chart or compass, that it has still to be determined whether the religious teaching of her schools be of a tendency to add to or to diminish the religious feeling of the country. 'I sometimes regretted to observe,' says Dr. Reid, in his Report on the Schools in connection with the Free Presbytery of Edinburgh, 'that [their lessons in the Bible and Shorter Catechism] were taught rather too much in the style of the ordinary lessons. I do not object to places being taken, or any other means employed, which a teacher may consider necessary to secure attention during a Scripture lesson; but divine truth should always be communicated with solemnity.' Now, such is the general defect of the religious teaching of the schoolroom. Nor is it to be obviated, we fear, by any expression of extra solemnity thrown into the pedagogical face, or even by the taking of places or the taws. And there seems reason to dread that lessons of this character can have but the effect of commonplacing the great truths of religion in the mind, and hardening the heart against their after application from the pulpit. But some ten or twelve years will serve to unveil to the Free Church the real nature of the experiment in which she is now engaged. For our own part, we can have little doubt, be the matter decided as it may, that experience will serve ultimately to show how vast the inferiority really is of man's 'teachers of religion' to Christ's preachers of the gospel.

We shall never forget at least the more prominent particulars of a conversation on this subject which we were privileged to hold with one of the most original-minded clergymen (now, alas, no more) our Church ever produced. He referred, first, to the false association which those words of world-wide meaning, 'religious education,' are almost sure to induce, when restricted, in a narrow, inadequate sense, to the teaching of the schoolmaster; and next, to the divine commission of the minister of the gospel. 'Perverted as human nature is,' he remarked, 'there are cases in which, by appealing to its sentiments and affections, we may derive a very nice evidence respecting the divine origin of certain institutions and injunctions. For instance, the Chinese hold, as one of their religious beliefs, that parents have a paramount claim to the affections of their sons and daughters, long after they have been married and settled in the world; whereas our Saviour teaches that a man should leave father and mother and cleave to his wife, and the wife leave father and mother and cleave to her husband. And as, in the case of the dead and living child, Solomon sought his evidence in the feelings of the women that came before him, and determined her to be the true mother in whom he found the true mother's love and regard, I would seek my evidence, in this other case, in the affections of human nature; and ask them whether they declared for the law of the Chinese Baal, or for that of Him who implanted them in the heart. And how prompt and satisfactory the reply! The love which of twain makes one flesh approves itself, in all experience, to be greatly stronger and more engrossing than that which attaches the child to the parent; and while we see the unnatural Chinese law making the weaker traverse and overrule the stronger affection, and thus demonstrating its own falsity, we find the law of Christ exquisitely concerting with the nature which Christ gave, and thus establishing its own truth. Now, regarding the commission of the minister of the gospel,' he continued, 'I put a similar question to the affections, and receive from them a not less satisfactory reply. The God who gave the commission does inspire a love for him who truly bears it; ay, a love but even too engrossing at times, and that, by running to excess, defeats its proper end, by making the servant eclipse in the congregational mind the Master whose message he bears. But I do believe that the sentiment, like the order to which it attaches, is, in its own proper place, of divine appointment. It is a preparation for the reception in love of the gospel message. God does not will that His message should be injured by any prejudice against the bearer of it; and that His will in this matter might be adequately carried out, was one of the grand objects of our contendings in the Church controversy. But we are not to calculate on the existence of any such strong feeling of love between the children of a school and their teacher. If, founding on the experience of our own early years, we think of the schoolmaster, not in his present relation to ourselves as a fellow-citizen, or as a servant of the Church, but simply in his connection with the immature class on which he operates, we will find him circled round in their estimation (save in perhaps a very few exceptional cases) with greatly more of terror than affection. There are no two classes of feelings in human nature more diverse than the class with which the schoolmaster and the class with which the minister of the gospel is regarded by their respective charges; and right well was St. Paul aware of the fact, when he sought in the terrors of the schoolmaster an illustration of the terrors of the law. And in this fence of terror we may perhaps find a reason why Christ never committed to the schoolmaster the gospel message.' We are afraid we do but little justice, in this passage, to the thinking of our deceased friend; for we cannot recall his flowing and singularly happy language, but we have, we trust, preserved his leading ideas; and they are, we think, worthy of being carefully pondered. We may add, that he was a man who had done much in his parish for education; but that he had at length seen, though without relaxing his efforts, that the religious teaching of his schools had failed to make the rising generation under his charge religious, and had been led seriously to inquire regarding the cause of its failure.

{15} Mr. Combe, however, may be regarded as an extreme man; and so the following letter, valuable as illustrating the views of a not very extreme opponent, though a decided assertor of the non-religious system of tuition, may be well deemed instructive. The writer, Mr. Samuel Lucas, was for many years Chairman of that Lancashire Public School Association which Mr. Fox proposes as the model of his scheme:—

TO THE EDITOR OF THE SCOTSMAN.

SIR,—In your paper of the 26th ultimo, I observe among the advertisements a set of resolutions which have been agreed to and signed by a number of parties, with the view of a national movement in favour of an unsectarian system of national education. It is perhaps too early to say, that though the names of some of the parties are well known and highly esteemed in this country, yet that the names of many who might be expected to be foremost in promoting such an object are wanting.

I cannot, however, help thinking, that some of these may have been prevented from signing the document in question by some considerations which have occurred to myself on the perusal of it; and as a few lines of editorial comment indicate that the project has your sanction, you will perhaps allow me briefly to say why I think the people of Scotland should give to it the most deliberate consideration before committing themselves to it.

Agreeing, as I do most fully, with a large proportion of the contents of the resolutions, I regret that its authors have made an attempt, which it is impossible can be successful, to unite in the national schoolhouses, and in the school hours, a sound religious with an unsectarian education.

What is a sound religious education? Will not the professors of every variety of religious faith answer the question differently?

I think it was Bishop Berkeley who said, Orthodoxy is my doxy; heterodoxy is another man's doxy. So it is with a sound religious education. What is sound to me is hollow and superficial, or perhaps full of error, to another.

If it be said that the majority of heads of families must decide as to what is sound and what is unsound, I must protest against such an injustice. The minority will contribute to the support of the public schools, and neither directly nor indirectly can they with justice be deprived of the use of them.

It appears to me that the authors of the resolutions are flying in the face of their own great authority, in proposing to introduce religious instruction into the public schools. It is true that Dr. Chalmers proposes that Government should 'leave this matter entire to the parties who had to do with the erection and management of the schools which they had been called upon to assist;' but he was not then contemplating the erection of national schools by the public money, but schools erected by voluntary subscription, which the Government might be called on to assist.

His opinion on the right action of Government in the present state of things is clear. He says: 'That in any public measure for helping on the education of the people, Government [should] abstain from introducing the element of religion at all into their part of the scheme.'

What, then, should be the course taken by the promoters of public schools, in accordance with the principles enunciated by Dr Chalmers? It appears to me to be clearly this: to make no provision whatever for, or rather directly to exclude, all religious teaching within the walls of the school, and to leave, in the words of the fifth resolution, 'the duty and responsibility of communicating religious instruction' in the hands of those 'to whom they have been committed by God, viz. to their parents, and, through them, to such teachers as they may choose to entrust with that duty.'

This was the course pursued by the Government of Holland in the early part of the present century; and I suppose no one will venture to call in question the morality or religion of the people of that country, or to throw a doubt upon the success of the system.

It is as an ardent friend of National Education, both in Scotland and England, that I have ventured to make these few observations. I desire to throw no obstruction in the way of any movement calculated to attain so desirable an object. It may be that I am mistaken in supposing that it is intended to convey religious instruction, in the public schools, of a kind that will be obnoxious to a minority; and if so, the design of the authors of the resolutions will have no more sincere well-wisher than, Sir, your obedient servant,

SAMUEL LUCAS.

LONDON, February 4, 1850.



CHAPTER SEVENTH.

General Outline of an Educational Scheme adequate to the demands of the Age—Remuneration of Teachers—Mode of their Election—Responsibility—Influence of the Church in such a Scheme—Apparent Errors of the Church—The Circumstances of Scotland very different now from what they were in the days of Knox.

Scotland will never have an efficient educational system at once worthy of her ancient fame, and adequate to the demands of the age, until in every parish there be at least one central school, known emphatically as the Parish or Grammar School, and taught by a superior university-bred teacher, qualified to instruct his pupils in the higher departments of learning, and fit them for college. And with this central institute every parish must also possess its supplementary English schools, efficient of their kind, though of a lower standing, and sufficiently numerous to receive all the youthful population of the district which fails to be accommodated in the other. In these, the child of the labourer or mechanic—if, possessed of but ordinary powers, he looked no higher than the profession of his father—could be taught to read, write, and figure. If, however, there awakened within him during the process, the stirrings of those impulses which characterize the superior mind, he could remove to his proper place—the central school—mayhap, in country districts, some two or three miles away; but when the intellectual impulses are genuine, two or three miles in such cases are easily got over.

We would fix for the teachers, in the first instance, on no very extravagant rate of remuneration; for it might prove bad policy in this, as in other departments, to set a man above his work. The salaries attached at present to our parish schools vary from a minimum of L25 to a maximum of about L34. Let us suppose that they varied, instead, from a minimum of L60 to a maximum of L80—not large sums, certainly, but which, with the fees and a free house, would render every parochial schoolmaster in Scotland worth about from L80 to L100 per annum, and in some cases—dependent, of course, on professional efficiency and the population of the locality—worth considerably more. The supplementary English schools we would place on the average level maintained at present by our parish schools, by providing the teachers with free houses, and yearly salaries of a minimum of L30 and a maximum of L40. And as it is of great importance that men should not fall asleep at their posts, and as tutors never teach more efficiently than when straining to keep ahead of their pupils, we would fain have provision made that, by a permitted use of occasional substitutes, this lower order of schoolmasters should be enabled to prepare themselves, by attendance at college, for competing, as vacancies occurred, for the higher schools. It would be an arrangement worth L20 additional salary to every school in Scotland, that the channels of preferment should be ever kept open to useful talent and honest diligence, so that the humblest English teacher in the land might rise, in the course of years, to be at the head of its highest school; nay, that, like that James Beattie who taught at one time the parish school of Fordoun, he might, if native faculty had been given and wisely improved, become one of the country's most distinguished professors. In fixing our permanent castes of schools, Grammar and English, we would strongly urge that there should be no permanent castes of teachers fixed—no men condemned to the humbler walks of the profession if qualified for the higher. The life-giving sap would thus have free course, from the earth's level to the topmost boughs of our national scheme; and low as an Englishman might deem our proposed rates of remuneration for university-taught men, we have no fear that they would prove insufficient, coupled with such a provision, for the right education of the country.