‘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.
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.
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.
‘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.