Leading Articles on Various Subjects
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Title: Leading Articles on Various Subjects
Author: Hugh Miller
Editor: John Davidson
Release date: July 18, 2009 [eBook #29440]
Language: English
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LEADING ARTICLES
ON VARIOUS SUBJECTS.
{Illustration: W. H. McFarlane, Lith^r Edin^r
HUGH MILLER
_Fac-simile of a Calotype by D. O. Hill, R. I. A. 1845.
see page 184_}
MURRAY AND GIBB, EDINBURGH,
PRINTERS TO HER MAJESTY'S STATIONERY OFFICE.
LEADING ARTICLES
ON VARIOUS SUBJECTS.
BY
HUGH MILLER,
AUTHOR OF 'THE OLD RED SANDSTONE,' ETC. ETC.
_EDITED BY HIS SON-IN-LAW_,
THE REV. JOHN DAVIDSON.
_FOURTH EDITION._
EDINBURGH:
WILLIAM P. NIMMO.
1872.
PREFACE.
The present volume is issued in compliance with the strong solicitations
of many, to whose desire deference was due. In selecting the articles,
I have been guided mainly by two considerations,--namely, the
necessity for reproducing the mature opinion of a great mind, upon
great subjects; and for making the selection so varied, as to convey to
the reader some idea of the wonderful versatility of the powers
which could treat subjects so diverse in their nature with such
uniform eloquence and discrimination. I trust that the chapters on
Education will prove to be a valuable contribution to the speedy
settlement of that question at the present crisis. Those on
Sutherlandshire are inserted because they possess a permanent value,
in connection with the social and economical history of our country.
Some of the articles are of a personal character, and are introduced,
not, certainly, for the purpose of recalling old animosities, but
solely to illustrate the author's method of using some of the more
formidable figures of speech; while over against these may be set some
on purely literary subjects, which show the genial tenderness of his
disposition towards those who aspired to serve God and their generation
by giving to the world the fruit of their imagination, their labour,
and their leisure.
I have not determined the selection without securing the counsel and
approval of men on whose judgment I could rely. It only remains for me
to thank them, and in an especial way to thank Mr. D. O. Hill for the
portrait which forms the frontispiece. An impersonal reference to a
similar portrait taken at the same time will be found at page 184, in
the article on 'The Calotype.'
JOHN DAVIDSON.
_London, March 8, 1870._
CONTENTS
PAGE
THOUGHTS ON THE EDUCATIONAL QUESTION, 1
LORD BROUGHAM, 105
THE SCOTT MONUMENT, 111
THE LATE MR. KEMP, 119
ANNIE M'DONALD AND THE FIFESHIRE FORESTER, 123
A HIGHLAND CLEARING, 136
THE POET MONTGOMERY, 146
CRITICISM--INTERNAL EVIDENCE, 151
THE SANCTITIES OF MATTER, 161
THE LATE REV. ALEXANDER STEWART, 170
THE CALOTYPE, 179
THE TENANT'S TRUE QUARREL, 190
CONCLUSION OF THE WAR IN AFFGHANISTAN, 199
PERIODICALISM, 206
'ANNUS MIRABILIS,' 215
EFFECTS OF RELIGIOUS DISUNION ON COLONIZATION, 223
FINE-BODYISM, 232
ORGANSHIP, 240
BAILLIE'S LETTERS AND JOURNALS, 249
FIRST PRINCIPLES, 262
AN UNSPOKEN SPEECH, 269
DISRUPTION PRINCIPLES, 280
CHARACTERISTICS OF THE CRIMEAN WAR, 293
THE POETS OF THE CHURCH, 302
THE ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA, 315
A VISION OF THE RAILROAD, 327
THE TWO MR. CLARKS, 337
PULPIT DUTIES NOT SECONDARY, 358
DUGALD STEWART, 369
OUR TOWN COUNCILS, 378
SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND IS; OR, HOW A COUNTRY MAY BE
RUINED, 388
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
TO
THOUGHTS ON THE EDUCATIONAL QUESTION.
The following chapters on the Educational Question first appeared as a
series of articles in the _Witness_ newspaper. They present, in
consequence, a certain amount of digression, and occasional
re-statement and explanation, which, had they been published
simultaneously, as parts of a whole, they would not have exhibited.
The controversy was vital and active at every stage of their
appearance. Statements made and principles laid down in the earlier
articles had, from the circumstance that their truth had been
questioned or their soundness challenged, to be re-asserted and
maintained in those which followed; and hence some little derangement
in the management of the question, for which, however, the interest
which must always attach to a real conflict may be found to
compensate. That portion of the controversy, however, which arose out
of one of the articles of the series, and which some have deemed
personal, has been struck out of the published edition of the
pamphlet, and retained in but an inconsiderable number of copies,
placed in the hands of a few friends. In omitting it where it has been
omitted, the writer has acted on the advice of a gentleman for whose
judgment he entertains the most thorough respect, and from a desire
that the general argument should not be prejudiced by a matter
naturally, but not necessarily, connected with it. And in retaining it
where it has been retained, he has done so in the full expectation of
a time not very distant, when it will be decided that he has neither
outraged the ordinary courtesies of controversy, nor taken up a false
line of inference or statement; and when the importance of the subject
discussed will be regarded as quite considerable enough to make any
one earnest, without the necessity of supposing that he had been
previously angry.
It is all-important, that on the general question of National
Education, the Free Church should take up her position wisely.
Majorities in her courts, however overwhelming, will little avail
her, if their findings fail to recommend themselves to the good
sense of her people, or are palpably unsuited to the emergencies of
the time. A powerful writer of the present age employs, in one of
his illustrations, the bold figure of a ship's crew, that, with
the difficulties of Cape Horn full before them, content themselves
with instituting aboard their vessel a constitutional system of
voting, and who find delight in contemplating the unanimity which
prevails on matters in general, both above decks and below. 'But
your ship,' says Carlyle, 'cannot double Cape Horn by its excellent
plans of voting: the ship, to get round Cape Horn, will find a set of
conditions already voted for, and fixed with adamantine rigour, by
the ancient Elemental Powers, who are entirely careless how you
vote. If you can by voting, or without voting, ascertain these
conditions, and valiantly conform to them, you will get round the
Cape: if you cannot, the ruffian Winds will blow you ever back again;
the inexorable Icebergs, dumb privy councillors from Chaos, will nudge
you with most chaotic admonition; you will be flung half-frozen on
the Patagonian cliffs, or jostled into shivers by your iceberg
councillors, and will never get round Cape Horn at all.' Now there
is much meaning couched in this quaint figure, and meaning which the
Free Church would do well to ponder. There are many questions on
which she could perhaps secure a majority, which yet that majority
would utterly fail to carry. On the question of College Extension,
for instance, she might be able to vote, if she but selected her
elders with some little care, that there should be full staffs of
theological professors at Glasgow and Aberdeen. But what would her
votes succeed in achieving? Not, assuredly, the doubling of the Cape;
but the certainty of shivering her all-important Educational
Institute on three inexorable icebergs. In the first place, her
magnificent metropolitan College, like that huge long boat, famous
in story, which Robinson Crusoe was able to build, but wholly unable
to launch, would change from being what it now is--a trophy of her
liberality and wisdom--into a magnificent monument of her folly. In
the second place, she would have to break faith with her existing
professors, and to argue, mayhap, when they were becoming thin and
seedy, and getting into debt, that she was not morally bound to
them for their salaries. And, in the third and last place, she would
infallibly secure that, some twenty years hence at furthest, every
theological professor of the Free Church should be a pluralist, and
able to give to his lectures merely those fag-ends of his time
which he could snatch from the duties of the pulpit and the care of
his flock. And such, in doubling the Cape Horn of the College
question, is all that unanimity of voting could secure to the
Church; unless, indeed, according to Carlyle, she voted in accordance
with the 'set of conditions already voted for and fixed by the
adamantine powers.'
Nor does the question of Denominational Education, now that there is a
national scheme in the field, furnish a more, but, on the contrary, a
much less, hopeful subject for mere voting in our church courts, than
the question of College Extension. It is _not_ to be carried by
ecclesiastical majorities. Some of the most important facts in the
'Ten Years' Conflict' have perhaps still to be recorded; and it is one
of these, that long after the Non-Intrusion party possessed majorities
in the General Assembly, the laity looked on with exceedingly little
interest, much possessed by the suspicion that the clergy were
battling, not on the popular behalf, but on their own. Even in 1839,
after the Auchterarder case had been decided in the House of Lords,
the apathy seemed little disturbed; and the writer of these chapters,
when engaged in doing his little all to dissipate it, could address a
friend in Edinburgh, to whom he forwarded the MS. of a pamphlet thrown
into the form of a letter to Lord Brougham, in the following
terms:--'The question which at present agitates the Church is a vital
one; and unless the people can be roused to take part in it (and they
seem strangely uninformed and wofully indifferent as yet), the worst
cause must inevitably prevail. They may perhaps listen to one of their
own body, who combines the principles of the old with the opinions of
the modern Whig, and who, though he feels strongly on the question,
has no secular interest involved in it.' It was about this time that
Dr. George Cook said--and, we have no doubt, said truly--that he could
scarce enter an inn or a stage-coach without finding respectable men
inveighing against the utter folly of the Non-Intrusionists, and the
worse than madness of the church courts. For the opponents of the
party were all active and awake at the time, and its incipient friends
still indifferent or mistrustful. The history of Church petitions in
Edinburgh during the ten eventful years of the war brings out this
fact very significantly in the statistical form. From 1833, the year
of the Veto Act, to 1839, the year of the Auchterarder decision,
petitions to Parliament from Edinburgh on behalf of the struggling
Church were usually signed by not more than from four to five
thousand persons. In 1839 the number rose to six thousand. The people
began gradually to awaken, and to trust. Speeches in church courts
were found to have comparatively little influence in creating opinion,
or ecclesiastical votes in securing confidence; and so there were
other means of appealing to the public mind resorted to, mayhap not
wholly without effect: for in 1840 the annual Church petition from
Edinburgh bore attached to it thirteen thousand signatures; and to
that of the following year (1841) the very extraordinary number of
twenty-five thousand was appended. And, save for the result, general
over Scotland, which we find thus indicated by the Church petitions of
Edinburgh, the Disruption, and especially the origination of a Free
Church, would have been impossible events. How, we ask, was that
result produced? Not, certainly, by the votes of ecclesiastical
courts,--for mere votes would never have doubled the Cape Horn of the
Church question; but simply through the conviction at length
effectually wrought in the public mind, that our ministers were
struggling and suffering, not for clerical privileges, but for popular
rights,--not for themselves, but for others. And that conviction once
firmly entertained, the movement waxed formidable; for elsewhere, as
in the metropolis, popular support increased at least fivefold; and
the question, previously narrow of base, and very much restricted to
one order of men, became broad as the Scottish nation, and deep as the
feelings of the Scottish people. But as certainly as the component
strands of a cable that have been twisted into strength and coherency
by one series of workings, may be untwisted into loose and feeble
threads by another, so certainly may the majorities of our church
courts, by a reversal of the charm which won for them the element of
popular strength, render themselves of small account in the nation.
They became strong by advocating, in the Patronage question, popular
rights, in opposition to clerical interests: they may and will become
weak, if in the Educational one they reverse the process, and advocate
clerical interests in opposition to popular rights.
Their country is perishing for lack of a knowledge which they cannot
supply. Every seven years--the brief term during which, if a
generation fail to be educated, the opportunity of education for ever
passes away--there are from a hundred and fifty to two hundred
thousand of the youth of Scotland added to the adult community in an
untaught, uninformed condition. Nor need we say in how frightful a
ratio their numbers must increase. The ignorant children of the
present will become the improvident and careless parents of the
future; and how improvident and careless the corresponding class which
already exists among us always approves itself to be, let our prisons
and workhouses tell. Our country, with all its churches, must
inevitably founder among the nations, like a water-logged vessel in a
tempest, if this state of matters be permitted to continue. And why
permit it to continue? Be it remembered that it is the _national_
schools--those schools which are the people's own, and are yet
withheld from them--and not the schools of the Free Church, which it
is the object of the Educational movement to open up and extend. Nor
is it proposed to open them up on a new principle. It is an
unchallenged fact, that there exists no statutory provision for the
teaching of religion _in them_. All that is really wanted is, to
transfer them on their present statutory basis from the few to the
many,--from Moderate ministers and Episcopalian heritors, to a people
essentially sound in the faith--Presbyterian in the proportion of at
least _six_ to one, and Evangelical in the proportion of at least
_two_ to one. And at no distant day this transference must and will
take place, if the ministers of the Free Church do not virtually join
their forces to their brethren of the Establishment in behalf of an
alleged ecclesiastical privilege nowhere sanctioned in the word of
God.{1}
There is another important item in this question, over which, as
already determined by inevitable laws, ecclesiastical votes, however
unanimous, can exert no influence or control. They cannot ordain that
inadequately paid schoolmasters can be other than inferior educators.
If the remuneration be low, it is impossible by any mere force of
majorities to render the teaching high. There is a law already 'voted
for' in the case, which majorities can no more repeal than they can
the law of gravitation. And here we must take the opportunity of
stating--for there has been misrepresentation on the point--what our
interest in the teachers of Scotland and of the Free Church really is.
Certainly not indifferent to their comfort as men, or to the welfare
of their profession, as one of the most important and yet worst
remunerated in the community, we frankly confess that we look to
something greatly higher than either their comfort or the professional
welfare in general. They and their profession are but _means_; and it
is to the _end_ that we mainly look,--that end being the right
education of the Scottish people, and their consequent elevation in
the scale, moral and intellectual. We would deal by the teachers of
the country in this matter as we would by the stone-cutters of
Edinburgh, were we entrusted with the erection of some such exquisite
piece of masonry as the Scott Monument, or that fine building recently
completed in St. Andrew Square. Instead of pitching our scale of
remuneration at the rate of labourers' wages, we would at once pitch
it at the highest rate assigned to the skilled mechanic; and this not
in order, primarily at least, that the masons engaged should be
comfortable, but in order that they should be masters of their
profession, and that their work should be of the completest and most
finished kind. For labourers' wages would secure the services of only
bungling workmen, and lead to the production of only inferior masonry.
And such is the principle on which we would befriend our poor
schoolmasters,--not so much for their own sakes, as for the sake of
their work. Further, however, it is surely of importance that, when
engaged in teaching religion, they themselves should be enabled, in
conformity with one of its injunctions, to 'provide things honest in
the sight of all men.' Nay, of nothing are we more certain, than that
the Church has only to exert herself to the extent of the liabilities
already incurred to her teachers, in order to be convinced of the
absolute necessity which exists for a broad national scheme. Any
doubts which she may at present entertain regarding the question of
the _necessity_, are, in part at least, effects of her lax views
respecting the question of the _liability_, and of her consequent
belief that _anything well divided_ is sufficient to discharge it. At
the same time, however, it would be perhaps well that at least our
better-paid schoolmasters should be made to reflect that the
circumstances of their position are very peculiar; and that should
they take a zealous part against what a preponderating majority of the
laity of their Church must of necessity come to regard as the cause of
their country, their opposition, though utterly uninfluential in the
general struggle, may prove thoroughly effectual in injuring
themselves. For virtually in the Free Church, as in the British
Constitution, it is the '_Commons_' who grant the supplies.
We subjoin the paper on the Educational Question, addressed by Dr.
Chalmers to the Hon. Mr. Fox Maule, as it first appeared in the
_Witness_. The reader will see that there is direct reference made to
it in the following pages, and will find it better suited to repay
careful study and frequent perusal than perhaps any other document on
the subject ever written:--
'It were the best state of things, that we had a Parliament
sufficiently theological to discriminate between the right and
the wrong in religion, and to encourage or 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,--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 upon this
footing might be regarded as being appropriately and exclusively
the expression of their value for a good secular education.
'The confinement for the time being of any Government measure
for schools to this object we hold to be an imputation, not so
much on the present state of our Legislature, as on the present
state of the Christian world, now broken up into sects and
parties innumerable, and seemingly incapable of any effort for
so healing these wretched divisions as to present the rulers of
our country with aught like such a clear and unequivocal
majority in favour of what is good and true, as might at once
determine them to fix upon and to espouse it.
'It is this which has encompassed the Government with
difficulties, from which we can see no other method of
extrication than the one which we have ventured to suggest. And
as there seems no reason why, because of these unresolved
differences, a public measure for the health of all--for the
recreation of all--for the economic advancement of all--should
be held in abeyance, there seems as little reason why, because
of these differences, a public measure for raising the general
intelligence of all should be held in abeyance. Let the men
therefore of all Churches and all denominations alike hail such
a measure, whether as carried into effect by a good education in
letters or in any of the sciences; and, meanwhile, in these very
seminaries let that education in religion which the Legislature
abstains from providing for, be provided for as freely and as
amply as they will by those who have undertaken the charge of
them.
'We should hope, as the result of such a scheme, for a most
wholesome rivalship on the part of many in the great aim of
rearing on the basis of their respective systems a moral and
Christian population, well taught in the principles and
doctrines of the gospel, along with being well taught in the
lessons of ordinary scholarship. Although no attempt should be
made to regulate or to enforce the lessons of religion in the
inner hall of legislation, this will not prevent, but rather
stimulate, to a greater earnestness in the contest between truth
and falsehood--between light and darkness--in the outer field of
society; nor will the result of such a contest in favour of what
is right and good be at all the more unlikely, that the families
of the land have been raised by the helping hand of the State to
a higher platform than before, whether as respects their health,
or their physical comfort, or their economic condition, or, last
of all, their place in the scale of intelligence and learning.
'Religion would, under such a system, be the immediate product,
not of legislation, but of the Christian philanthropic zeal
which obtained throughout society at large. But it is well
when what legislation does for the fulfilment of its object
tends not to the impediment, but rather, we apprehend, to the
furtherance, of those greater and higher objects which are in
the contemplation of those whose desires are chiefly set on
the immortal wellbeing of man.
'On the basis of these general views, I have two remarks to
offer regarding the Government scheme of education.
'1. I should not require a certificate of satisfaction with the
religious progress of the scholars from the managers of the
schools, in order to their receiving the Government aid. Such a
certificate from Unitarians or Catholics implies the direct
sanction or countenance by Government to their respective
creeds, and the responsibility, not of _allowing_, but, more
than this, of _requiring_, that these shall be taught to the
children who attend. A bare allowance is but a general
toleration; but a requirement involves in it all the mischief,
and, I would add, the guilt, of an indiscriminate endowment for
truth and error.
'2. I would suffer parents or natural guardians to select what
parts of the education they wanted for their children. I would
not force arithmetic upon them, if all they wanted was reading
and writing; and as little would I force the Catechism, or any
part of the religious instruction that was given in the school,
if all they wanted was a secular education. That the managers of
the Church of England schools shall have the power to impose
their own Catechism upon the children of Dissenters, and, still
more, to compel their attendance on church, I regard as among
the worst parts of the scheme.
'The above observations, it will be seen, meet any questions
which might be put in regard to the applicability of the scheme
to Scotland, or in regard to the use of the Douay version in
Roman Catholic schools.
'I cannot conclude without expressing my despair of any great or
general good being effected in the way of Christianizing our
population, but through the medium of a Government themselves
Christian, and endowing the true religion, which I hold to be
their imperative duty, not because it is the religion of the
many, but because it is true.
'The scheme on which I have now ventured to offer these
few observations I should like to be adopted, not because
it is absolutely the best, but only the best in existing
circumstances.
'The endowment of the Catholic religion by the State I should
deprecate, as being ruinous to the country in all its interests.
Still I do not look for the general Christianity of the people,
but through the medium of the Christianity of their rulers. This
is a lesson taught _historically_ in Scripture, by what we read
there of the influence which the personal character of the
Jewish monarchs had on the moral and religious state of their
subjects; it is taught _experimentally_, by the impotence, now
fully established, of the Voluntary principle; and last, and
most decisive of all, it is taught _prophetically_ in the book
of Revelation, when told that then will the kingdoms of the
earth (_Basileiai_, or governing powers) become the kingdoms of
our Lord Jesus Christ, or the Governments of the earth become
Christian Governments.
(Signed) 'THOMAS CHALMERS.'
-----
{1} Some of the reasonings of both the Established and Free
Church courts on this matter would be amusing were they not so
sad. 'Feed my lambs,' said our Saviour, after His resurrection,
to Peter; and again twice over, 'Feed my sheep.' Now, let us
suppose some zealous clergyman setting himself, on the strength
of the latter injunction here, to institute a new order of
preachers. As barbers frequently amuse their employers with
gossip, when divesting them of their beards or trimming their
heads, and have opportunities of addressing their fellow-men
which are not possessed by the other mechanical professions, the
zealous clergyman determines on converting them into preachers,
and sets up a Normal School, in order that they may be taught
the art of composing short sermons, which they are to deliver
when shaving their customers, and longer ones, which they are
to address to them when cutting their hair. And in course of
time the expounding barbers are sent abroad to operate on the
minds and chins of the community. 'There is no mention made of
any such order of prelectors,' says a stubborn layman, 'in my
New Testament;' 'Nor yet in mine,' says another. 'Sheer
Atheism,--Deism at the very least!' exclaims the zealous
clergyman. 'Until Christianity was fairly established in the
world, there was no such thing as shaving at all; the Jews don't
shave yet: besides, does not every decent Church member shave
before going to church? And as for the authority, how read you
the text, "Feed my sheep!'" 'Weighty argument that about the
shaving,' say the laymen; 'but really the text seems to be
stretched just a little too far. The commission is given to
Peter; but it confers on Peter no authority whatever to
commission the barbers. Nay, our grand objection to the
pseudo-successors of Peter is, that they corrupted the Church
after this very manner, by commissioning the non-commissioned,
until they filled the groaning land with cardinals, bishops, and
abbots, monks and nuns,--
"Eremites and friars,
White, black, and grey, with all their trumpery.'"
Now, be it remembered that we are far from placing the
Church-employed schoolmaster on the level of the parson-employed
barber of our illustration. _Rationally_ considered, they are
very different orders indeed; but so far as _direct_ Scripture is
concerned, they stand, we contend, on exactly the same ground.
The laity would do well in this controversy to arm themselves
with the New Testament, and, if their opponents be very
intolerant, to hand them the volume, and request them to turn up
their authority. And, of course, if the intolerance be very
great, the authority must be very direct. Mere arguings on the
subject would but serve to show that it has no actual existence.
When the commission of a captain or lieutenant is legitimately
demanded, it is at once produced; but were one to demand the
commission of a sergeant or boatswain's mate, the man could at
best only reason about it.
THOUGHTS
ON
THE EDUCATIONAL QUESTION.
CHAPTER FIRST.
Disputes regarding the meaning embodied by Chalmers in his
Educational Document--Narrative suited to throw some light on
the subject--Consideration of the Document itself--Testimony
respecting it of the Hon. Mr. Fox Maule.
One of the most important controversies which has arisen within
the pale of the Romish Church--that between the Jansenists and
Jesuits--was made to hinge for many years on a case of disputed
meaning in the writings of a certain deceased author. There were five
doctrines of a well-defined character which, the Jesuits said, were to
be found in the works of Cornelius Jansenius, umquhile Bishop of
Ypres, but which, the Jansenists asserted, were not to be found in
anything Jansenius had ever written. And in the attempt to decide
this simple question of fact, as Pascal calls it, the School of the
Sorbonne and the Court of the Inquisition were completely baffled;
and zealous Roman Catholics heard without conviction the verdict of
councils, and failed to acquiesce in the judgment of even the Pope.
We have been reminded oftener than once of this singular controversy,
by the late discussions which have arisen in our church courts
regarding the meaning embodied by Chalmers in that posthumous document
on the Educational question, which is destined, we hold, to settle the
whole controversy. At first we regarded it as matter of wonder that
such discussions should have arisen; for we had held that there was
really little room for difference respecting the meaning of
Chalmers,--a man whose nature it was to deal with broad truths, not
with little distinctions; and who had always the will, and certainly
did not lack the ability, of making himself thoroughly understood. We
have since thought, however, that as there is nothing which has once
occurred that may not occur again, what happened to the writings of
Jansenius might well happen to one of the writings of Chalmers; and
further, that from certain conversations which we had held with the
illustrious deceased a few months before his death, on the subject of
his paper, and from certain facts in our possession regarding his
views, we had spectacles through which to look at the document in
question, and a key to his meaning, which most of the disputants
wanted. The time has at length come when these helps to the right
understanding of so great an authority should be no longer withheld
from the public. We shall betray no confidence; and should we be
compelled to speak somewhat more in the first person, and of
ourselves, than may seem quite accordant with good taste, our readers
will, we trust, suffer us to remind them that we do not commit the
fault very often, or very offensively, and that the present employment
of the personal pronoun, just a little modified by the editorial _we_,
seems inevitably incident to the special line of statement on which we
propose to enter.
During the greater part of the years 1845 and 1846, the Editor of
the _Witness_ was set aside from his professional labours by a
protracted illness, in part at least an effect of the perhaps too
assiduous prosecution of these labours at a previous period. He had
to cease per force even from taking a very fixed view of what the
Church was doing or purposing; and when, early in January 1847, he
returned, after a long and dreary period of rustication, in improved
health to Edinburgh, he at least possessed the advantage--much
prized by artists and authors in their respective walks--of being
able to look over the length and breadth of his subject with a
_fresh_ eye. And, in doing so, there was one special circumstance
in the survey suited to excite some alarm. We found that in all the
various schemes of the Free Church, with but one exception, its
extensively spread membership and its more active leaders were
thoroughly at one; but that in that exceptional scheme they were
not at all at one. They were at one in their views respecting the
ecclesiastical character of ministers, elders, and church courts,
and of the absolute necessity which exists that these, and these
only, should possess the spiritual key. Further, they were wholly at
one in recognising the command of our adorable Saviour to preach
the gospel to all nations, as of perpetual obligation on the
Churches. But regarding what we shall term, without taking an undue
liberty with the language, the pedagogical teaching of religion, they
differed _in toto_. Practically, and to all intents and purposes,
the schoolmaster, in the eye of the membership of our Church, and
of the other Scottish Churches, was simply a layman, the proper
business of whose profession was the communication of secular
learning. And as in choosing their tailors and shoemakers the
people selected for themselves the craftsmen who made the best and
handsomest shoes and clothes, so, in selecting a schoolmaster for
their children, they were sure always to select the teacher who was
found to turn out the best scholars.{2} All other things equal, they
would have preferred a serious, devout schoolmaster to one who was
not serious nor devout, just as, _coeteris paribus_, they would have
preferred a serious shoemaker or tailor to a non-religious maker of
shoes or clothes; but religious character was not permitted to stand
as a compensatory item for professional skill; nay, men who might be
almost content to put up with a botched coat or a botched pair of
shoes for the sake of the good man who spoiled them, were particularly
careful not to botch, on any account whatever, the education of
their children. In a country in which there was more importance
attached than in perhaps any other in the world to the religious
teaching of the minister, there was so little importance attached to
the religious teaching of the schoolmaster, that, when weighed
against even a slight modicum of secular qualification, it was
found to have no sensible weight. And with this great practical fact
some of our leading men seemed to be so little acquainted, that they
were going on with the machinery of their educational scheme, on a
scale at least co-extensive with the Free Church, as if, like that
Church--all-potent in her spiritual character--it had a moving power
in the affections of the people competent to speed it on. And it was
the great discrepancy with regard to this scheme which existed
between the feelings of the people and the anticipations of some of
our leading men, clerical and lay, that excited our alarm. Unless
that discrepancy be removed, we said--unless the anticipations of
the men engaged in the laying down of this scheme be sobered to the
level of the feelings of the lay membership of our Church, or,
_vice versa_, the feelings of the lay membership of our Church be
raised to the level of the anticipations of our leaders--bankruptcy
will be the infallible result. From the contributions of our
laymen can the scheme alone derive its support; and if our leaders
lay it down on a large scale, and our laymen contribute on a small
one, alas for its solvency! Such were our views, and such our
inferences, on this occasion; and to Thomas Chalmers, at once our
wisest and our humblest man--patient to hear, and sagacious to
see--we determined on communicating them.
He had kindly visited the writer, to congratulate him in his dwelling
on his return to comparative health and strength; and after a long and
serious conversation, in which he urged the importance of maintaining
the _Witness_ in honest independency, uninfluenced by cliques and
parties, whether secular or ecclesiastical, the prospects of the Free
Church educational scheme were briefly discussed. He was evidently
struck by the view which we communicated, and received it in far other
than that parliamentary style which can politely set aside, with some
soothing half-compliment, the suggestions that run counter to a
favourite course of policy already lined out and determined upon. In
the discrepancy which we pointed out to him he recognised a fact of
the practical kind, which rarely fail to influence the affairs upon
which they bear; and in accordance with his character--for no man
could be more thoroughly convinced that free discussion never hurts a
good cause, and that second thoughts are always wiser than first
ones--he expressed a wish to see the educational question brought at
once to the columns of the _Witness_, and probed to its bottom. We
could not, however, see at that time how the thing was to be
introduced in a practical form, and preferred waiting on for an
opportunity, which in the course of events soon occurred. The
Government came forward with its proposal of educational grants, and
the question was raised--certainly not by the writer of these
chapters--whether or no the Free Church could conscientiously avail
herself of these. It was promptly decided by some few of our leading
men, clerical and lay, that she could not; and we saw in the decision,
unless carried by appeal to our country ministers and the people, and
by them reversed, the introduction of a further element of certain
dissolution in our educational scheme.
The status of the schoolmaster had been made so exceedingly
ecclesiastical, and his profession so very spiritual, that the money
of that Government of the country whose right and duty it is to
educate its people, was regarded as too vile and base a thing to be
applied to his support. There were even rumours afloat that our
schoolmasters were on the eve of being _ordained_. We trust, however,
that the report was a false one, or, at worst, that the men who
employed the word had made a slip in their English, and for the time
at least had forgot its meaning. _Ordination_ means that special act
which gives status and standing within the ecclesiastical province. It
implies the enjoined use of that spiritual key which is entrusted by
Christ to His Church, that it may be employed just as _He_ directs,
and in no other way. The Presbyterian Church has as much right to
institute prelates as to ordain pedagogues. 'Remember,' said an
ancient Scottish worthy, in 'lifting up his protestation' in troublous
times, 'that the Lord has fashioned His Kirk by the uncounterfeited
work of His own new creation; or, as the prophet speaketh, "hath made
us, and not we ourselves;" and that we must not presume to fashion a
new portraiture of a Kirk, and a _new form of divine service, which
God in His word hath not before allowed_; seeing that, were we to
extend our authority further than the calling we have of God doth
permit--as, namely, if we should (as God forbid!) authorize the
authority of bishops--we should bring into the Kirk of God the
ordinance of man.' If men are to depart from the 'law and the
testimony,' we hold that the especial mode of their departure may be
very much a matter of taste, and would, for our own part, prefer
bishops and cardinals to poor dominies of the gospel, somewhat out at
the elbows.{3} The fine linen and the purple, the cope and the stole,
would at least have the effect of giving that sort of pleasant relief
to the widespread sable of our Assemblies which they possessed of
yore, ere they for ever lost the gay uniform of the Lord High
Commissioner, the gold lace of his dragoon officers, and the glitter
of his pages in silver and scarlet. 'We are two of the humblest
servants of Mother Church,' said the Prior and his companion to Wamba,
the jester of Rotherwood. 'Two of the humblest servants of Mother
Church!' repeated Wamba; 'I should rather like to see her seneschals,
her chief butlers, and her other principal domestics.'
We again saw Chalmers, and, in a corner apart from a social party, of
which his kind and genial heart formed the attractive centre, we found
he thoroughly agreed with us in holding that the time for the
discussion of the educational question had fully come. It was a
question, he said, on which he had not yet fully made up his mind:
there was, however, one point on which he seemed clear--though, at
this distance of time, we cannot definitively say whether the remark
regarding it came spontaneously from himself, or was suggested by any
query of ours--and that was the right and duty of a Government to
_instruct_, and consequently of the governed to receive the
instruction thus communicated, if in itself good. We remarked in turn,
that there were various points on which we also had to 'grope our way'
(a phrase to which the reader will find him referring in his note,
which we subjoin); but that regarding the inherently secular
character of the schoolmaster, and the right and duty of the
Government to employ him in behalf of its people, we had no doubt
whatever. And so, parting for the time, we commenced that series of
articles which, as they were not wholly without influence in
communicating juster views of the place and status of the schoolmaster
than had formerly obtained in the Free Church, and as they had some
little effect in leading the Church to take at least one step in
averting the otherwise inevitable ruin which brooded over her
educational scheme, the readers of the _Witness_ may perhaps remember.
We were met in controversy on the question by a man, the honesty of
whose purpose in this, as in every other matter, and the warmth of
whose zeal for the Church which he loved, and for which he laboured,
no one has ever questioned, and no one ever will. And if, though
possessed of solid, though perhaps not brilliant talent, he failed on
this occasion 'in finding his hands,' we are to seek an explanation of
his failure simply in the circumstance that truths of principle--such
as those which establish the right and duty of every Government to
educate its people, or which demonstrate the schoolmaster to possess a
purely secular, not an ecclesiastical standing--or yet truths of fact,
such as that for many years the national teaching of Scotland has
_not_ been religious, or that the better Scottish people will on no
account or consideration sacrifice the secular education of their
children to the dream of a spiritual pedagogy,--are truths which can
neither be controverted nor set aside. He did on one occasion, during
the course--what he no doubt afterwards regretted--raise against us
the cry of infidelity,--a cry which, when employed respecting matters
on which Christ or His apostles have not spoken, really means no more
than that he who employs it, if truly a good man, is bilious, or has a
bad stomach, or has lost the thread of his argument or the equanimity
of his temper. Feeling somewhat annoyed, however, we wished to see
Chalmers once more; but the matter had not escaped his quick eye, and
his kind heart suggested the remedy. In the course of the day in which
our views and reasonings were posted as infidel, we received the
following note from Morningside:--
MORNINGSIDE, _March 13, 1847_.
MY DEAR SIR,--You are getting nobly on on education; not only
groping your way, but making way, and that by a very sensible
step in advance this day.
On my own mind the truth evolves itself very gradually; and I am
yet a far way from the landing-place. Kindest respects to Mrs.
Miller; and with earnest prayer for the comfort and happiness of
both, I ever am, my dear Sir, yours very truly,
THOMAS CHALMERS.
Hugh Miller, Esq.
In short, Thomas Chalmers, by his sympathy and his connivance, had
become as great an infidel as ourselves; and we have submitted to our
readers the evidence of the fact, fully certified under his own
hand.{4} There is a sort of perfection in everything; and perfection
once reached, deterioration usually begins. And when, in bandying the
phrases _infidel_ and _infidelity_--like the feathered missiles in the
game of battledore and shuttlecock--they fell upon Chalmers, we think
there was a droll felicity in the accident, which constitutes for it
an irresistible claim of being the terminal one in the series. The
climax reached its point of extremest elevation; for even should our
infidel-dubbers do their best or worst now, it is not at all likely
they will find out a second Chalmers to hit.
We concluded our course of educational articles; and though we
afterwards saw the distinguished man to whom our eye so frequently
turned, as, under God, the wise pilot of the Free Church, and were
honoured by a communication from him, dictated to his secretary, we
did not again touch on the subject of education. We were, however,
gratified to learn, from men much in his confidence and company--we
hope we do not betray trust in referring to the Rev. Mr. Tasker of the
West Port as one of these--that he regarded our entire course with a
feeling of general approval akin to that to which he had given
expression in his note. It further gratifies us to reflect that our
course had the effect of setting his eminently practical mind
a-working on the whole subject, and led to the production of the
inestimably valuable document, long and carefully pondered, which will
do more to settle the question of national education in Scotland than
all the many volumes which have been written regarding it. As in a
well-known instance in Scottish story, it is the 'dead Douglas' who is
to 'win the field.'
But we lag in our narrative. That melancholy event took place which
cast a shade of sadness over Christendom; and in a few weeks
after, the posthumous document, kindly communicated to us by the
family of the deceased, appeared in the columns of the _Witness_. We
perused it with intense interest; and what we saw in the first
perusal was, that Chalmers had gone far beyond us; and in the
second, that, in laying down his first principles, he had looked at
the subject, as was his nature, in a broader and more general aspect,
and had unlocked the difficulty which it presented in a more
practical and statesmanlike manner. _We_ had, indeed, considered
in the abstract the right and duty of the civil magistrate to
educate his people; but our main object being to ward off otherwise
inevitable bankruptcy from a scheme of our Church, and having to
deal with a sort of vicious Cameronianism, that would not accept of
the magistrate's money, even though he gave the Bible and the
Shorter Catechism along with it, we had merely contended that
money given in connection with the Bible and Shorter Catechism is a
very excellent thing, and especially so to men who cannot fulfil their
obligations or pay their debts without it. But Chalmers had looked
beyond the difficulties of a scheme, to the emergencies of a nation.
At the request of many of our readers, we have reprinted his document
in full, as it originally appeared.{5} First, let it be remarked
that, after briefly stating what he deemed the optimity of the
question, he passes on to what he considered the only mode of
settling it practically, in the present divided state of the
Church and country. And in doing so he lays down, as a preliminary
step, the absolute right and duty of the Government to educate,
altogether independently of the theological differences or divisions
which may obtain among the people or in the Churches. 'As there
seems no reason,' he says, 'why, because of these unresolved
differences, a public measure for the health of all, for the
recreation of all, for the economic advancement of all, should be
held in abeyance, there seems as little reason why, because of these
differences, a public measure for raising the general intelligence of
all should be held in abeyance.' Such is the principle which he
enunciates regarding the party possessing the right to _educate_.
Let the reader next mark in what terms he speaks of the party _to be_
educated, or under whose immediate superintendence the education is
to be conducted. Those who most widely misunderstand the Doctor's
meaning--from the circumstance, perhaps, that their views are most
essentially at variance with those which he entertained--seem to hold
that this _absolute_ right on the part of Government is somehow
_conditional_ on the parties to be educated, or to superintend the
education, coming forward to them _in the character of Churches_.
They deem it necessary to the integrity of his meaning, that
Presbyterians should come forward as Presbyterians, Puseyites as
Puseyites, Papists as Papists, and Socinians as Socinians; in
which case, of course, all could be set right so far as the Free
Church conscience was concerned in the matter, by taking the State's
grant with the one hand, and holding out an indignant protest
against its extension to the erroneous sects in the other. But
that Chalmers could have contemplated anything so monstrous as
that _Scotchmen_ should think of coming forward simply as Scotchmen,
they cannot believe. He must have regarded the State's _unconditional_
right to educate as _conditional_ after all, and dependent on the
form assumed by the party on which or through which it was to be
exercised. Let the reader examine for himself, and see whether
there exists in the document a single expression suited to favour
such a view. Nothing can be plainer than the words 'Parliament,'
'Government,' 'State,' 'Legislature,' employed to designate the
educating party on the one hand; and surely nothing plainer than
the words 'people,' '_men_ of all Churches and denominations,'
'families of the land,' and 'society at large,' made use of in
designating the party to be educated, or entrusted with the
educational means or machinery, on the other. There is a well-grounded
confidence expressed in the Christian and philanthropic zeal which
obtain throughout society; but the only bodies ecclesiastical which
we find specially named--if, indeed, one of these can be regarded as
at all ecclesiastical--are the 'Unitarians and the Catholics.' It was
with the broad question of national education in its relation to two
great parties placed in happy opposition, as the 'inner hall of
legislation' and the 'outer field of society,' that we find Dr.
Chalmers mainly dealing. And yet the document _does_ contain
palpable reference to the Government scheme. There is one clause in
which it urges the propriety of 'leaving [the matter of religion]
to the parties who had to do with the erection and management of
the schools which [the rulers of the country] had been called on
to assist.' But the greater includes the less, and the much that is
general in the paper is in no degree neutralized by the little in it
that is particular. The Hon. Mr. Fox Maule could perhaps throw some
additional light on this matter. It was at his special desire, and
in consequence of a conversation on the subject which he held with
Chalmers, that the document was drawn up. The nature of the
request could not, of course, alter whatever is absolutely present in
what it was the means of producing; but it would be something to
know whether what the statesman asked was a decision on a special
educational scheme, or--what any statesman might well desire to
possess--the judgment of so wise and great a man on the all-important
subject of national education.
It will be found that the following valuable letters from Dr. Guthrie
and the Hon. Mr. Fox Maule determine the meaning of Dr. Chalmers on
his own authority:--
2, LAURISTON LANE, _March 5, 1850_.
MY DEAR MR. MILLER,--When such conflicting statements were
advanced as to the bearing of Dr. Chalmers' celebrated paper on
education, although I had no doubt in my own mind that the view
you had taken of that valuable document was the correct one, and
had that view confirmed by a conversation I had with his
son-in-law, Mr. M'Kenzie, who heard Dr Chalmers discuss the
matter in London, and acted, indeed, as his amanuensis in
writing that paper; yet I thought it were well also to see
whether Mr. Maule could throw any light on the subject. I wrote
him with that object in view; and while we must regret that we
are called to differ from some most eminent and excellent
friends on this important question, it both comforts and
confirms us to find another most important testimony in the
letter which I now send to you, in favour of our opinion, that
Dr. Chalmers, had God spared him to this day, would have lifted
up his mighty voice to advocate the views in which we are
agreed.
Into the fermenting mind of the public it is the duty of every
one to cast in whatever may, by God's blessing, lead to a happy
termination of this great question; and with this view I send
you the letter which I have had the honour to receive from Mr.
Maule.--Believe me, yours ever,
THOMAS GUTHRIE.
GROSVENOR STREET, _March 4, 1850_.
MY DEAR DR. GUTHRIE,--When you wrote me some time since upon the
subject of the communication made to me by the late Dr. Chalmers
upon the all-important question of education, I could not take
upon myself to say positively (though I had very little doubt in
my mind) whether that document took its origin in a desire
expressed by me to have Dr. Chalmers' opinion on the general
question of education, or merely upon the scheme laid down and
pursued by the Committee of Privy Council. My impression has
always been, that Dr. Chalmers addressed himself to the question
as a whole; and on looking over my papers a few days since, I
find that impression quite confirmed by the following sentence,
in a note in Dr. Chalmers' handwriting, bearing date 21st May
1847:--'I hope that by to-morrow night I shall have prepared a
few brief sentences on the _subject of education_.'
None of us thought how inestimable these brief sentences were to
become, forming, as they do, the last written evidence of the
tone of his great mind on this subject.
Should you address yourself to this question, you are, in my
opinion, fully justified in dealing with the _memorandum_ as
referring to general and national arrangements, and not to
those which are essentially of a temporary and varying
character.--Believe me, with great esteem, yours sincerely,
F. MAULE.
-----
{2} This passage has been referred to in several Free Church
presbyteries, as if the writer had affirmed that the schoolmaster
stands on no higher level than the shoemaker or tailor. We need
scarce say, however, that the passage conveys no such meaning.
By affirming that in matters of chimney-sweeping men choose
for themselves the best chimney-sweeps, and in matters of
indisposition or disease the best physicians, we do not at
all level the physician with the chimney-sweep: we merely
intimate that there is a _best_ in both professions, and that
men select that best, as preferable to what is inferior or worse,
on every occasion they can.
{3} We have learned that what was actually intended at this time
was, not to _ordain_, but only to _induct_ our schoolmasters. And
their _induction_ would have made, we doubt not, what Foigard in
the play calls a 'very pretty sheremony.' But no mere ceremony,
however imposing, can communicate to a secular profession a
spiritual status or character.
{4} A fac-simile of this letter was reproduced in the columns of
the _Witness_.--ED.
{5} See Introduction.
CHAPTER SECOND.
Right and Duty of the Civil Magistrate to educate the
People--Founded on two distinct Principles, the one economic,
the other judicial--Right and Duty of the Parent--Natural, not
Ecclesiastical--Examination of the purely Ecclesiastical
Claim--The real Rights in the case those of the State, the
Parent, and the Ratepayer--The terms Parent and Ratepayer
convertible into the one term Householder.
Wherever mind is employed, thought will be evolved; and in all
questions of a practical character, truth, when honestly sought, is
ultimately found. And so we deem it a happy circumstance, that there
should be more minds honestly engaged at the present time on the
educational problem than at perhaps any former period. To the upright
light will arise. The question cannot be too profoundly pondered, nor
too carefully discussed; and at the urgent request of not a few of our
better readers, we purpose examining it anew in a course of occasional
articles, convinced that its crisis has at length come, just as the
crisis of the Church question had in reality come when the late Dr.
M'Crie published his extraordinary pamphlet;{6} and that it must
depend on the part now taken by the Free Church in this matter,
whether some ten years hence she is to posses any share, even the
slightest, in the education of the country. We ask our readers
severely to test all our statements, whether of principle or of fact,
and to suffer nothing in the least to influence them which is not
rational, or which is not true.
In the first place, then, we hold with Chalmers, that it is
unquestionably the right and duty of the civil magistrate to educate
his people, altogether independently of the religion which _he
himself holds_, or of the religious differences which may unhappily
obtain among _them_. Even should there be as many sects in a country
as there are families or individuals, the right and duty still remain.
Religion, in such circumstances, can palpably form no part of a
Government scheme of tuition; but there is nothing in the element of
religious difference to furnish even a pretext for excluding those
important secular branches which bear reference to the principles of
trade, the qualities of matter, the relations of numbers, the
properties of figured space, the philosophy of grammar, or the form
and body which in various countries and ages literature and the
_belles lettres_ have assumed. And this right and duty of a Government
to instruct, rest, we hold, on two distinct principles,--the one
_economic_, the other _judicial_. Education adds immensely to the
_economic_ value of the subjects of a State. The professional and
mercantile men who in this country live by their own exertions, and
pay the income tax, and all the other direct taxes, are educated men;
whereas its uneducated men do not pay the direct taxes, and, save in
the article of intoxicating drink, very little of the indirect ones;
and a large proportion of their number, so far from contributing to
the national wealth, are positive burdens on the community. And on the
class of facts to which this important fact belongs rests the
_economic_ right and duty of the civil magistrate to educate.
His _judicial_ right and duty are founded on the circumstance, that
the laws which he promulgates are _written_ laws, and that what he
writes for the guidance of the people, the people ought to be enabled
to read; seeing that to punish for the breach of a law, of the
existence of which he who breaks it has been left in ignorance, is not
man-law, but what Jeremy Bentham well designates dog-law, and
altogether unjust. We are, of course, far from supposing that every
British subject who can read is to peruse the vast library which the
British Acts of themselves compose; but we hold that education forms
the only direct means through which written law, as a regulator of
conduct, can be known, and that, in consequence, in its practical
breadth and average aspect, it is only educated men who know it, and
only uneducated men who are ignorant of it. And hence the derivation
of the magistrate's _judicial_ right and duty. But on this part of our
subject, with Free Churchmen for our readers, we need not surely
insist. Our Church has homologated at least the general principle of
the civil magistrate's right and duty, by becoming the recipient of
his educational grant. If he has no right to give, she can have no
right to receive. If he, instead of performing a duty, has perpetrated
a wrong, she, to all intents and purposes, being guilty of receipt, is
a participator in the crime. Nay, further, let it be remarked that, as
indicated by the speeches of some of our abler and more influential
men, there seems to exist a decided wish on the part of the Free
Church, that the State, in its educational grants, should assume a
purely secular character, and dispense with the certificate of
religious training which it at present demands,--a certificate which,
though anomalously required of sects of the most opposite tenets,
constitutes notwithstanding, in this business of grants, the sole
recognition of religion on the part of the Government. Now this, if a
fact at all, is essentially a noticeable and pregnant one, and shows
how much opposite parties are in reality at one on a principle
regarding which they at least _seem_ to dispute.
The right and duty of the civil magistrate thus established, let us
next consider another main element in the question,--the right and
duty of the parent. It is, we assert, imperative on every parent in
Scotland and elsewhere to educate his children; and on the principle
that he is a joint contributor with the Government to the support of
every national teacher--the Government giving _salary_, and the
parent _fees_--we assert further, that should the Government give its
salary 'exclusively as the expression of its value for a good
_secular_ education,' _he_ may, notwithstanding, demand that his fees
should be received as the representative of _his_ value for a good
_religious_ education. Whether his principles be those of the
Voluntary or of the Establishment-man, the same schoolmaster who is a
secular teacher in relation to the Government, may be a religious
teacher in relation to him. For unless the State positively _forbid_
its schoolmaster to communicate religious instruction, he exists to
the parent, in virtue of the fees given and received, in exactly the
circumstances of the teacher of any adventure school.
Let us further remark, that the rights of the parent in the matter of
education are not _ecclesiastical_, but _natural_ rights. The writer
of this article is one of the parents of Scotland; and, simply as
such, he claims for himself the right of choosing his children's
teacher on his own responsibility, and of determining what his
children are to be taught. The Rev. Dr. Thomas Guthrie is his
minister; and _he_ also is one of the parents of Scotland, and enjoys,
as such, a right identical in all respects with that of his
parishioner and hearer. But it is only an identical and co-equal
right. Should the writer send his boy to a Socialist or Popish school,
to be taught either gross superstition or gross infidelity, the
minister would have a right to interfere, and, if entreaty and
remonstrance failed, to bring him to discipline for so palpable a
breach of his baptismal engagement. If, on the other hand, it was the
minister who had sent his boy to the Socialist or Popish school, the
parishioner would have a right to interfere, and, were entreaty and
remonstrance disregarded, to bring _him_ to discipline. Minister and
parishioner stand, we repeat, in this matter, on exactly the same
level. Nor have ten, twenty, a hundred, a thousand, twenty thousand,
or a hundred thousand lay parents, or yet ten, twenty, a hundred, or
a thousand clerical parents, whether existing as a congregation or
hundreds of congregations on the one hand, or as a Presbytery, Synod,
or General Assembly on the other, rights in this matter that in the
least differ in their nature from the rights possessed by the single
clergyman, Dr. Guthrie, or by the single layman, the Editor of the
_Witness_. The sole right which exists in the case--that of the
parent--is a _natural_ right, not an _ecclesiastical_ one; and the
sole modification which it can receive from the superadded element of
Church membership is simply that modification to which we refer as
founded on the religious duty of both member and minister, in its
relation to ecclesiastical law and the baptismal vow.
Nor, be it observed, does this our recognition, in our character as a
Church member, of ecclesiastical rule and authority, give our minister
any true grounds for urging that it is our bounden duty, in virtue of
our parental engagements, and from the existence of such general texts
as the often quoted one, 'Train up a child,' etc., to send our
children to some school in which religion is expressly taught. Far
less does it give him a right to _demand_ any such thing. We are Free
Church in our principles; and the grand distinctive principle for
which, during the protracted Church controversy, we never ceased to
contend, was simply the right of choosing our own religious teacher,
on the strength of our own convictions, and on our own exclusive
responsibility. We laughed to scorn the idea that the three items of
Dr. George Cook's ceaseless iterations--life, literature, and
doctrine--formed the full tale of ministerial qualification: there was
yet a fourth item, infinitely more important than all the others put
together, viz. _godliness_, or religion proper, or, in yet other
words, the regeneration of the whole man by the Spirit of God. And on
this last item we held that it was the right and duty of the people
who Chose for themselves, _and for their children_, a religious
teacher, and of none others, clerical or lay, solemnly to decide. And
while we still hold by this sacred principle on the one hand, we see
clearly, on the other, that the sole qualifications of our Free Church
teachers, as prepared in our Normal Schools, correspond to but Dr.
Cook's three items; nay, that instead of exceeding, they fall greatly
short of these. The certificate of character which the young
candidates bring to the institution answers but lamely to the item
'_life_;' the amount of secular instruction imparted to them within
its walls answers but inadequately to the item '_literature_;' while
the modicum of theological training received, most certainly not equal
to a four years' course of theology at a Divinity Hall, answers but
indifferently to the crowning item of the three--'_doctrine_.' That
paramount item, conversion on the part of the teacher to God, is still
unaccounted for; and we contend that, respecting that item, the
parent, and the parent only, has a right to decide, all difficult and
doubtful as the decision may be: for be it remembered, that there
exist no such data on which to arrive at a judgment in cases of this
nature, as exist in the choosing of a minister. And though we would
deem it eminently right and proper that our child should read his
daily Scripture lesson to some respectable schoolmaster, a believer in
the divine authority of revelation, and should repeat to him his
weekly tale of questions from the National Catechism, yet to the
_extempore_ religious teaching of no merely respectable schoolmaster
would we subject our child's heart and conscience. For we hold that
the religious lessons of the unregenerate lack regenerating life; and
that whatever in this all-important department does not intenerate and
soften, rarely fails to harden and to sear. Religious preachments from
a secular heart are the droppings of a petrifying spring, which
convert all that they fall upon into stone. Further, we hold that a
mistake regarding the character of a schoolmaster authorized to teach
religion _extempore_ might be greatly more serious, and might involve
an immensely deeper responsibility, than a similar mistake regarding a
minister. The minister preaches to grown men--a large proportion of
them members of the Church--not a few of them office-bearers in its
service, and competent, in consequence, to judge respecting both the
doctrine which he exhibits and the mode of its exhibition; but it is
children, immature of judgment, and extremely limited in their
knowledge, whom the religion-teaching schoolmaster has to address.
Nay, more: in choosing a minister, we may mistake the character of the
man; but there can be no mistake made regarding the character of the
office, seeing that it is an office appointed by God Himself; whereas
in choosing a religion-teaching schoolmaster, we may mistake the
character of both the man and the office too. We are responsible in
the one case for only the man; we are responsible in the other for
both the man and the office.
We have yet another objection to any authoritative interference on the
part of ecclesiastical courts with the natural rights and enjoined
duties of the parent in the matter of education. Even though we fully
recognised some conscientious teacher as himself in possession of the
divine life, we might regard him as very unfitted, from some natural
harshness of temper, or some coldness of heart, or some infirmity of
judgment, for being a missionary of religion to the children under his
care. At one period early in life we spent many a leisure hour in
drawing up a gossiping little history of our native town, and found,
in tracing out the _memorabilia_ of its parish school, that the Rev.
John Russell, afterwards of Kilmarnock and Stirling, and somewhat
famous in Scottish literature as one of the clerical antagonists of
Burns, had taught in it for twelve years, and that several of his
pupils (now long since departed) still lived. We sought them out one
by one, and succeeded in rescuing several curious passages in his
history, and in finding that, though not one among them doubted the
sincerity of his religion, nor yet his conscientiousness as a
schoolmaster, they all equally regarded him as a harsh-tempered,
irascible man, who succeeded in inspiring all his pupils with fear,
but not one of them with love. Now, to no such type of schoolmaster,
however strong our conviction of his personal piety, would we entrust
the religious teaching of our child. If necessitated to place our boy
under his pedagogical rule and superintendence, we would address him
thus: Lacking time, and mayhap ability, ourselves to instruct our son,
we entrust him to you, and this simply on the same division of labour
principle on which we give the making of our shoes to a shoemaker, and
the making of our clothes to a tailor. And in order that you may not
lack the power necessary to the accomplishment of your task--for we
hold that 'folly is bound up in the heart of a child'--we make over to
you our authority to admonish and correct. But though we can put into
your hands the parental rod--with an advice, however, to use it
discreetly and with temper--there are things which we cannot
communicate to you. We cannot make over to you our child's affection
for us, nor yet our affection for our child: with these joys 'a
stranger intermeddleth not.' And as religious teaching without love,
and conducted under the exclusive influence of fear, may and must be
barren--nay, worse than barren--we ask you to leave this part of our
duty as a parent entirely to ourselves. _Our_ duty it is, and to you
we delegate no part of it; and this, not because we deem it
unimportant, but because we deem it important in the highest degree,
and are solicitous that no unkindly element should mar it in its
effects. Now where, we ask, is the ecclesiastical office-bearer who,
in his official character, or in any character or capacity whatever,
has a right authoritatively to challenge our rejection, on our own
parental responsibility, of the religious teaching of even a converted
schoolmaster, on purely reasonable grounds such as these? Or where is
the ecclesiastical office-bearer who has an authoritative right to
challenge our yet weightier Free Church objection to the religious
teaching of a schoolmaster whom we cannot avoid regarding as an
unregenerate man, or whom we at least do not know to be a regenerate
one? Or yet further, where is the ecclesiastical office-bearer who has
a right authoritatively to bear down or set aside our purely
Protestant caveat against a teacher of religion who, in his
professional capacity, has no place or standing in the word of God?
The right and duty of the civil magistrate in all circumstances to
educate his people, and of parents to choose their children's teacher,
and to determine what they are to be taught, we are compelled to
recognise; and there seems to be a harmony between the two rights--the
parental and the magisterial, with the _salary_ of the one and the
_fees_ of the other--suited, we think, to unlock many a difficulty;
but the authoritative standing, in this question, of the ecclesiastic
as such, we have hitherto failed to see. The parent, as a Church
member or minister, is amenable to discipline; but his natural rights
in the matter are simply those of the parent, and his political rights
simply those of the subject and the ratepayer.
And in this educational question certain political rights _are_
involved. In the present state of things, the parish schoolmasters of
the kingdom are chosen by the parish ministers and parish heritors:
the two elements involved are the ecclesiastical and the political.
But while we see the parish minister as but the mere idle image of a
state of things passed away for ever, and possessed in his ministerial
capacity of merely a statutory right, which, though it exists to-day,
may be justly swept away to-morrow, we recognise the heritor as
possessed of a real right; and what we challenge is merely its
engrossing extent, not its nature. We regard it as just in kind, but
exorbitant in degree; and on the simple principle that the money of
the State is the money of the people, and that the people have a right
to determine that it be not misapplied or misdirected, we would, with
certain limitations, extend to the ratepayers as a body the
privileges, in this educational department, now exclusively exercised
by the heritors. In that educational franchise which we would fain see
extended to the Scottish people, we recognise two great elements, and
but two only,--the natural, or that of the parent; and the political,
or that of the ratepayer. These form the two opposite sides of the
pyramid; and, though diverse in their nature, let the reader mark how
nicely for all practical purposes they converge into the point,
_householder_. The householders of Scotland include all the ratepayers
of Scotland. The householders of Scotland include also all the parents
of Scotland. We would therefore fix on the householders of a parish as
the class in whom the right of nominating the parish schoolmaster
should be vested. But on the same principle of high expediency on
which we exclude householders of a certain standing from exercising
the political franchise in the election of a member of Parliament,
would we exclude certain other householders, of, however, a much lower
standing, from voting in the election of a parish schoolmaster. We are
not prepared to be Chartists in either department,--the educational or
the political; and this simply on the ground that Chartism in either
would be prejudicial to the general good. On this part of the subject,
however, we shall enter at full length in our next.
Meanwhile we again urge our readers carefully to examine for
themselves all our statements and propositions,--to take nothing on
trust,--to set no store by any man's _ipse dixit_, be he editor or
elder, minister or layman. In this question, as in a thousand others,
'truth lies at the bottom of the well;' and if she be not now found
and consulted, to the exclusion of every prejudice, and the disregard
of every petty little interest and sinister motive, it will be ill ten
years hence with the Free Church of Scotland in her character as an
educator. Her safety rests, in the present crisis, in the just and the
true, and in the just and the true only.
-----
{6} _What ought the General Assembly to do at the present
Crisis?_ (1833.)
CHAPTER THIRD.
Parties to whom the Educational Franchise might be safely
extended--House Proprietors, House Tenants of a certain
standing, Farmers, Crofters--Scheme of an Educational
Faculty--Effects of the desired Extension--It would restore the
National Schools to the People of the Nation.
It is the right and duty of every Government to educate its people,
whatever the kinds or varieties of religion which may obtain among
them;--it is the right and duty of every parent to select, on his
own responsibility, his children's teacher, and to determine what his
children are to be taught;--it is the right and duty of every member
of the commonwealth to see that the commonwealth's money, devoted to
educational purposes, be not squandered on incompetent men, and,
in virtue of his contributions as a ratepayer, to possess a voice
with the parents of a country in the selection of its salaried
schoolmasters. There exist, on the one hand, the right and duty of
the State; there exist, on the other, the rights and duties of the
parents and ratepayers; and we find both parents and ratepayers
presenting themselves in the aggregate, and for all practical
purposes in this matter, as a single class, viz. the _householders_
of the kingdom. But as, in dealing with these in purely political
questions, we exclude a certain portion of them from the exercise of
the _political_ franchise, and that simply because, as classes, they
are uninformed or dangerous, and might employ power, if they
possessed it, to the public prejudice, so would we exclude a certain
proportion of them, on similar grounds, from the _educational_
franchise. In selecting, however, the safe classes of householders,
we would employ tests somewhat dissimilar in their character from
those to which the Reform Act extends its exclusive sanction, and
establish a somewhat different order of qualifications from those
which it erects.
In the first place, we would fain extend the educational franchise to
all those householders of Scotland who inhabit houses of their own,
however humble in kind, or however low the valuation of their
rental. We know not a safer or more solid, or, in the main, more
intelligent class, than those working men of the country who, with the
savings of half a lifetime, build or purchase a dwelling for
themselves, and then sit down rent-free for the rest of their lives,
each 'the monarch of a shed.' With these men we are intimately
acquainted, for we have lived and laboured among them; and very rarely
have we failed to find the thatched domicile, of mayhap two little
rooms and a closet, with a patch of garden-ground behind, of which
some hard-handed country mechanic or labourer had, through his own
exertions, become the proud possessor, forming a higher certificate of
character than masters the most conscientious and discerning could
bestow upon their _employés_, or even Churches themselves upon their
members. Nor is this house-owning qualification much less valuable
when it has been derived by inheritance--not wrought for; seeing that
the man who retains his little patrimony unsquandered must be at
least a steady, industrious man, the slave of no expensive or
disreputable vice. Let us remark, however, that we would not
attach the educational franchise to property as such: the proprietor
of the house, whether a small house or a large one, would require
to be the _bona fide_ inhabitant of the dwelling which he occupied,
for at least a considerable portion of every year. The second class
to which we would fain see the educational franchise extended are
all those householders of the kingdom who tenant houses of five
pounds annual rent and upwards, who settle with their landlords not
oftener than twice every twelvemonth, and who are at least a year
entered on possession. By fixing the qualification thus high, and
rejecting the monthly or weekly rent-payer, the country would get rid
of at least nineteen-twentieths of the dangerous classes,--the
agricultural labourers, who wander about from parish to parish, some
six or eight months in one locality, and some ten or twelve in
another; the ignorant immigrant Irish, who tenant the poorer hovels
of so many of our western coast parishes; and last, not least, all the
migratory population of our larger towns, who rarely reside half a
year in the same dwelling, and who, though they may in some
instances pay at more than the rate of the yearly five pounds, pay
it weekly, or by the fortnight or month. We regret, however, that
there is a really worthy class which such a qualification would
exclude,--ploughmen, labourers, and country mechanics, who reside
permanently in humble cottages, the property of the owner of the
soil, and who, though their course through life lies on the bleak
edge of poverty, are God-fearing, worthy men, at least morally
qualified to give, in the election of a teacher, an honest and not
unintelligent voice. And yet, hitherto at least, we have failed to
see any principle which a British statesman would recognise as
legitimate, on which this class could be included in the educational
franchise, and their dangerous neighbours of the same political
status kept out. There is yet a third very important class whom we
would fain see in possession of the educational franchise,--those
householders of Scotland who till the soil as tenants, whether
with or without leases, or whether the annual rent which they pay
amounts to three or to three thousand pounds. The tillers of the
soil are a fixed class, greatly more permanent, even where there
exists no lease, than the mere tenant householders; and they
include, especially in the Highlands of Scotland, and the poorer
districts of the low country, a large proportion of the country's
parentage. They are in the main, too, an eminently safe class, and
not less so where the farms are small and the dwellings upon them
mere cottages--to which, save for the surrounding croft or farm, no
franchise could attach--than where they live in elegant houses, and
are the lessees of hundreds of acres. And such are the three great
classes to which, as composing the solid body of the Scottish
nation--to the exclusion of little more than the mere rags that
hang loosely on its vestments--would we extend, did we possess the
power, the educational franchise.
In order, however, to render a franchise thus liberally restricted
more safe and salutary still, we would demand not only certain
qualifications on the part of the parents and ratepayers of the
country, without which they could not be permitted to _vote_, but
also certain other qualifications on the part of the country's
schoolmasters, without which they could not be _voted for_. We
would thus impart to the scheme such a twofold aspect of security as
that for which in a purely ecclesiastical matter we contended, when
we urged that none but Church members should be permitted to choose
their own ministers; and that none but ministers pronounced duly
qualified in life, literature, and doctrine, by a competent
ecclesiastical court, should they be _permitted_ to choose. There
ought to exist a teaching Faculty as certainly as there exists a
medical or legal Faculty, or as there exists in the Church what is
essentially a preacher-licensing Faculty. The membership of a Church
are unfitted in their aggregate character to judge respecting at
least the literature of the young licentiate whom, in their own and
their children's behalf, they call to the pastoral charge;--the
people of a district, however shrewd and solid, are equally
unqualified to determine whether the young practitioner of medicine
or of law who settles among them is competently acquainted with his
profession, and so a fit person to be entrusted with the care of
their health or the protection of their property. And hence the
necessity which exists in all these cases for testing, licensing,
diploma-giving courts or boards, composed of men qualified to decide
regarding those special points of ability or acquirement which the
people, as such, cannot try for themselves. In no case, however, are
courts of this nature more imperatively required than in the case
of the schoolmaster. Neither the amount of literature which he
possesses, nor yet his mastery over the most approved modes of
communicating it, can be tested by the people, who, as parents and
ratepayers, possess the exclusive right to make choice of him for
their parish or district school; and hence the necessity that what
they cannot do for themselves should be previously done for them by
some competent court or board, and that no teacher who did not possess
a licence or diploma should be eligible to at least an endowed
seminary supported by the public money. With, of course, the
qualifications of the mere adventure-teacher, whether supported by
Churches or individuals, we would permit no board to interfere. As
to the composition of the board itself, that, we hold, might be
determined on very simple principles. Let the College-bred teachers
of Scotland, associated with its University professors, select for
themselves, out of their own number, a dean or chairman, and a court
or committee, legally qualified by Act of Parliament stringently
to try all teachers who may present themselves before them, in order
to be rendered eligible for a national school, and to grant them
licences or diplomas, legally representative of professional
qualification. Whether a teacher, on his election by the people,
might not be a second time tried, especially on behalf of the State
and the ratepayers, by a Government inspectorship, and thus a check
on the board be instituted, we are not at present called on to
determine; but on this we are clear, that the certificate of no
Normal School, in behalf of its own pupils, ought to be received
otherwise than as a mere makeweight in the general item of
professional character; seeing that any such document would be as
much a certificate of the Normal School's own ability in rearing
efficient teachers, as of the pedagogical skill of the teachers
which it reared. The vitiating element of self-interest would
scarce fail to induce, ultimately at least, a suspicious habit of
self-recommendation.
Such, then, in this matter, is our full tale of qualification,
pedagogical and popular, of the educators of the country on the
one hand, and of the educational franchise-holders of the country on
the other. And now we request the reader to mark one mighty result
of the arrangement, which no other yet set in opposition to it could
possibly produce. There are in Scotland about one thousand one
hundred national schools, supported by national resources; and, of
consequence, though fallen into the hands of a mere sect, which in
some localities does not include a tithe of the population, they
of right belong to the Scottish people. And these schools of the
_people_ that extension of the educational franchise which we
desiderate would not fail to restore to the _people_. It would put
them once more in possession of what was their own property _de
facto_ at the Revolution (for at that period, when, with a few
inconsiderable exceptions, they were all of one creed, the ministry of
the Established Church virtually represented them), and of what has
been _de jure_ their property ever since. But by the ministry of no
one Church can the people be represented now. The long rule of
Moderatism,--the consequent formation of the Secession and Relief
Churches,--the growth of Independency and Episcopacy,--and last,
but not least in the series, the Disruption, and the instantaneous
creation of the Free Church, have put an end to that state of things
for ever. The time has in the course of Providence fairly come,
when the people must be permitted in this matter to represent
themselves; and there is one thing sure,--the struggle may be
protracted, but the issue is certain. Important, however, as are our
parish schools, and rich in associations so intimately linked to the
intellectual glory of the nation, that, were they but mere relics of
the past, the custodiership of them might well be most desirable to
the Scottish people, they represent but a small part of the stake
involved in the present all-engrossing movement. It seeks also to
provide from the coffers of the State--on a broad basis of popular
representation, and with the reservation of a right on the part of
the people to supplement whatever instruction the State may not or
cannot supply--that fearful educational destitution of the nation
which is sinking its tens and hundreds of thousands into abject
pauperism and barbarous ignorance, and which neither Churches nor
Societies can of themselves supply. It is the _first_ hopeful movement
of the age; for our own Free Church educational movement, though
perhaps _second_ in point of importance, only serves irrefragably
to demonstrate its necessity.
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
£15 and £20 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 £15 salaries at
the reduced rate of £10, and its £20 salaries at the rate of £13,
13s. 4d.; and those embarrassments, of which the reduction was a
consequence, have borne with distressful effect on the Committee's
_employés_. 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 £10,000 to £12,000 yearly for educational purposes,
she would require to realize some £5000 or £6000 more in order to
qualify her to meet her existing liabilities, estimated at the
very moderate rates laid down in the programme. The £5000 or £6000
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 £5000 or £6000 short of supplying the two-thirds,
and some £6000 or £7000 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:--
'1_st_, 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.
'2_d_, 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.
'3_d_, 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 £15 and £20 scale of salaries: these are now
paid with £10 and £13, 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 £10 or £13 she will receive ultimately only the worth of £10
or £13. 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 £10 and £13 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 £10 or
£13? 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 £10 and £13 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, 1_st_, 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; 2_d_, 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 3_d_, 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.'
-----
{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}
-----
{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 £25 to a maximum of about £34. Let us suppose that they varied,
instead, from a minimum of £60 to a maximum of £80--not large sums,
certainly, but which, with the fees and a free house, would render
every parochial schoolmaster in Scotland worth about from £80 to £100
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 £30 and
a maximum of £40. 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 £20
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.
We are not sure that we quite comprehend the sort of machinery meant
to be included under the term Local or Parochial Boards. It seems
necessary that there should exist Local _Committees_ of the
educational franchise-holders, chosen by themselves, from among
their own number, for terms either definite or indefinite, and
recognised by statute as vested in certain powers of examination and
inquiry. But though a mere name be but a small matter, we are
inclined to regard the term Board as somewhat too formidable and
stiff. Let us, at least for the present, substitute the term
Committee; and as large committees are apt to degenerate into
little mobs, and, as such, to conduct their business noisily and ill,
let us suppose educational committees to consist, in at least
country districts or the smaller towns, of some eight or ten
individuals, selected by the householders for their intelligence,
integrity, and business habits, and with a chairman at their head,
chosen from among their number by themselves. A vacancy occurs, let
us suppose, in either the Grammar or one of the English schools of
the place: the committee, through their chairman, put themselves in
communication with some of the Normal schoolmasters of the south,
and receive from them a few names of deserving and qualified teachers,
possessed of diplomas indicating their professional standing, and
furnished, besides, with trustworthy certificates of character. Or, if
the emoluments of the vacant school be considerable, and some of the
neighbouring teachers, placed on a lower rate of income, have
distinguished themselves by their professional merits, and so
rendered themselves known in the district, let us suppose that they
select _their_ names, and to the number of some two, three, four, or
more, submit them, with the necessary credentials, to their
constituents the householders. And these assemble on some fixed day,
and, from the number placed on the list, select their men. Such,
in the business of electing a schoolmaster, would, we hold, be the
proper work of a committee. In all other seasons, the committee
might be recognised as vested in some of the functions now exercised
by the Established presbyteries, such as that of presiding, in
behalf of the parentage of the locality, at yearly or half-yearly
examinations of the schools, and of watching over the general
morals and official conduct of the teacher. But the power of trial
and dismission, which, of course, would need to exist somewhere, we
would vest in other hands. Let us remark, in the passing, that
much might come to depend ultimately on the portioning out of the
localities into electoral districts of a proper size, and that it
would be perhaps well, as a general rule, that there should be no
subdivisions made of the old parishes. There are few parishes in
Scotland in which the materials of a good committee might not be
found; but there are perhaps many half, and third, and quarter
parishes in which no such materials exist. Further, the householders
of some country hamlet or degraded town-suburb, populous enough to
require its school, might be yet very unfit of themselves to choose
for it a schoolmaster. And hence the necessity for maintaining a
local breadth of representation sufficient to do justice to the
principle of the scheme, and to prevent it, if we may so speak, from
sinking in the less solid parts of the kingdom. A parochial
breadth of base would serve as if to plank over the unsounder portions
of the general surface, and give footing to a system of schools and
teachers worthy, as a whole, of the character and the necessities
of a country wise and enlightened in the main, but that totters on
the brink of a bottomless abyss.
The power of trying, and, if necessary, of dismissing from his charge,
an offending teacher, would, however, as we have said, require to exist
somewhere. Every official, whether of the State or Church, or whether
dependent on a single employer or on a corporation or company, bears
always a twofold character. He is a subject of the realm, and, as
such, amenable to its laws; he has also an official responsibility,
and may be reprimanded or dismissed for offences against the
requirements and duties of his office. A tradesman or mechanic may
go on tippling for years, wasting his means and neglecting his business,
untouched by any law save that great economic law of Providence which
dooms the waster to ultimate want; but for the excise officer, or bank
accountant, or railway clerk, who pursues a similar course, there
exists a court of official responsibility, which anticipates the slow
operation of the natural law, by at once divesting the offender of
his office. And the State-paid schoolmaster must have also his official
responsibility. But it would serve neither the ends of justice nor
the interests of a sound policy to erect his immediate employers into a
court competent to try and condemn: their proper place would be rather
that of parties than of judges; and as parties, we would permit them
simply to conduct against him any case for which they might hold there
existed proper grounds. A schoolmaster chosen by a not large majority,
might find in a few years that his supporters had dwindled into a
positive minority: parents whose boys were careless, or naturally
thick-headed, would of course arrive at the opinion that it was the
teacher who was in fault; nay, a parent who had fallen into arrears
with his fees might come to entertain the design of discharging the
account simply by discharging the schoolmaster; and thus great
injustice might be done to worthy and efficient men, and one of the
most important classes of the community placed in circumstances of a
shackled dependency, which no right-minded teacher could submit to
occupy. What we would propose, then, is, that the power of trial, and
of dismission if necessary, should be vested in a central national
board, furnished with one or more salaried functionaries to record
its sentences and do its drudgery, but consisting mainly of unpaid
members of high character and standing,--some of them, mayhap, members
_ex officio_; the Lord Provost of Edinburgh, let us suppose--the
Principal and some of the Professors of the Edinburgh University--the
Rector, shall we say, of the High School--the Lord Advocate, and
mayhap the Dean of Faculty. And as it would be of importance that there
should be as little new machinery created as possible, the evidence,
criminatory or exculpatory, on which such a board would have to decide
could be taken before the Sheriff Courts of the provinces, and then,
after being carefully sifted by the Sheriffs or their Substitutes,
forwarded in a documentary form to Edinburgh. It would scarce be wise
to attempt extemporizing an official code in a newspaper article;
but the laws of such a code might, we think, be ranged under three
heads,--immorality, incompetency, and breach of trust to the parents.
We would urge the dismissal, as wholly unqualified to stand in the
relation of teacher to the youthhead, of the tippling, licentious, or
dishonest schoolmaster; further, we would urge the dismissal (and in
cases of this kind the corroborative evidence of the Government
inspector might be regarded as indispensable) of an incompetent
teacher who did not serve the purpose of his appointment; and, in the
third and last place, we would urge that a teacher who made an
improper use of his professional influence over his pupils, and of the
opportunities necessarily afforded him, and who taught them to entertain
beliefs, ecclesiastical or semi-ecclesiastical, which their parents
regarded as erroneous, should be severely reprimanded for such an
offence in the first instance, and dismissed if he persevered in it.
We would confer upon the board, in cases of this last kind, no power of
deciding regarding the absolute right or wrong of the dogmas taught.
The teacher might be a zealous Voluntary, who assured the children of
men such as the writer of these articles that their fathers, in
asserting the Establishment principle, approved themselves limbs of that
mystic Babylon which was first founded by Constantine; or he might be a
conscientious Establishment-man, who dutifully pressed upon the
Voluntary pupils under his care, that their parents, though they
perhaps did not know it, were atheistical in their views. And we would
permit no board to determine in such cases, whether Voluntaryism was in
any respect or degree tantamount to atheism, or the Establishment
principle to Popery. But we would ask them to declare, as wise and
honest men, that no schoolmaster, under the pretext of a zeal for
truth, should with impunity break faith with the parents of his pupils,
or prejudice the unformed and ductile minds entrusted to his care
against their hereditary beliefs. Should we, however, do no violence
by such a provision, we have heard it asked, to the conscientious
convictions of the schoolmaster? No, not in the least. If he was in
reality the conscientious man that he professed to be, he would quit
his equivocal position as a teacher, in which, without being
dishonest, he could not fulfil what he deemed his religious duty,
and become a minister; a character in which he would find Churches
within which he could affirm with impunity that Dr. Chalmers was, in
virtue of his Establishment views, little better than a Papist, or
that Robert Hall, seeing he was a Voluntary, must have been an
unconscious atheist at bottom.
Let us next consider what the influence of the ministers of our
Church would be under a national scheme such as that which we
desiderate, and what the probability that the national teaching would
be religious. The minister, as such, would possess, nominally at
least, but a single vote; and if he were what an ordained minister may
in some cases be--merely a suit of black clothes surmounted by a
white neckcloth--the vote, _nominally_ one, would be also _really_
but one; nor ought it, we at once say, to weigh in such cases an
iota more than it counted. Mere black coats and white neckcloths,
though called by congregations, and licensed and ordained by
presbyteries, never yet carried on the proper business of either
Church or school. But if the minister was no mere suit of clothes, but
a Christian man, ordained and called not merely by congregations and
presbyteries, but by God Himself, his one vote in the case would
outweigh hundreds, simply because it would represent the votes of
hundreds. Let us suppose that, with the national schools thrown
open, a vacancy had occurred in the parish school of Cromarty during
the incumbency of the lamented Mr. Stewart. The people of the town
and parish, possessing the educational franchise, would meet; their
committee would deliberate; there would be a teacher chosen,--in
all probability, the present excellent Free Church teacher of the
town; and every man would feel that he had exercised in the election
his own judgment on his own proper responsibility. And yet it would
assuredly be the teacher whom the minister had deemed on the whole
most eligible for the office, that would find himself settled, in
virtue of the transaction, in the parish school. How? Not, certainly,
through any exercise of clerical domination, nor through any
employment of what is still more hateful--clerical manoeuvre--but in
virtue of a widespread confidence reposed by the people in the wisdom
and the integrity of the minister sent them by God Himself to preach
to them the everlasting gospel. In almost all the surrounding
parishes--in Resolis, Rosskeen, Urquhart under the late Dr.
M'Donald, Alness, Kiltearn, Kincardine, Kilmuir, etc. etc. etc.--in
similar cases similar results would follow; and if there are
preachers in that vast northern or north-western tract--which, with
the three northern counties, includes also almost the entire
Highlands--in which such results would _not_ follow, it would be
found that in most cases the fault lay rather with the ordained
suits of black, topped by the white neckcloths, than with the
people whom they failed to influence.
As for the religion or the religious teaching of the schools, we
hold it to be one of the advantages of the proposed scheme, that it
would really stir up both ministers and people to think seriously of
the matter, and to secure for the country truly religious teaching,
so far as it was found to be at once practicable and good. Previous to
the year 1843, when the parish schools lay fully within our power,
there was really nothing done to introduce religious teaching into
_them_; we had it all secure on written sheepskin, that their
teaching should and might be religious, for we had them all fast
bound to the Establishment; and, as if that were enough of itself,
ministers, backed by heritors and their factors, went on filling
these parish schools with men who stood the test of the Disruption
worse, in the proportion of at least five to one, than any other class
in the country, and who, if their religious teaching had but taken
effect on the people by bringing them to their own level, would have
rendered that Disruption wholly an impossibility.{16} And then, when
that great event occurred, we flung ourselves into an opposite
extreme,--eulogized our Educational Scheme as the best and most
important of all the Schemes of our Church, on, we suppose, the
principle so well understood by the old divines, that whereas the
other schemes were of God, and God-enjoined, this scheme was of
ourselves,--introduced, further, the design of '_inducting_' our
teachers, as if an idle ceremony could be any substitute for the
indispensable commission signed by the Sovereign, and could make the
non-commissioned by Him at least _half_ ecclesiastics.{17} And then,
after _teaching_ our schoolmasters to _teach_ religion, we sent
them abroad in shoals--some of them, no doubt, converted men, hundreds
of them unconverted, and religious but by certificate--to make the
children of the Free Church as good Christians as themselves. And by
attempting to make them half ecclesiastics, we have but succeeded in
making them half mendicants, and somewhat more,--a character which
assuredly no efficient schoolmaster ought to bear; for while his
profession holds in Scripture no higher place than the two _secular_
branches of the learned professions, physic and the law, he is as
certainly worthy of his reward, and of maintaining an ind
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