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 15 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, 16 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 17 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 18 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 19 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 20 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 21 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, 22 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 23 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 24 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, 25 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 26 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 27 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.

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 29 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 30 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 31 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, 32 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 33 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 34 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 35 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 36 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 37 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 38 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.

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 40 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 41 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 42 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 43 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 44 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 45 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 46 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 47 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 48 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 49 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.

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 51 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 52 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 53 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, 54 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 55 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 56 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, 57 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 58 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 59 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 60 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 61 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?

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 63 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 64 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 65 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 66 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 67 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 68 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 69 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 70 Churchmen ought to agree. It is necessary that the truth should be known respecting the educational condition and resources of Scotland. It will, we understand, be moved to-day [February 27th], in the Free Church Presbytery of Edinburgh, as a thing good and desirable, that Government should ‘institute an inquiry into the educational destitution confessedly existing in large towns, populous neighbourhoods, and remote districts, with a view to the marking out of places where elementary schools are particularly needed,’ etc. Would it not be more satisfactory to move instead, the desirableness of a Government Commission of Inquiry, 1st, into the educational condition of all the youth of Scotland between the years of six and fifteen, on the scheme of that inquiry recently conducted by a Free Church Educational Association in the Tron parish of Glasgow; 2d, into the condition, character, and teaching of all the 71 various schools of the country, whether parochial, Free Church, or adventure schools, with the actual amount of pupils in attendance at each; and 3d, into the general standing, acquirements, and emoluments of all the teachers? Not only would the report of such a Commission be of much solid value in itself, from the amount of fact which it would furnish for the direction of educational exertion on the part of both the people and the State; but it might also have the effect of preventing good men from taking up, in the coming contest, untenable and suspicious ground. It would lay open the true state of our parish schools, and not only show how utterly useless these institutions have become, from at least the shores of the Beauly to those of the Pentland Frith, and throughout the Highlands generally, but also expose the gross exaggeration of the estimate furnished by Mr. Macrae, and adopted by Dr. 72 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 73 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 74 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.’

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 76 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 77 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 78 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 79 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 80 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 81 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, 82 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 83 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 84 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, 85 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 86 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, 87 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]

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 89 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, 90 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, 91 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, 92 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, 93 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 94 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 95 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 96 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, 97 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 98 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 independent position in society, as either the lawyer or the physician. In schools truly national––with no sheepskin authority to sleep over on the one hand, and no idle dream of semi-ecclesiastical ‘induction’ to beguile on the other––the item of religious teaching, brought into prominence by both the Free and the Established Churches in the preliminary struggle, would assert 99 and receive its due place. Scotland would possess what it never yet possessed,––not even some twenty years or so after the death of Knox,––a system of schools worthy, in the main, of a Christian country. We are told by old Robert Blair, in his Autobiography, that when first brought under religious impressions (in the year 1600), ‘he durst never play on the Lord’s day, though the schoolmaster, after taking an account of the Catechism, dismissed the children with that express direction, “Go not to the town, but to the fields, and play.” I obeyed him,’ adds the worthy man, ‘in going to the fields, but refused to play with my companions, as against the commandment of God.’ Now it is not at all strange that there should have been such a schoolmaster, in any age of the Presbyterian Church, in one of the parish schools of our country; but somewhat strange, mayhap, considering the impression so generally received regarding the Scottish schools of that period, that Blair should have given us no reason whatever to regard the case as an extreme or exceptional one. Certainly, with such a central board in existence as that which we desiderate, no such type of schoolmaster would continue to hold office in a national seminary.

Further, it really seems difficult to determine whether the difference between the old educational scheme of Knox and that proposed at the present time by the Free Church, or the difference between the circumstances of Scotland in his days and of Scotland in the present day, be in truth the wider difference of the two. Knox judged it of ‘necessitie that every several kirk should have one schoolmaster appointed,’––‘such a one at least as was able to teach grammar and the Latine tongue;’ ‘that there should be erected in every notable town,’ a ‘colledge, in which the arts, logic, and rhethorick, together with the tongues, should be read by masters, for whom honest stipends should be appointed;’ and further, ‘that fair provision should be 100 made for the [support of the] poor [pupils], in especial those who came from landward,’ and were ‘not able, by their friends nor by themselves, to be sustained at letters.’ We know that the notable towns referred to here as of importance enough to possess colleges were, many of them, what we would now deem far from notable. Kirkwall, the Chanonry of Ross, Brechin, St. Andrews, Inverary, Jedburgh, and Dumfries, are specially named in the list; and we know further, that what Knox deemed an ‘honest stipend’ for a schoolmaster, amounted on the average to about two-thirds the stipend of a minister. Such, in the sixteenth century, was the wise scheme of the liberal and scholarly Knox, the friend of Calvin, Beza, and Buchanan. Are we to recognise its counterpart in the middle of the nineteenth century, in a scheme at least three-fourths of whose teachers are paid with yearly salaries of from £10 to £13, 13s. 4d.––about half ploughman’s wages––and of whom not a fourth have passed the ordeal of a Government examination, pitched at the scale of the lowest rate of attainment? The scheme of the noble Knox! Say rather a many-ringed film-spinning grub, that has come creeping out of the old crackling parchment, in which the sagacious Reformer approved himself as much in advance of his own age, as many of those who profess to walk most closely in his steps demonstrate themselves to be in the rear of theirs.

Let us next mark how entirely the circumstances of the country have changed since the days of the First Book of Discipline. With the exception of the clergy, a few lay proprietors, and a sprinkling of the inhabitants of the larger towns, Scotland was altogether, in the earlier period, an uneducated nation. Even for more than a century after, there were landed gentlemen of the northern counties unable, as shown by old deeds, to sign their names. If the Church had not taken upon herself the education of the 101 people in those ages, who else was there to teach them? Not one. Save for her exertions, the divine command, ‘Search the Scriptures,’ would have remained to at least nine-tenths of the nation a dead letter. But how entirely different the circumstances of Scotland in the present time! The country has its lapsed masses,––men in very much the circumstances, educationally, of the great bulk of the population in the age of Knox; and we at once grant that, unless the Churches of the country deal with these as Knox dealt with the whole, there is but little chance of their ever being restored to society or the humanizing influences of religion, let Government make for them what provision it may.[18] But such is not the condition of the membership of at least the evangelical Churches. Such is palpably not the condition of the membership of the Free Church, consisting as it does of parents taken solemnly bound, in their baptismal engagements, to bring up their children in the ‘nurture and admonition of the Lord,’ and of the children for whom they have been thus taken bound. Save in a few exceptional cases, their education is secure, let the Church exert herself as little as she may. She is but exhausting herself in vain efforts to do what would be done better without her. She has all along contemplated, we are told, merely the education of her own members; and these form exactly that portion of the people which––unless, indeed, the solemn engagements 102 which she has deliberately laid upon them mean as little as excise affidavits or Bow Street oaths––may be safely left to a broad national scheme, wisely based on a principle of parental responsibility.

‘If thou altogether holdest thy peace at this time,’ said Mordecai to Esther, ‘then shall there enlargement and deliverance arise to the Jews from another place, but thou and thy father’s house shall be destroyed.’ Scotland will have ultimately her Educational Scheme adequate to the demands of the age; but if the Free Church stand aloof, and suffer the battle to be fought by others, her part or lot in it may be a very small matter indeed. What, we ask, would be her share, especially in the Highlands, in a scheme that rendered the basis of the educational franchise merely co-extensive with the basis of the political one? Nay, what, save perhaps in the northern burghs, would be her share in such a scheme over Scotland generally? A mere makeweight at best. But at least the lay membership of the Free Church will, we are assured, not long stand aloof; and this great question of national education being in no degree an ecclesiastical one, nor lying within the jurisdiction of presbyteries or assemblies, true lovers of their country and of their species, whether of the Established or of the Free Churches, will come forward and do their duty as Scotchmen on the political platform. In neither body does the attitude assumed by the ecclesiastical element in this question, so far as has yet been indicated, appear of a kind which plain, simple-minded laymen will delight to contemplate. The Established Church courts are taking up the ground that the teaching in their parish schools has been all along religious, and at least one great source from which has sprung the vitalities of the country’s faith. And who does not know that to be a poor, unsolid fiction,––a weak and hollow sham? And, on the other hand, some of our Free Churchmen are asserting that they are not morally 103 bound to their forlorn teachers for the meagre and altogether inadequate salaries held out to them in prospect, when they were set down in their humble schools, divorced from all other means of support, to regulate their very limited expenditure by the specified incomes. Further, they virtually tell us that we cannot possibly take our stand as Scotchmen on this matter, in the only practical position, without being untrue to our common Christianity, and enemies to our Church. It has been urged against our educational articles, that we have failed to take into account the fall of man: he would surely be an incorrigible sceptic, we reply, who could look upon statements such as these, and yet doggedly persist in doubting that man has fallen. But, alas! it is not a matter on which to congratulate ourselves, that when the Established Church is coming forward to arrest the progress of national education with her strange equivocal caveat, the Free Church––the Church of the Disruption––should be also coming forward with a caveat which at least seems scarce less equivocal; and that, like the twin giants of Guildhall––huge, monstrous, unreal––both alike should be turning deaf and wooden ears to the great clock of destiny, as it strikes the hours of doom to their distracted and sinking country. O for an hour of the great, the noble-minded Chalmers! Ultimately, however, the good cause is secure. It is a cause worth struggling and suffering for. We know a little boy, not yet much of a reader, who has learned to bring a copy of Scott’s Tales of a Grandfather, which now opens of itself at the battle of Bannockburn, to a little girl, his sister, somewhat more in advance, that she may read to him, for the hundredth time, of Wallace and the Black Douglas, and how the good King Robert struck down Sir Henry Bohun with a single blow, full in the sight of both armies. And after drinking in the narrative, he tells that, when grown to be a big man, he too is to be a soldier like 104 Robert the Bruce, and to ‘fight in the battle of Scotland.’ And then he asks his father when the battle of Scotland is to begin! Laymen of the Free Church, the battle of Scotland has already begun; and ’tis a battle better worth fighting than any other which has arisen within the political arena since the times of the Reform Bill. Your country has still claims upon you: the Disruption may have dissolved the tie which bound you to party; but that which binds you to Scotland still remains entire. The parental right is not dissolved by any traditionary requirements of the altar; nor can we urge with impunity to our country,––‘It is Corban, that is to say, a gift, by whatsoever thou mightest be profited by me.’