Chapter IV: Conclusion: Of the War in Affghanistan, 199 (3)

But why, it may be asked of the writer, if you be thus sensible of the immense superiority of a territorial scheme of educational endowments over a denominational scheme of educational grants,--why did you yourself urge, some three years ago, that the Free Church should avail herself of these very grants? Our reply is sufficiently simple. The denominational scheme of grants was the only scheme before us at the time; these grants were, we saw, in danger of being rejected by the Free Church on what we deemed an unsound and perilous principle, which was in itself in no degree Free Church; and last, not least, we saw further, that if the Church did not avail herself of these grants, there awaited on her Educational Scheme--ominously devoid of that direct divine mandate which all her other schemes possessed--inevitable and disastrous bankruptcy. But circumstances have greatly changed. The Free Church is no longer in any danger from the principle which would have rejected Government assistance. There is now a territorial scheme brought full before the view of the country; and, further, the Government grants have wholly failed to preserve our Educational Scheme from the state of extreme pecuniary embarrassment which we too surely anticipated. Salaries of £15 and £20 per annum are greatly less than adequate for the support and remuneration of even the lower order of teachers, especially in thinly-peopled districts of country, where pupils are few and the fees inconsiderable. But at these low rates it was determined, in the programme of the Free Church Educational Scheme, that about three-fourths of the Church's teachers should be paid; and there are scores and hundreds among them who regulated their expenditure on the arrangement. For at least the last two years, however, the Education Committee has been paying its £15 salaries at the reduced rate of £10, and its £20 salaries at the rate of £13, 13s. 4d.; and those embarrassments, of which the reduction was a consequence, have borne with distressful effect on the Committee's _employés_. However _orthodox_ their creed, their circumstances have in many instances become _Antinomian_; nor, while teaching religion to others, have they been able in every instance to conform to one of its simplest demands--'Owe no man anything.'

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

That which we so much dreaded has come, we repeat, upon our Educational Scheme. The subject is a painfully delicate one, and we have long kept aloof from it; but truth, and truth only, can now enable the Free Church and her people to act, in this emergency, as becomes the character which they bear, and the circumstances in which they are placed. Let us not fall into the delusion of deeming the mere array of our Free Church schools and teachers--their numbers and formidable length of line--any matter of congratulation; nor forget, in our future calculations, that if the Free Church now realizes from £10,000 to £12,000 yearly for educational purposes, she would require to realize some £5000 or £6000 more in order to qualify her to meet her existing liabilities, estimated at the very moderate rates laid down in the programme. The £5000 or £6000 additional, instead of enabling her to erect a single additional school, would only enable her to pay in full her teachers' salaries. And so it is obviously a delusion to hold that our Free Church Educational Scheme supplies in reality two-thirds of our congregations with teachers, seeing that these teachers are only two-thirds paid. We are still some £5000 or £6000 short of supplying the two-thirds, and some £6000 or £7000 more of supplying the whole. And even were the whole of our own membership to be supplied, the grand query, How is our country to be educated,--our parish schools to be restored to usefulness and the Scotch people,--and Scotland herself to resume and maintain her old place among the nations?--would come back upon us as emphatically as now. Judging from what has been already done, and this after every nerve has been strained in the Sisyphisian work of rolling up-hill an ever-returning stone, it seems wholly impossible that we should ever succeed in educating the young of even our own congregations; and how, then, save on some great national scheme, is a sinking nation to be educated?

-----

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER FIFTH.

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

That higher order of farm-servants which are known technically in Mid-Lothian as 'sowers and stackers,' receive, as their yearly wages, in the immediate neighbourhood of the house of the writer, eighteen pounds in money, four bolls oatmeal, two cart-loads of potatoes, and about from twenty to thirty shillings worth of milk. The money value of the whole amounts, at the present time, to something between twenty-three and twenty-four pounds sterling. We are informed by a Fifeshire proprietor, that in his part of the country, a superior farm-servant, neither grieve nor foreman, receives eight pounds in money, six and a half bolls meal, three cart-loads of potatoes, and the use of a cow, generally estimated as worth from ten to twelve pounds annually. His aggregate wages, therefore, average from about twenty-four to twenty-six pounds ten shillings a year. And we are told by another proprietor of the south of Scotland, that each of the better hinds in his employment costs him every year about thirty pounds. In fine, to the south of the Grampians, the emoluments of our more efficient class of farm-servants range from twenty-three to thirty pounds yearly. We need not refer to the wages of railway navvies, nor yet to those of the superior classes of mechanics, such as printers, masons, jewellers, typefounders, etc. There is not a printer in the _Witness_ office who would be permitted by the rules of his profession, to make an arrangement with his employers, were he to exchange piece-work for wages, that did not secure to him twenty-five shillings per week. To expect that a country or Church can possibly have efficient schoolmasters at a lower rate of emolument than not only skilled mechanics, but than even unskilled railway labourers, or the 'stackers and sowers' of our large farms, is so palpably a delusion, that simply to name it is to expose it. And yet of our Free Church schoolmasters, especially in thinly-peopled rural districts and the Highlands, there are scores remunerated at a lower rate than labourers and farm-servants, and hundreds at a rate at least as low; and if we except the fortunate hundred and twenty-nine who receive the Government grant, few indeed of the others rise to the level of the skilled mechanic. Greatly more than two-thirds of our teachers were placed originally on the £15 and £20 scale of salaries: these are now paid with £10 and £13, 13s. 4d. respectively. There are many localities in which these pittances are not more than doubled by the fees, and some localities in which they are even less than doubled; and so a preponderating majority of the schoolmasters of the Free Church are miserably poor men: for what might be a competency to a labourer or hind, must be utter poverty to them. And not a few of their number are distressfully embarrassed and in debt.

Now this will never do. The Church may make herself very sure, that for her £10 or £13 she will receive ultimately only the worth of £10 or £13. She may get windfalls of single teachers for a few months or years: superior young men may occasionally make a brief stay in her schools, in the course of their progress to something better,--as Pilgrim rested for a while in the half-way recess hollowed in the side of the Hill Difficulty; but only very mediocre men, devoid of energy enough of body or mind to make good masons or carpenters, will stick fast in them. We have learned that, in one northern locality, no fewer than eight Free Church teachers have since Martinmas last either tendered their resignations, or are on the eve of doing so. These, it will be found, are superior men, who rationally aspire to something better than mere ploughman's wages; but there will of course be no resignations tendered by the class who, in even the lowest depths of the Scheme, have found but their proper level. These, as the more active spirits fly off, will flow in and fill up their places, till, wherever the £10 and £13 salaries prevail,--and in what rural district do they not prevail?--the general pedagogical acquirements of our teachers will present a surface as flat, dull, and unprofitable as ditch-water. For what, we again ask, can be expected for £10 or £13? And let the reader but mark the effect of such teaching. We have seen placed side by side, in the same burgh town, an English school, in which what are deemed the branches suitable for mechanics and their children, such as reading, writing, and arithmetic, were energetically taught, and a grammar school in which a university-bred schoolmaster laboured, with really not much energy, especially in those lower departments in which his rival excelled, but who was fitted to prepare his pupils for college, and not devoid of the classical enthusiasm. And it struck us as a significant and instructive fact, that while the good English school, though it turned out smart readers and clever arithmeticians, failed to elevate a single man from the lower to the middle or higher walks of life, the grammar school was successful in elevating a great many. The principle on which such a difference of result should have been obtained is so obvious, that it can scarce be necessary to point it out. The teaching of the one school was a narrow lane, trim, 'tis true, and well kept, but which led to only workshops, brick-kilns, and quarries; whereas that of the other was a broad, partially-neglected avenue, which opened into the great professional highways, that lead everywhere. And if the difference was one which could not be obviated by all the energy of a superior and well-paid English teacher, how, we ask, is it to be obviated by our Free Church £10 and £13 teachers? Surely our Church would do well to ponder whether it can be either her interest or her duty to urge on any scheme, in opposition to a national one, which would have all too palpably the effect of degrading her poorer membership, so far as they availed themselves of it, into the Gibeonites of the community--its hewers of wood and drawers of water. Never will Scotland possess an educational scheme truly national, and either worthy of her ancient fame or adequate to the demands and emergencies of an age like the present, until at least every parish shall possess among its other teachers its one university-bred schoolmaster, popularly chosen, and well paid, and suited to assist in transplanting to the higher places of society those select and vigorous scions that from time to time spring up from the stock of the commonalty. The waking dream of running down the ignorance and misery of a sinking country by an array of starveling teachers in the train of any one denomination--itself, mayhap, sufficiently attenuated by the demands of purely ecclesiastical objects--must be likened to that other waking dream of the belated German peasant, who sees from some deep glade of his native forests a spectral hunt sweep through the clouds,--skeleton stags pursued by skeleton huntsmen, mounted on skeleton horses, and surrounded by skeleton beagles; and who hears, as the wild pageant recedes into the darkness, the hollow tantivy and the spectral horns echoing loud and wildly through the angry heavens.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER SIXTH.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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