Chapter V: Conclusion: Of the War in Affghanistan, 199 (4)

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

-----

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

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

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

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

TO THE EDITOR OF THE SCOTSMAN.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SAMUEL LUCAS.

LONDON, _February 4, 1850_.

CHAPTER SEVENTH.

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

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

We would fix for the teachers, in the first instance, on no very extravagant rate of remuneration; for it might prove bad policy in this, as in other departments, to set a man above his work. The salaries attached at present to our parish schools vary from a minimum of £25 to a maximum of about £34. Let us suppose that they varied, instead, from a minimum of £60 to a maximum of £80--not large sums, certainly, but which, with the fees and a free house, would render every parochial schoolmaster in Scotland worth about from £80 to £100 per annum, and in some cases--dependent, of course, on professional efficiency and the population of the locality--worth considerably more. The supplementary English schools we would place on the average level maintained at present by our parish schools, by providing the teachers with free houses, and yearly salaries of a minimum of £30 and a maximum of £40. And as it is of great importance that men should not fall asleep at their posts, and as tutors never teach more efficiently than when straining to keep ahead of their pupils, we would fain have provision made that, by a permitted use of occasional substitutes, this lower order of schoolmasters should be enabled to prepare themselves, by attendance at college, for competing, as vacancies occurred, for the higher schools. It would be an arrangement worth £20 additional salary to every school in Scotland, that the channels of preferment should be ever kept open to useful talent and honest diligence, so that the humblest English teacher in the land might rise, in the course of years, to be at the head of its highest school; nay, that, like that James Beattie who taught at one time the parish school of Fordoun, he might, if native faculty had been given and wisely improved, become one of the country's most distinguished professors. In fixing our permanent castes of schools, Grammar and English, we would strongly urge that there should be no permanent castes of teachers fixed--no men condemned to the humbler walks of the profession if qualified for the higher. The life-giving sap would thus have free course, from the earth's level to the topmost boughs of our national scheme; and low as an Englishman might deem our proposed rates of remuneration for university-taught men, we have no fear that they would prove insufficient, coupled with such a provision, for the right education of the country.

We are not sure that we quite comprehend the sort of machinery meant to be included under the term Local or Parochial Boards. It seems necessary that there should exist Local _Committees_ of the educational franchise-holders, chosen by themselves, from among their own number, for terms either definite or indefinite, and recognised by statute as vested in certain powers of examination and inquiry. But though a mere name be but a small matter, we are inclined to regard the term Board as somewhat too formidable and stiff. Let us, at least for the present, substitute the term Committee; and as large committees are apt to degenerate into little mobs, and, as such, to conduct their business noisily and ill, let us suppose educational committees to consist, in at least country districts or the smaller towns, of some eight or ten individuals, selected by the householders for their intelligence, integrity, and business habits, and with a chairman at their head, chosen from among their number by themselves. A vacancy occurs, let us suppose, in either the Grammar or one of the English schools of the place: the committee, through their chairman, put themselves in communication with some of the Normal schoolmasters of the south, and receive from them a few names of deserving and qualified teachers, possessed of diplomas indicating their professional standing, and furnished, besides, with trustworthy certificates of character. Or, if the emoluments of the vacant school be considerable, and some of the neighbouring teachers, placed on a lower rate of income, have distinguished themselves by their professional merits, and so rendered themselves known in the district, let us suppose that they select _their_ names, and to the number of some two, three, four, or more, submit them, with the necessary credentials, to their constituents the householders. And these assemble on some fixed day, and, from the number placed on the list, select their men. Such, in the business of electing a schoolmaster, would, we hold, be the proper work of a committee. In all other seasons, the committee might be recognised as vested in some of the functions now exercised by the Established presbyteries, such as that of presiding, in behalf of the parentage of the locality, at yearly or half-yearly examinations of the schools, and of watching over the general morals and official conduct of the teacher. But the power of trial and dismission, which, of course, would need to exist somewhere, we would vest in other hands. Let us remark, in the passing, that much might come to depend ultimately on the portioning out of the localities into electoral districts of a proper size, and that it would be perhaps well, as a general rule, that there should be no subdivisions made of the old parishes. There are few parishes in Scotland in which the materials of a good committee might not be found; but there are perhaps many half, and third, and quarter parishes in which no such materials exist. Further, the householders of some country hamlet or degraded town-suburb, populous enough to require its school, might be yet very unfit of themselves to choose for it a schoolmaster. And hence the necessity for maintaining a local breadth of representation sufficient to do justice to the principle of the scheme, and to prevent it, if we may so speak, from sinking in the less solid parts of the kingdom. A parochial breadth of base would serve as if to plank over the unsounder portions of the general surface, and give footing to a system of schools and teachers worthy, as a whole, of the character and the necessities of a country wise and enlightened in the main, but that totters on the brink of a bottomless abyss.

The power of trying, and, if necessary, of dismissing from his charge, an offending teacher, would, however, as we have said, require to exist somewhere. Every official, whether of the State or Church, or whether dependent on a single employer or on a corporation or company, bears always a twofold character. He is a subject of the realm, and, as such, amenable to its laws; he has also an official responsibility, and may be reprimanded or dismissed for offences against the requirements and duties of his office. A tradesman or mechanic may go on tippling for years, wasting his means and neglecting his business, untouched by any law save that great economic law of Providence which dooms the waster to ultimate want; but for the excise officer, or bank accountant, or railway clerk, who pursues a similar course, there exists a court of official responsibility, which anticipates the slow operation of the natural law, by at once divesting the offender of his office. And the State-paid schoolmaster must have also his official responsibility. But it would serve neither the ends of justice nor the interests of a sound policy to erect his immediate employers into a court competent to try and condemn: their proper place would be rather that of parties than of judges; and as parties, we would permit them simply to conduct against him any case for which they might hold there existed proper grounds. A schoolmaster chosen by a not large majority, might find in a few years that his supporters had dwindled into a positive minority: parents whose boys were careless, or naturally thick-headed, would of course arrive at the opinion that it was the teacher who was in fault; nay, a parent who had fallen into arrears with his fees might come to entertain the design of discharging the account simply by discharging the schoolmaster; and thus great injustice might be done to worthy and efficient men, and one of the most important classes of the community placed in circumstances of a shackled dependency, which no right-minded teacher could submit to occupy. What we would propose, then, is, that the power of trial, and of dismission if necessary, should be vested in a central national board, furnished with one or more salaried functionaries to record its sentences and do its drudgery, but consisting mainly of unpaid members of high character and standing,--some of them, mayhap, members _ex officio_; the Lord Provost of Edinburgh, let us suppose--the Principal and some of the Professors of the Edinburgh University--the Rector, shall we say, of the High School--the Lord Advocate, and mayhap the Dean of Faculty. And as it would be of importance that there should be as little new machinery created as possible, the evidence, criminatory or exculpatory, on which such a board would have to decide could be taken before the Sheriff Courts of the provinces, and then, after being carefully sifted by the Sheriffs or their Substitutes, forwarded in a documentary form to Edinburgh. It would scarce be wise to attempt extemporizing an official code in a newspaper article; but the laws of such a code might, we think, be ranged under three heads,--immorality, incompetency, and breach of trust to the parents. We would urge the dismissal, as wholly unqualified to stand in the relation of teacher to the youthhead, of the tippling, licentious, or dishonest schoolmaster; further, we would urge the dismissal (and in cases of this kind the corroborative evidence of the Government inspector might be regarded as indispensable) of an incompetent teacher who did not serve the purpose of his appointment; and, in the third and last place, we would urge that a teacher who made an improper use of his professional influence over his pupils, and of the opportunities necessarily afforded him, and who taught them to entertain beliefs, ecclesiastical or semi-ecclesiastical, which their parents regarded as erroneous, should be severely reprimanded for such an offence in the first instance, and dismissed if he persevered in it. We would confer upon the board, in cases of this last kind, no power of deciding regarding the absolute right or wrong of the dogmas taught. The teacher might be a zealous Voluntary, who assured the children of men such as the writer of these articles that their fathers, in asserting the Establishment principle, approved themselves limbs of that mystic Babylon which was first founded by Constantine; or he might be a conscientious Establishment-man, who dutifully pressed upon the Voluntary pupils under his care, that their parents, though they perhaps did not know it, were atheistical in their views. And we would permit no board to determine in such cases, whether Voluntaryism was in any respect or degree tantamount to atheism, or the Establishment principle to Popery. But we would ask them to declare, as wise and honest men, that no schoolmaster, under the pretext of a zeal for truth, should with impunity break faith with the parents of his pupils, or prejudice the unformed and ductile minds entrusted to his care against their hereditary beliefs. Should we, however, do no violence by such a provision, we have heard it asked, to the conscientious convictions of the schoolmaster? No, not in the least. If he was in reality the conscientious man that he professed to be, he would quit his equivocal position as a teacher, in which, without being dishonest, he could not fulfil what he deemed his religious duty, and become a minister; a character in which he would find Churches within which he could affirm with impunity that Dr. Chalmers was, in virtue of his Establishment views, little better than a Papist, or that Robert Hall, seeing he was a Voluntary, must have been an unconscious atheist at bottom.

Let us next consider what the influence of the ministers of our Church would be under a national scheme such as that which we desiderate, and what the probability that the national teaching would be religious. The minister, as such, would possess, nominally at least, but a single vote; and if he were what an ordained minister may in some cases be--merely a suit of black clothes surmounted by a white neckcloth--the vote, _nominally_ one, would be also _really_ but one; nor ought it, we at once say, to weigh in such cases an iota more than it counted. Mere black coats and white neckcloths, though called by congregations, and licensed and ordained by presbyteries, never yet carried on the proper business of either Church or school. But if the minister was no mere suit of clothes, but a Christian man, ordained and called not merely by congregations and presbyteries, but by God Himself, his one vote in the case would outweigh hundreds, simply because it would represent the votes of hundreds. Let us suppose that, with the national schools thrown open, a vacancy had occurred in the parish school of Cromarty during the incumbency of the lamented Mr. Stewart. The people of the town and parish, possessing the educational franchise, would meet; their committee would deliberate; there would be a teacher chosen,--in all probability, the present excellent Free Church teacher of the town; and every man would feel that he had exercised in the election his own judgment on his own proper responsibility. And yet it would assuredly be the teacher whom the minister had deemed on the whole most eligible for the office, that would find himself settled, in virtue of the transaction, in the parish school. How? Not, certainly, through any exercise of clerical domination, nor through any employment of what is still more hateful--clerical manoeuvre--but in virtue of a widespread confidence reposed by the people in the wisdom and the integrity of the minister sent them by God Himself to preach to them the everlasting gospel. In almost all the surrounding parishes--in Resolis, Rosskeen, Urquhart under the late Dr. M'Donald, Alness, Kiltearn, Kincardine, Kilmuir, etc. etc. etc.--in similar cases similar results would follow; and if there are preachers in that vast northern or north-western tract--which, with the three northern counties, includes also almost the entire Highlands--in which such results would _not_ follow, it would be found that in most cases the fault lay rather with the ordained suits of black, topped by the white neckcloths, than with the people whom they failed to influence.

As for the religion or the religious teaching of the schools, we hold it to be one of the advantages of the proposed scheme, that it would really stir up both ministers and people to think seriously of the matter, and to secure for the country truly religious teaching, so far as it was found to be at once practicable and good. Previous to the year 1843, when the parish schools lay fully within our power, there was really nothing done to introduce religious teaching into _them_; we had it all secure on written sheepskin, that their teaching should and might be religious, for we had them all fast bound to the Establishment; and, as if that were enough of itself, ministers, backed by heritors and their factors, went on filling these parish schools with men who stood the test of the Disruption worse, in the proportion of at least five to one, than any other class in the country, and who, if their religious teaching had but taken effect on the people by bringing them to their own level, would have rendered that Disruption wholly an impossibility.{16} And then, when that great event occurred, we flung ourselves into an opposite extreme,--eulogized our Educational Scheme as the best and most important of all the Schemes of our Church, on, we suppose, the principle so well understood by the old divines, that whereas the other schemes were of God, and God-enjoined, this scheme was of ourselves,--introduced, further, the design of '_inducting_' our teachers, as if an idle ceremony could be any substitute for the indispensable commission signed by the Sovereign, and could make the non-commissioned by Him at least _half_ ecclesiastics.{17} And then, after _teaching_ our schoolmasters to _teach_ religion, we sent them abroad in shoals--some of them, no doubt, converted men, hundreds of them unconverted, and religious but by certificate--to make the children of the Free Church as good Christians as themselves. And by attempting to make them half ecclesiastics, we have but succeeded in making them half mendicants, and somewhat more,--a character which assuredly no efficient schoolmaster ought to bear; for while his profession holds in Scripture no higher place than the two _secular_ branches of the learned professions, physic and the law, he is as certainly worthy of his reward, and of maintaining an 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 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 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 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 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_ 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 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.'

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{16} There are about one thousand one hundred parish schoolmasters
in Scotland: of these, not more than eighty (strictly, we
believe, seventy-seven) adhered to the Free Church at the
Disruption.

{17} The Church as such ought to employ the schoolmaster, it has
been argued, in virtue of the divine injunction, 'Search the
Scriptures:' what God _commands_ men to do, it is her duty to
_enable_ men to do. The argument is excellent, we say, so far as
it goes; but of perilous application in the case in hand. It is
the Church's duty to teach those to read the Scriptures, who,
_without her assistance, would not be taught to read them_. But
if by teaching Latin, arithmetic, algebra, and the mathematics to
_ten_, she is incapacitating herself from teaching _twenty_ to
read the Bible; or if, by teaching twenty to read the Bible who
would have learned to read it whether she taught them or no, she
is incapacitating herself from teaching twenty others to read it,
who, unless she teach them, will never learn to read it at all;
then, instead of doing her recognised duty in the matter, she is
doing exactly the reverse of her duty--doing what prevents her
from doing her duty. Let the Free Church but take her stand on
this argument, and straightway her rectors, her masters in
academies, and her schoolmasters planted in towns and populous
localities, to teach the higher branches, become so many bars
raised by herself virtually to impede and arrest her, through the
expense incurred in their maintenance, in her proper work of
enabling the previously untaught and ignorant to read the word of
God, in obedience to the divine injunction.

{18} This statement has been quoted by an antagonist as utterly
inconsistent with our general line of argument; but we think we
may safely leave the reader to determine whether it be really so.
Did we ever argue that any scheme of national education, however
perfect, could possibly supersede the proper _missionary_ labours
of the Churches, whether educational or otherwise? Assuredly not.
What we really assert is, that if the Churches waste their
energies on work not missionary, the work which, if they do it
not, cannot be done must of necessity be neglected; seeing that,
according to Bacon, 'charity will hardly water the ground where
it must first fill a pool.'

LORD BROUGHAM.

The history of Lord Brougham has no exact parallel in that of British statesmen. Villiers Duke of Buckingham (the Duke of the times of Charles II.) sunk quite as low, but not from such an elevation. Of him too it was said, as of his Lordship, that 'he left not faction, but of that was left,'--that every party learned to distrust and stand aloof from him, and that his great parts had only the effect of rendering his ultimate degradation the more marked and the more instructive. Hume tells us that by his 'wild conduct, unrestrained either by prudence or principle, he found means to render himself in the end odious, and even insignificant.' But the Duke of Buckingham had been a mere courtier from the beginning, and no man had ever trusted or thought well of him.

Bolingbroke bears a nearly similar character. There was a mighty difference between the influential and able minister of Queen Anne, recognised by all as decidedly one of the most accomplished statesmen of his age or country, and the same individual,--forlorn and an exile, disliked and suspected by parties the most opposite, and who agreed in nothing else,--a fugitive from his own country to avoid the threatened impeachment of the Whigs for his Jacobitism, and a fugitive from France to avoid being impeached by the Pretender for his treachery. But Bolingbroke had never very seriously professed to be the friend of his country, nor would his country have believed him if he had. According to the shrewd remark of Fielding, the temporal happiness, the civil liberties and properties of Europe, had been the game of his earliest youth, and the eternal and final happiness of all mankind the sport and entertainment of his advanced age. He would have fain destroyed the freedom of his countrymen when in power, and their hope of immortality when in disgrace. Neither can we find a parallel in the history of that other Lord Chancellor of England, who has been described by the poet as 'the greatest, wisest, meanest of mankind.' Two of the epithets would not suit Lord Brougham; and though he unquestionably bore himself more honourably in the season of his elevation than his illustrious predecessor, he has as certainly employed himself to worse purpose in the time of his disgrace.

Unlike Lords Bolingbroke, Buckingham, or Bacon, Lord Brougham entered public life a reformer and a patriot. The subject of his first successful speech in Parliament was the slave-trade. He denounced not only the abominable traffic itself,--the men who stole, bought, and kept the slave; but also the traders and merchants,--'the cowardly suborners of piracy and mercenary murder,' as he termed them, under whose remote influence the trade had been carried on; and the sympathies of the people went along with him. He was on every occasion, too, the powerful advocate of popular education. Brougham is no discoverer of great truths; but he has evinced a 'curious felicity' in expressing truths already discovered: he exerted himself in sending 'the schoolmaster abroad,' and announced the fact in words which became more truly his motto than the motto found for him in the Herald's Office. He took part in well-nigh every question of reform; stood up for economy, the reduction of taxes, and Queen Caroline; found very vigorous English in which to express all he ought to have felt regarding the Holy Alliance and the massacre at Manchester; and dealt with Cobbett as Cobbett deserved, for doing what he is now doing himself. There was always a lack of heart about Brougham, so that men admired without loving him.

There were no spontaneous exhibitions of those noblenesses of nature which mark the true reformer, and which compel the respect of even enemies. Luther, Knox, and Andrew Thomson were all men of rugged strength,--men of war, and born to contend; but they were also men of deep and broad sympathies, and of kindly affections: they could all feel as well as see the right; what is even more important still, they could all thoroughly forget themselves, and what the world thought and said of them, in the pursuit of some great and engrossing object: they could all love, too, at least as sincerely as they could hate. Brougham, on the contrary, could only see without feeling the right; but then he saw clearly. Brougham could not forget himself; but then he succeeded in identifying himself with much that was truly excellent. Brougham could not love as thoroughly as he could hate; but then his indignation generally fell where it ought. His large intellect seemed based on an inferior nature--it was a brilliant set in lead; nor were there indications wanting all along, it has been said, that he was one of those patriots who have their price. But the brilliant was a true, not a factitious brilliant, whatever the value of the setting; and the price, if ever proffered, had not been sufficiently large. Brougham became Lord Chancellor, the Reform Bill passed into a law, and slavery was abolished in the colonies.