educational agitation is not to be settled in the course of a few brief months; nor yet by the votes of Presbyteries, Synods, or General Assemblies, whether they belong to the Free or to the Established Churches. It rises direct out of the great social question of the time. Scotland as such forms one of its battle-fields, and Scotchmen as such are the parties who are to be engaged in the fight; and the issue, though ultimately secure, will long seem doubtful. And so the Free Church may have quite time enough to fight her own battle, or rather her own two battles in succession, and, when both are over, find that the great general contest still remains undecided.
For what we must deem by much the better and more important battle of the two––that for a statutory demand on the part of the State that the Bible and Shorter Catechism should be taught in the national schools––we are afraid the time is past; but most happy would we be to find ourselves mistaken. The Church of Scotland, as represented by that majority which is now the Free Church, might have succeeded in carrying some such measure ten years ago, when the parish schools were yet in her custody; just as she might have succeeded seven years earlier in 67 obviating the dire necessity which led to the Disruption, by acting upon the advice of the wise and far-seeing M’Crie.[10] But she was not less prepared at the one date to agitate for the total abolition of patronage, than at the other to throw open the parish schools on the basis of a statutory security for the teaching of religion. In both cases, the golden opportunity was suffered to pass by; and Old Time presents to her now but the bald retreating occiput, which her eager hand may in vain attempt to grasp. Where, we ask, are we to look for the forces that are to assist us in fighting this battle of statutory security? Has the Establishment become more liberal, or more disposed to open the parish schools, than we ourselves were when we composed the majority of that very Establishment? Alas! in order to satisfy ourselves on that head, we have but to look at the decisions of her various ecclesiastical courts. Or is it the old Scottish Dissenters that are to change their entire front, and to make common cause with us, in disregard, and even in defiance, of their own principles, as they themselves understand them? Or are we to look to that evangelical portion of the Episcopacy of England, with whom Establishment means Church, and the ‘good of the Establishment’ a synonyme for the ‘good of the Church,’ and who, to a certainty, will move no hand against the sister Establishment in Scotland? Or are we to be aided by that portion of English Independency that has so very strangely taken its stand equally against educational grants and educational endowments, on the ground that there is a sort of religion homœopathically diffused in all education––especially, we suppose, in Lindley Murray’s readings from the Spectator and Dr. Blair––and that, as the State must not provide religious teaching for its people, it cannot, and 68 must not, provide for them teaching of any kind? Scientific Jews are they, of the straitest sect, who, wiser than their fathers, have ascertained by the microscope, that all meat, however nicely washed, continues to retain its molecules of blood, and that flesh therefore must on no account be eaten. We cannot, we say, discern, within the wide horizon of existing realities, the troops with which this battle is to be fought. They seem to be mere shadows of the past. But if the Free Church see otherwise, let her by all means summon them up, and fight it. Regarded simply as a matter of policy, we are afraid the contest would be at least imprudent. ‘It were well,’ said a Scotch officer to Wolfe, when Chatham first called out the Highlanders of Scotland to fight in the wars of Britain,––‘It were well, General, that you should know the character of these Highland troops. Do not attempt manœuvring with them; Scotch Highlanders don’t understand manœuvre. If you make a feint of charging, they will throw themselves sword in hand into the thick of the enemy, and you will in vain attempt calling them back; or if you make a show of retreating, they will run away in right earnest, and you will never see them more. So do not employ them in feints and stratagems, but keep them for the hard, serious business of the fight, and you will find them the best troops in the world.’ Now, nearly the same character applies to the Free Church. To set her a-fighting as a matter of policy, would be very bad policy indeed. She would find out reasons, semi-theological at least, for all her positions, however hopeless, and would continue fixed in these long after the battle had been fought and lost, and when she ought to be engaged in retrieving her disasters on other ground, and in a fresh and more promising quarrel. But if the Free Church does enter into this battle, let her in the meantime not forget, that after it has been fought, and at least possibly lost, another battle may have still to 69 be begun; nor let her attempt damaging, by doubtful theology, the position which a preponderating majority of her own office-bearers and members may have yet to take up. For, ultimately at least, the damage would be all her own. Let her remark further, that should her people set their hearts pretty strongly on those national seminaries, which in many parts of the country would become, if opened up, wholly their own de facto, and which are already their own de jure, they might not be quite able to feel the cogency of the argument that, while it left Socinians and Papists in the enjoyment of at once very liberal and very flexible Government grants, challenged their right to choose, on their own responsibility, State-paid teachers for their children; and which virtually assured them, that if they did not contribute largely to the educational scheme of their own Church, she would be wholly unable to maintain it as a sort of mid-impediment between them and their just rights, the parish schools. They would be exceedingly apt, too, to translate any very determined and general preference manifested by our church courts for the scheme of educational grants, into some such enunciation as the following:––‘Give us to ourselves but a moiety of one-third of the Scottish young, and we will frankly give up the other two-thirds,––the one-half of them to be destroyed by gross ignorance, and the other half by deadly error.’[11]
There is at least one point on which we think all Free 70 Churchmen ought to agree. It is necessary that the truth should be known respecting the educational condition and resources of Scotland. It will, we understand, be moved to-day [February 27th], in the Free Church Presbytery of Edinburgh, as a thing good and desirable, that Government should ‘institute an inquiry into the educational destitution confessedly existing in large towns, populous neighbourhoods, and remote districts, with a view to the marking out of places where elementary schools are particularly needed,’ etc. Would it not be more satisfactory to move instead, the desirableness of a Government Commission of Inquiry, 1st, into the educational condition of all the youth of Scotland between the years of six and fifteen, on the scheme of that inquiry recently conducted by a Free Church Educational Association in the Tron parish of Glasgow; 2d, into the condition, character, and teaching of all the 71 various schools of the country, whether parochial, Free Church, or adventure schools, with the actual amount of pupils in attendance at each; and 3d, into the general standing, acquirements, and emoluments of all the teachers? Not only would the report of such a Commission be of much solid value in itself, from the amount of fact which it would furnish for the direction of educational exertion on the part of both the people and the State; but it might also have the effect of preventing good men from taking up, in the coming contest, untenable and suspicious ground. It would lay open the true state of our parish schools, and not only show how utterly useless these institutions have become, from at least the shores of the Beauly to those of the Pentland Frith, and throughout the Highlands generally, but also expose the gross exaggeration of the estimate furnished by Mr. Macrae, and adopted by Dr. 72 Muir.[12] Further, it would have the effect of preventing any member of either the Free Church or the Establishment from resorting to the detestable policy of those Dissenters of England, who, in order to secure certain petty advantages to their own miserable sects, set themselves to represent their poor country––perishing at the time for lack of knowledge––as comparatively little in need of educational assistance. But we trust this at least is an enormity, at once criminal and mean, of which no Scotchman, whatever his Church, could possibly be guilty; and so we shall not do our country the injustice of holding that, though it produced its ‘fause Sir Johns’ in the past, it contains in the present one such traitor, until we at least see the man. Further, a State Report of the kind would lay open to us, in the severe statistical form, the actual emoluments of our own Free Church teachers. We trust, then, that this scheme of a searching Government inquiry may be regarded as a first great step towards the important work of educating the Scottish people, in which all ought to agree, however thoroughly at variance in matters of principle or on points of detail.
It
