really are. Let us remember that it is not for the emergencies of yesterday that we are now called on to provide, but for the necessities of to-day,––not for Scotland in the year 1592, nor yet in the year 1700, but for Scotland in the year 1850. What might be the best possible course in these bygone ages, may be, and is, wholly an impracticable course now. Church at both these earlier dates meant not only an orthodox communion, but also that preponderating majority of the nation which reckoned up as its own the great bulk of both the rulers and the ruled, and at once owned the best and longest swords, and wore the strongest 73 armour; whereas it now means, legally at least, merely two Erastianized Establishments, and politically, all the Christian denominations that possess votes and return members to Parliament. The prism seizes on a single white ray, and decomposes it into a definitely proportioned spectrum, gorgeous with the primary colours. The representative principle of a Government such as ours takes up, as if by a reverse process, those diverse hues of the denominational spectrum that vary the face of society, and compounds them in the Legislature into a blank. Save for the existence of the two Establishments––strong on other than religious grounds––and the peculiar tinge which they cast on the institutions of the country, the blank would be still more perfect than it is; and this fact––a direct result of the strongly marked hues of the denominational spectrum, operated upon by the representative principle––we can no more change than we can the optical law. Let there be but the colour of one religion in the national spectrum, and the Legislature will wear but one religious colour: let it consist of half-a-dozen colours, and the Legislature will be of none. ‘O for an hour of Knox!’ it has been said by a good and able man, from whom, however, in this question we greatly differ,––‘O for an hour of Knox to defend the national religious education which he was raised up to institute!’ Knox, be it remembered, was wise, prudent, sagacious, in accordance with the demands of his time. A Knox of the exact fashion of the sixteenth century, raised up in the middle of the nineteenth, would be but a slim, long-bearded effigy of a Knox, grotesquely attired in a Geneva cloak and cap, and with the straw and hay that stuffed him sticking out in tufts from his waistband. ‘O for an hour of Knox!’ The Scottish Church of the present age has already had its Knox. ‘Elias hath already come.’ The large-minded, wise-hearted Knox of the nineteenth century died at Morningside three years ago; and he has 74 bequeathed, as a precious legacy to the Church, his judgment on this very question. ‘It were the best state of things,’ he said, ‘that we had a Parliament sufficiently theological to discriminate between the right and the wrong in religion, and to endow accordingly. But failing this, it seems to us the next best thing, that in any public measure for helping on the education of the people, Government were to abstain from introducing the element of religion at all into their part of the scheme; and this not because they held the matter to be insignificant,––the contrary might be strongly expressed in the preamble of their Act,[13]––but on the ground that, in the present divided state of the Christian world, they would take no cognizance of, just because they would attempt no control over, the religion of applicants for aid,––leaving this matter entire to the parties who had to do with the erection and management of the schools which they had been called upon to assist. A grant by the State on this footing might be regarded as being appropriately and exclusively the expression of their value for a good secular education.’
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CHAPTER SIXTH.
Our previous Statement regarding the actual Condition of the Free Church Educational Scheme absolutely necessary––Voluntary Objections to a National Scheme, as stated by the Opponents of the Voluntaries; not particularly solid––Examination of the matter.
Our episode regarding the Free Church Educational Scheme now fairly completed, let us return to the general question. The reader may, however, do well to note the inevitable necessity which existed on our part, that our wholesome, though mayhap unpalatable, statements respecting it should have been submitted to the Church and the country. The grand question which in the course of Providence had at length arisen was, ‘How is our sinking country to be educated?’ We had taken our stand, as a Scotchman, in behalf of the Scottish people; and as the belief seemed widely to exist that our own Free Church scheme was adequate, or at least nearly so, to the education of the children of our own membership, and that our duty as Scotchmen could be fulfilled, somehow, by concentrating all our exertions upon it, it had become essentially necessary that the delusion should be dispelled. And so we have showed, that while our scheme, in order fully to supply the educational wants of even our own people, would require to exist in the proportion of nine, it exists nominally in but the proportion of six, and in reality in but the proportion of four,––seeing that the six, i.e. our existing staff of teachers, amounting to but two-thirds of the number required, are but two-thirds paid;––in short, that our educational speculation is exactly in the circumstances of a railway company who, having engaged to cut a line ninety miles in length, have succeeded in cutting forty miles of it at their own proper 76 expense, and then having cut twenty miles more on preference shares, find their further progress arrested by a lack of funds. And so it became necessary to show that the existence and circumstances of our Free Church schools, instead of furnishing, as had been urged in several of our presbyteries, any argument against the agitation of the general question, furnished, on the contrary, the best possible of all arguments for its agitation; and to show further, that the policy which brought a denominational scheme, that did not look beyond ourselves, into a great national engagement, in the character of a privateer virtually on the side of the enemy, was a most perilous policy, that exposed it to damaging broadsides, and telling shot right between wind and water.
Let us now pass on to the consideration of a matter on which we but touched before,––the perfect compatibility of a consistent Voluntaryism with religious teaching in a school endowed by the State, on the principle of Dr. Chalmers. The Witness is as little Voluntary now as it ever was. It seems but fair, however, that a principle should be saddled with only the consequences that legitimately arise from it; and that Voluntaryism should not be exposed, in this contest, to a species of witchcraft, that first caricatures it in an ill-modelled image, and then sticks the ugly thing over with pins.
The revenues of the State-endowed schools of this country––and, we suppose, of every other––are derived from two distinct sources: from Government, who furnishes the schoolmaster’s salary, and erects the building in which he teaches; and from the parents or guardians, who remunerate him according to certain graduated rates for the kind of instruction which he communicates to their children or wards. And the rationale of this State assistance seems very obvious. It is of importance to the State, both on economic and judicial grounds, that all its people 77 should be taught; but, on the adventure-school principle, it is impossible that they should all be taught, seeing that adventure schools can thrive in only densely peopled localities, or where supported by wealthy families, that pay largely for their children’s education. And so, in order that education may be brought down to the humblest of the people, the State supplements, in its own and its people’s behalf, the schoolmaster’s income, and builds him a school. Such seems to be the principle of educational endowments. Now, if the State, in endowing national schoolmasters, were to signify that it endowed them in order that, among other things, they should teach religion, we can well see how a Voluntary who conscientiously holds, as such, that religion ought not to be State-endowed, might be unable to avail himself, on his children’s behalf, of the State-enjoined religious teaching of any such functionaries; just as we can also see, that if the State forbade its schoolmasters on any account to teach religion, a conscientious holder of the Establishment principle might be perhaps equally unable to avail himself of services so restricted. We can at least see how each, in turn, might lodge an alternate protest,––the one against the positive exclusion of religion by the State, the other against its positive introduction. But if, according to Chalmers, the State, aware of the difficulty, tenders its endowment and builds its schools ‘simply as an expression of its value for a good secular education,’
