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 manœuvre––but in virtue of a widespread confidence reposed by the people in the wisdom and the integrity of the minister sent them by God Himself to preach to them the everlasting gospel. In almost all the surrounding parishes––in Resolis, Rosskeen, Urquhart under the late Dr. M’Donald, Alness, Kiltearn, Kincardine, Kilmuir, etc. etc. etc.––in similar cases similar results would follow; and if there are preachers in that vast northern or north-western tract––which, with the three northern counties, includes also almost the entire Highlands––in which such results would not follow, it would be found that in most cases the fault lay rather with the ordained suits of black, 97 topped by the white neckcloths, than with the people whom they failed to influence.
As for the religion or the religious teaching of the schools, we hold it to be one of the advantages of the proposed scheme, that it would really stir up both ministers and people to think seriously of the matter, and to secure for the country truly religious teaching, so far as it was found to be at once practicable and good. Previous to the year 1843, when the parish schools lay fully within our power, there was really nothing done to introduce religious teaching into them; we had it all secure on written sheepskin, that their teaching should and might be religious, for we had them all fast bound to the Establishment; and, as if that were enough of itself, ministers, backed by heritors and their factors, went on filling these parish schools with men who stood the test of the Disruption worse, in the proportion of at least five to one, than any other class in the country, and who, if their religious teaching had but taken effect on the people by bringing them to their own level, would have rendered that Disruption wholly an impossibility.[16] And then, when that great event occurred, we flung ourselves into an opposite extreme,––eulogized our Educational Scheme as the best and most important of all the Schemes of our Church, on, we suppose, the principle so well understood by the old divines, that whereas the other schemes were of God, and God-enjoined, this scheme was of ourselves,––introduced, further, the design of ‘inducting’ our teachers, as if an idle ceremony could be any substitute for the indispensable commission signed by the Sovereign, and could make the non-commissioned by Him at least half ecclesiastics.[17] And then, after teaching our 98 schoolmasters to teach religion, we sent them abroad in shoals––some of them, no doubt, converted men, hundreds of them unconverted, and religious but by certificate––to make the children of the Free Church as good Christians as themselves. And by attempting to make them half ecclesiastics, we have but succeeded in making them half mendicants, and somewhat more,––a character which assuredly no efficient schoolmaster ought to bear; for while his profession holds in Scripture no higher place than the two secular branches of the learned professions, physic and the law, he is as certainly worthy of his reward, and of maintaining an independent position in society, as either the lawyer or the physician. In schools truly national––with no sheepskin authority to sleep over on the one hand, and no idle dream of semi-ecclesiastical ‘induction’ to beguile on the other––the item of religious teaching, brought into prominence by both the Free and the Established Churches in the preliminary struggle, would assert 99 and receive its due place. Scotland would possess what it never yet possessed,––not even some twenty years or so after the death of Knox,––a system of schools worthy, in the main, of a Christian country. We are told by old Robert Blair, in his Autobiography, that when first brought under religious impressions (in the year 1600), ‘he durst never play on the Lord’s day, though the schoolmaster, after taking an account of the Catechism, dismissed the children with that express direction, “Go not to the town, but to the fields, and play.” I obeyed him,’ adds the worthy man, ‘in going to the fields, but refused to play with my companions, as against the commandment of God.’ Now it is not at all strange that there should have been such a schoolmaster, in any age of the Presbyterian Church, in one of the parish schools of our country; but somewhat strange, mayhap, considering the impression so generally received regarding the Scottish schools of that period, that Blair should have given us no reason whatever to regard the case as an extreme or exceptional one. Certainly, with such a central board in existence as that which we desiderate, no such type of schoolmaster would continue to hold office in a national seminary.
Further, it really seems difficult to determine whether the difference between the old educational scheme of Knox and that proposed at the present time by the Free Church, or the difference between the circumstances of Scotland in his days and of Scotland in the present day, be in truth the wider difference of the two. Knox judged it of ‘necessitie that every several kirk should have one schoolmaster appointed,’––‘such a one at least as was able to teach grammar and the Latine tongue;’ ‘that there should be erected in every notable town,’ a ‘colledge, in which the arts, logic, and rhethorick, together with the tongues, should be read by masters, for whom honest stipends should be appointed;’ and further, ‘that fair provision should be 100 made for the [support of the] poor [pupils], in especial those who came from landward,’ and were ‘not able, by their friends nor by themselves, to be sustained at letters.’ We know that the notable towns referred to here as of importance enough to possess colleges were, many of them, what we would now deem far from notable. Kirkwall, the Chanonry of Ross, Brechin, St. Andrews, Inverary, Jedburgh, and Dumfries, are specially named in the list; and we know further, that what Knox deemed an ‘honest stipend’ for a schoolmaster, amounted on the average to about two-thirds the stipend of a minister. Such, in the sixteenth century, was the wise scheme of the liberal and scholarly Knox, the friend of Calvin, Beza, and Buchanan. Are we to recognise its counterpart in the middle of the nineteenth century, in a scheme at least three-fourths of whose teachers are paid with yearly salaries of from £10 to £13, 13s. 4d.––about half ploughman’s wages––and of whom not a fourth have passed the ordeal of a Government examination, pitched at the scale of the lowest rate of attainment? The scheme of the noble Knox! Say rather a many-ringed film-spinning grub, that has come creeping out of the old crackling parchment, in which the sagacious Reformer approved himself as much in advance of his own age, as many of those who profess to walk most closely in his steps demonstrate themselves to be in the rear of theirs.
Let us next mark how entirely the circumstances of the country have changed since the days of the First Book of Discipline. With the exception of the clergy, a few lay proprietors, and a sprinkling of the inhabitants of the larger towns, Scotland was altogether, in the earlier period, an uneducated nation. Even for more than a century after, there were landed gentlemen of the northern counties unable, as shown by old deeds, to sign their names. If the Church had not taken upon herself the education of the 101 people in those ages, who else was there to teach them? Not one. Save for her exertions, the divine command, ‘Search the Scriptures,’ would have remained to at least nine-tenths of the nation a dead letter. But how entirely different the circumstances of Scotland in the present time! The country has its lapsed masses,––men in very much the circumstances, educationally, of the great bulk of the population in the age of Knox; and we at once grant that, unless the Churches of the country deal with these as Knox dealt with the whole, there is but little chance of their ever being restored to society or the humanizing influences of religion, let Government make for them what provision it may.[18] But such is not the condition of the membership of at least the evangelical Churches. Such is palpably not the condition of the membership of the Free Church, consisting as it does of parents taken solemnly bound, in their baptismal engagements, to bring up their children in the ‘nurture and admonition of the Lord,’ and of the children for whom they have been thus taken bound. Save in a few exceptional cases, their education is secure, let the Church exert herself as little as she may. She is but exhausting herself in vain efforts to do what would be done better without her. She has all along contemplated, we are told, merely the education of her own members; and these form exactly that portion of the people which––unless, indeed, the solemn engagements 102 which she has deliberately laid upon them mean as little as excise affidavits or Bow Street oaths––may be safely left to a broad national scheme, wisely based on a principle of parental responsibility.
