to which this important fact belongs rests the economic right and duty of the civil magistrate to educate.
His judicial right and duty are founded on the circumstance, that the laws which he promulgates are written laws, and that what he writes for the guidance of the people, the people ought to be enabled to read; seeing that to punish for the breach of a law, of the existence of which he who breaks it has been left in ignorance, is not man-law, but what Jeremy Bentham well designates dog-law, and altogether unjust. We are, of course, far from supposing that every British subject who can read is to peruse the vast 30 library which the British Acts of themselves compose; but we hold that education forms the only direct means through which written law, as a regulator of conduct, can be known, and that, in consequence, in its practical breadth and average aspect, it is only educated men who know it, and only uneducated men who are ignorant of it. And hence the derivation of the magistrate’s judicial right and duty. But on this part of our subject, with Free Churchmen for our readers, we need not surely insist. Our Church has homologated at least the general principle of the civil magistrate’s right and duty, by becoming the recipient of his educational grant. If he has no right to give, she can have no right to receive. If he, instead of performing a duty, has perpetrated a wrong, she, to all intents and purposes, being guilty of receipt, is a participator in the crime. Nay, further, let it be remarked that, as indicated by the speeches of some of our abler and more influential men, there seems to exist a decided wish on the part of the Free Church, that the State, in its educational grants, should assume a purely secular character, and dispense with the certificate of religious training which it at present demands,––a certificate which, though anomalously required of sects of the most opposite tenets, constitutes notwithstanding, in this business of grants, the sole recognition of religion on the part of the Government. Now this, if a fact at all, is essentially a noticeable and pregnant one, and shows how much opposite parties are in reality at one on a principle regarding which they at least seem to dispute.
The right and duty of the civil magistrate thus established, let us next consider another main element in the question,––the right and duty of the parent. It is, we assert, imperative on every parent in Scotland and elsewhere to educate his children; and on the principle that he is a joint contributor with the Government to the support of every national teacher––the Government giving salary, and the 31 parent fees––we assert further, that should the Government give its salary ‘exclusively as the expression of its value for a good secular education,’ he may, notwithstanding, demand that his fees should be received as the representative of his value for a good religious education. Whether his principles be those of the Voluntary or of the Establishment-man, the same schoolmaster who is a secular teacher in relation to the Government, may be a religious teacher in relation to him. For unless the State positively forbid its schoolmaster to communicate religious instruction, he exists to the parent, in virtue of the fees given and received, in exactly the circumstances of the teacher of any adventure school.
Let us further remark, that the rights of the parent in the matter of education are not ecclesiastical, but natural rights. The writer of this article is one of the parents of Scotland; and, simply as such, he claims for himself the right of choosing his children’s teacher on his own responsibility, and of determining what his children are to be taught. The Rev. Dr. Thomas Guthrie is his minister; and he also is one of the parents of Scotland, and enjoys, as such, a right identical in all respects with that of his parishioner and hearer. But it is only an identical and co-equal right. Should the writer send his boy to a Socialist or Popish school, to be taught either gross superstition or gross infidelity, the minister would have a right to interfere, and, if entreaty and remonstrance failed, to bring him to discipline for so palpable a breach of his baptismal engagement. If, on the other hand, it was the minister who had sent his boy to the Socialist or Popish school, the parishioner would have a right to interfere, and, were entreaty and remonstrance disregarded, to bring him to discipline. Minister and parishioner stand, we repeat, in this matter, on exactly the same level. Nor have ten, twenty, a hundred, a thousand, twenty thousand, or a hundred thousand lay parents, 32 or yet ten, twenty, a hundred, or a thousand clerical parents, whether existing as a congregation or hundreds of congregations on the one hand, or as a Presbytery, Synod, or General Assembly on the other, rights in this matter that in the least differ in their nature from the rights possessed by the single clergyman, Dr. Guthrie, or by the single layman, the Editor of the Witness. The sole right which exists in the case––that of the parent––is a natural right, not an ecclesiastical one; and the sole modification which it can receive from the superadded element of Church membership is simply that modification to which we refer as founded on the religious duty of both member and minister, in its relation to ecclesiastical law and the baptismal vow.
Nor, be it observed, does this our recognition, in our character as a Church member, of ecclesiastical rule and authority, give our minister any true grounds for urging that it is our bounden duty, in virtue of our parental engagements, and from the existence of such general texts as the often quoted one, ‘Train up a child,’ etc., to send our children to some school in which religion is expressly taught. Far less does it give him a right to demand any such thing. We are Free Church in our principles; and the grand distinctive principle for which, during the protracted Church controversy, we never ceased to contend, was simply the right of choosing our own religious teacher, on the strength of our own convictions, and on our own exclusive responsibility. We laughed to scorn the idea that the three items of Dr. George Cook’s ceaseless iterations––life, literature, and doctrine––formed the full tale of ministerial qualification: there was yet a fourth item, infinitely more important than all the others put together, viz. godliness, or religion proper, or, in yet other words, the regeneration of the whole man by the Spirit of God. And on this last item we held that it was the right and duty of the people who Chose for themselves, and for their children, a religious 33 teacher, and of none others, clerical or lay, solemnly to decide. And while we still hold by this sacred principle on the one hand, we see clearly, on the other, that the sole qualifications of our Free Church teachers, as prepared in our Normal Schools, correspond to but Dr. Cook’s three items; nay, that instead of exceeding, they fall greatly short of these. The certificate of character which the young candidates bring to the institution answers but lamely to the item ‘life;’ the amount of secular instruction imparted to them within its walls answers but inadequately to the item ‘literature;’ while the modicum of theological training received, most certainly not equal to a four years’ course of theology at a Divinity Hall, answers but indifferently to the crowning item of the three––‘doctrine.’ That paramount item, conversion on the part of the teacher to God, is still unaccounted for; and we contend that, respecting that item, the parent, and the parent only, has a right to decide, all difficult and doubtful as the decision may be: for be it remembered, that there exist no such data on which to arrive at a judgment in cases of this nature, as exist in the choosing of a minister. And though we would deem it eminently right and proper that our child should read his daily Scripture lesson to some respectable schoolmaster, a believer in the divine authority of revelation, and should repeat to him his weekly tale of questions from the National Catechism, yet to the extempore religious teaching of no merely respectable schoolmaster would we subject our child’s heart and conscience. For we hold that the religious lessons of the unregenerate lack regenerating life; and that whatever in this all-important department does not intenerate and soften, rarely fails to harden and to sear. Religious preachments from a secular heart are the droppings of a petrifying spring, which convert all that they fall upon into stone. Further, we hold that a mistake regarding the character of a schoolmaster authorized to teach 34 religion extempore might be greatly more serious, and might involve an immensely deeper responsibility, than a similar mistake regarding a minister. The minister preaches to grown men––a large proportion of them members of the Church––not a few of them office-bearers in its service, and competent, in consequence, to judge respecting both the doctrine which he exhibits and the mode of its exhibition; but it is children, immature of judgment, and extremely limited in their knowledge, whom the religion-teaching schoolmaster has to address. Nay, more: in choosing a minister, we may mistake the character of the
