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and that the former was the more effective of the two. In Protestant Prussia, the national church is identical with the government. It would be an abuse of terms to assert that the Church as it is constituted in Prussia could originate any act whatsoever; accordingly, the duties of a church are performed in Prussia by agents of the State, in the churches and the schools as well as in the public offices or the army. In England it is far otherwise: we have a Church, which is closely allied to the State by her duties and her powers, without being dependent on the State by her commission or her interests. With these rights are connected, by their very essence, the responsibility and the duty of promoting the education of those committed to her charge.

But here we are stopped by the question, Why has a church, endowed with such remarkable gifts, possessing abundant means of promoting the work of education by its influence with the crown and its presence in the upper house of the legislature,-a church, whose essence and origin is traced by her most zealous and sincere defenders to the need of those very services, and the fulfilment of those very duties, which have been so long and generally neglected, a church, whose funds might enable her to annex the school to the altar, if it be one of her most important maxims that teaching and preaching should be one,-a church, pervading the whole country, and commanding the sympathies and highest feelings of the nation as no other institution can or ought to command them,—a church, whose own canons prescribe the work of education, and even provide for the purpose machinery not unsuited to our actual wants, how comes it, we repeat, that the Church, enjoying these privileges and bearing these sacred obligations, has done so little to promote the advancement of sound education? Is it possible, that a body, professing allegiance to Christ as its head, should allow the project which is to supply deficiencies in things so essential to its own standing and importance, to originate with laymen, and to be ripened by the unwholesome heat of party controversies? Is it possible, that with so much to do, and so much power of doing it, so little should have been done?

We believe that the Church has these powers, that they are a

part of her divine commission, and that she exists for the purpose of spreading religion and true knowledge among the young and old, in the class and the congregation. But when we inquire for facts, what do we discover? We ask for EDUCATION, We are met by the dry formularies of religious instruction; we ask for an efficient control exercised over all the young generation in England, and we are referred to the exertions of a few amiable and zealous individuals, who have happily succeeded in infusing into the parishes committed to their care that spirit which we seek in vain wherever individual zeal and enlightenment has not come to the relief of the imperfect system. We ask what the Church of England, the assemblage of the prelates, the priests and the communicants at the established altars of the land, have done for education; and we are either met by a defence of the theory which they ought to have carried into practice, or by the reports of the National Society for the education of the poor in the principles of the Established Church.'

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The exertions of that society should not be undervalued: it has been sanctioned by good men; it has been served by well-meaning officers; it has done a great deal towards spreading the notion that schools were to exist, and human beings to be taught to think, or at least to read, in spite of the prejudices of the last half-century. But it is high time to ask by what claim the National Society is to be regarded as the Church herself? The Church has made over the high and inalienable duties of the education of the poor in the principles of the Established Church' to an association of an humbler character and of a far less indisputable title. An attempt is made to settle the question by the high argument of church authority, and we are told of the efficiency of "machinery actually working "well, and promising before long to embrace in its operation "the whole body of the peasantry." But whatever may be the results of the present system, they are due to the National Society, established and conducted under the auspices of churchmen-not to the Church herself. We say that it is high time to call the attention of the public to this state of things; because as, on the one hand, many of the arguments used in defence of education by the Church do not belong, and ought not fairly to be applied, to the school-keeping as

sociation called the National Society, so, on the other, the results of the National Society are not the results of education by the Church of England,—they are the results of the supposititious institution destined to effect what the Church has neglected. By what right then has the National Society acquired the powers it affects to exercise, of prescribing tests and methods to all the schools of the Church of England, of enjoining beneficed clergy of the Church to perform or to abstain from performing certain acts,-of treating with the Government in the language of an estate of the realm, and, in fact, of legislating on a subject which affects so deeply the most important interests of the public and the Church? Such language on such a subject would be appropriate in convocation, in a synod, or even in the senate; but there is nothing which gives the National Society a claim to that deference which we should be inclined to exact even from the highest authorities of the State to the Church herself. In short, there is a material difference between the archbishop of Canterbury and the bench of bishops going down to the House of Lords to bring in a bill for the establishment of a system of national education, (if their lordships had ever been so minded,) and the same right reverend prelates sitting as the committee of the school at the Sanctuary, Westminster, from which they censure the efforts of the laymen at Whitehall and control the schools of the clergy all over the country.

The National Society has derived much of its importance in later years from having been made the channel through which the largest part of the parliamentary grant was distributed by the Treasury. The change which was effected last year by the transfer of this distribution from the Treasury to the Lords of the Council as the givers, and from the National Society generally to the applicants individually as the receivers, is in itself a very good thing; for it substitutes on the one hand an enlightened and responsible committee of the advisers of the Crown for the subordinate financial agents of the administration, and on the other it deals with the merits and the necessities of zealous and able individuals, in lieu of the inefficient machinery of the society. Of course, the National Society has exerted itself to disparage this improvement; but

even admitting their arguments in defence of the exclusive administration of the fund by the Church, the grant ought to be made over, not to the National Society, but to the Diocesan Boards.

In our opinion the results of the National schools, as they are termed, are not so satisfactory as to furnish the clergy with proofs of their competency and activity derived from actual experience. But notwithstanding their imperfections, the National Society appeals to the Church and the Church to the National Society, with an admirable harmony in sharing the honours as well as in disclaiming the disgrace which a narrower inspection of these schools might bring upon their promoters. Mr. Maurice, in his last work, looks forward with confidence to the dawn of a new era by the exertions of the clergy, whilst he condemns the machinery of mutual instruction which has been so widely established by the National Society.

"It is this machinery in England which has overshadowed our ecclesiastical education, and prevented it from coming forth in its fulness and power. We have the principle recognised, that education is to be conducted by those who, we believe, have the power of what M. Van der Ende calls 'forming men'; but that this was to be their object we have not perceived, or at least strongly felt. We have been worshipping our own net, and burning incense to our own drag, looking at our system and forgetting the beings upon whom the system was to act. While this was the case, it was inevitable that the very reason for which clergymen were made the teachers of the land should cease to be understood, and that they themselves should become unmindful of their high position. Once let us believe this, that in every poor child there dwells a human spirit which we can speak to,-which we have a commission from above to speak to, and to call forth and to instruct in all its divine and human relations, all the instruments we want will speedily gather themselves about us. Possibly we shall find that we want no new instruments at all; that by rightly availing ourselves of all that we have already, we shall effect our purpose much better than by constructing new ones. The country-parson may find in many cases that the revival of the old dame-school system for girls, or at least for infants, may save him the expense of building a school-room, and do the work more effectually; for looking upon himself as the head schoolmaster of the parish, he may put the dame upon such a method of appealing to the heart and understanding of her pupils as may give new life both to herself and them. In every case he will care for the teacher more than for the lessons; him he will try by every means to inform and cultivate. In the hands of a living teacher the catechism he knows will be no dead book; it will unfold mysteries to the heart of a child which will surround

and possess him, and give him a sense of his nothingness and of his greatness, through infancy, and youth, and manhood."-Maurice, Lectures on Education, p. 277.

These are true and delightful sentiments, spoken with the carnestness of a devout churchman, but they have nothing in common with the operations of the National Society; they may have sprung up in the heart of many a clergyman to bless his solitary labours, but they have not received the sanction or support of the church which he serves. We now borrow from a source equally well affected to the Church a still more minute-alas! we fear, a still more visionary sketch of the part now taken by the clergy in the work of education. The following passage is from an article which appeared in the Quarterly Review of April 1838, on Archdeacon Bather's Hints on Scriptural Education.

men.

"To the natural order of Christian education we are now (if we are not cut short) reverting; catechising the child, that is, grounding him in the principles of the faith by vivá voce conference with him, in order that the man may be taught to edification. But whilst we are thus dealing with him, the fault is our own, if the very first object of all education is not answered, even as our economists themselves would admit- For, if they say that something more is desirable for the poor than mere reading and writing and a little arithmetic, so say, I too,' cries the Archdeacon; ‘I should like to see them taught to think.' And accordingly he proceeds to point out how this primary object of education is achieved, and in a manner the best of all, by the very same discipline which serves to make them profitable hearers for the Church; and that, whilst your aim is to train up in them sound Christians, you are incidentally forming them into thinking The catechist, then, who will seldom be any other in a country parish than the minister himself, having fixed upon his subject, which will seldom be taken from any other book than the Bible—that being of all books the one which is found on trial to interest children most, and therefore to be the fittest to quicken them to mental exertion—'first instructs his pupils by questioning the meaning into them, and then examines them by questioning it out of them.' The former part of this task he does by putting what the lawyers call leading questions, that is, questions which instil a meaning, to be extracted by and by; and if the answers prove such as require to be corrected, which they will often be, still the children are brought to make the correction themselves, which is done by means of further questioning, after the same fashion as before; till at length they find themselves surprised into a full knowledge of the subject proposed to them, and apparently by efforts of their own; the process keeping them on the alert, and the result flattering their sagacity.

"We shall be excused, we are sure, if we follow Mr. Bather into an ex

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