fulfil the declared intentions of the 'persons applying for aid as well as of those by whom the aid has been contributed. "While my Lords would deeply regret to find that the objections urged by the Committee of the National Society to the plan of inspection contained in the report presented to the House of Commons were so general as to discourage the exertions of the parochial clergy for the erection of schools, their lordships feel bound to state explicitly that they cannot consent to except from that inspection any class of schools receiving aid from the parliamentary grant. My Lords, however, have the greatest confidence that, on the contrary, increased exertions on the part of the clergy, both in the erection and in the vigilant and constant superintendence and improvement of the schools, will be the consequence of an inspection conducted with the object of rendering the elementary instruction of the people of this country consistent with the wishes and expectations of the country at large. 'My Lords are at a loss to conceive what is intended by the assertion, that the system of inspection about to be established by the National Society is more complete in its authority than an inspection emanating from her Majesty in Council; or how any act of their lordships, in refraining from proposing to interfere with the system of religious instruction in schools connected with the Church, can tend to defeat the object which Parliament had in view in attaching the condition of inspection to the appropriation of the public funds; or can have the effect of exalting the secular in comparison with the religious part of education. There is nothing, however, in the instructions proposed to be given that will prevent the inspectors from reporting in any case in which they may be desired and authorised by the National Society, or by the parochial clergyman superintending the school, on the state of the religious as well as of the secular instruction." The opinions which are professed in this letter, and in other communications from the same source, whenever a fixed principle has been called in to dignify and invigorate the mere polemics of the question, appear to us to be true and constitutional: true,-because they proceed from an enlightened view of the connexion which binds the Church to the State; constitutional,-because they rely for their practical effect on the co-operation which that union ought to secure. A great many pious churchmen of our day think to do the Church honour by asserting her entire independence of action, her paramount authority in spiritual matters, and the absence of all responsibility to the State*. These doctrines are *See, for instance, the Tracts for the Times, No. 59, in which the relation or rather the natural hostility of the State to the Church is expounded. The question as diametrically opposed to the notion of the establishment of the Church of England, as the principles of Chartism are to our political constitution. It is very much the fashion to brand as popish, men and measures as unconnected with the Pope as with the Pretender. That term would be far more appropriately attached to such as place the Church and State in bitter hostility; who reject all overtures of conciliation; who demand for the Church alone the full and uncontrolled exercise of rights essentially belonging to the joint supremacy of the spiritual and temporal powers; and who profess an allegiance to some extrinsic authority in ecclesiastical matters, which may as well be the Pope of Rome as the Pope at Oxford. There is no divided allegiance to the Church and State of England; they have no distinct jurisdiction, but joint resources, joint objects, joint rights. The State may demand that the Church should fulfil the duties allotted to her; the Church may demand the protection and the means required for the discharge of such duties. It is true that the laws which opened the rights of citizenship fully and freely to classes of citizens not in communion with the Church, did impose on the State a class of duties in which the Church has no direct part. In addition to the duty of supporting the means of divine worship and Christian instruction administered by the Church, the State has contracted the obligation of "not withholding public aid" (we quote the words of Lord J. Russell, which were adopted and approved by the bishop of Exeter in the recent correspondence)" for the instruction of those children of the poor whose parents conscientiously object to allow their children to be "taught the Church catechism, or to be compelled, as the price "of their instruction, to attend divine service in any other "than their own places of worship."-Recent Measures, tenth edit., p. 11. Whatever tolerance we may show to dissent, as long as the Church of England is established by law, the legal presumption is, that an English subject is in communion 66 of an establishment is divided into the two heads of State protection and State interference: the former is treated as the duty owed by the State to the Church, but a duty ill-performed, though lawfully demanded; the latter is depicted as the impious usurpation by the State of the powers of self-government with which the Church was blessed in England-when? from 1200 to 1260! with her. Dissent is, in fact, the demand of exemption from this presumption; and dissent is now recognised as a right by the laws. But if we were to estimate the importance of the dissenting interest by the support afforded by it to the Government on the education question, it would fall very low indeed. The direct opposition of the more influential sects, and the extreme lukewarmness of others, demonstrate, that however energetic dissent may be as a negative power, it has neither the means nor the will to maintain and carry into practice a positive principle of government. We believe that the Church affords, upon the whole, the best means of instructing the people; but it is because, in addition to the claims which she has on those within her pale, she has strength to support a large amount of assistance from the State. Wherever you want to obtain a direct access to the individual conscience by the most solemn earthly authority, and by those hopes which range beyond the world, the Church will furnish means of wide, though not universal, application: wherever you want to act on the whole of a population diversified by a multitude of creeds, and to spread the knowledge which the Church does not inculcate, the State possesses the right to undertake, and the means to achieve, the task. But as far as the mere interests of the Church herself are concerned, we are fully convinced, (and we would urge the truth most earnestly on her zealous partizans,) the more she can include the people in her schools by giving them a sound practical character as well as a highly religious one, the more she insists upon their essential quality of schools connected with the institutions of the country and with the State, the more, too, will she extend her numbers and influence. To effect these ends, the inspection proposed by the Government,-unaccompanied, observe, by any sort of compromise in religious instruction, or any attempt to expel the clergy from their proper position,-that scheme, we repeat, was excellently adapted. It was a practical illustration of the united action of the principles whose union is symbolically denoted by the personal identity of the head of the Church and the sovereign. The only suggestion which has been made at all calculated to assert this union at a time when its nature is so traduced, and its very existence threatened by the opposite hostility of the voluntary system on the one side, and the nonjuring high-church on the other, has proceeded from the bishop of Exeter. "I should rejoice," said he, in the answer to lord J. Russell's letter, above-quoted, "to see instituted a confer66 ence between the Committee of Council on Education and "the Bishops, for the purpose of devising measures to carry "into effect your Lordship's very just and moderate prin"ciple, and, at the same time, to give to the Church that "public recognition of her being the fit guardian and admi"nistratrix of national education, with which your Lordship's "principle can be so well reconciled." We cannot entirely assent to the general proposition, that the Church is the Guardian AND Administratrix of national education. Where she is the administratrix, the State is the guardian: where the State is the administratrix, the Church may be the guardian. But these principles, and their special application, might with great propriety have been discussed at such a conference. We regret that the proposal did not emanate from the Committee of Council; we regret still more, that, having emanated from the bishop, lord John should have treated it lightly. Instead, however, of any approach to the joint action which the theory of the constitution prescribes, and the necessity of the case demands, we have nothing to record but eager, incessant conflict. The powers which, being united, might save a generation of our countrymen from shameful ignorance, which might extinguish the smouldering fires of popular commotion, and defeat, in the name of religion and common sense, the monstrous lies which now work uncontrolled upon the public mind,--the powers which are bound to accomplish these tasks, the one by its duty to heaven, the other by its duty to the world, have only strength to paralyse each other. It is a civil warfare, a conflict which leads to self-destruction; and the public enemy, which is Ignorance, wallows over the land, debasing the tastes, misdirecting the energies, destroying the souls of the people; because, whilst this controversy lasts, three quarters of our strength are for party, and hardly one quarter for truth; three quarters of our alacrity to baffle the foe, and one to establish the cause. The people whom you have neglected to teach their duties and their trades, are taught a farrago We observed, at the commencement of these remarks, that the time was come when at least the march of education was recognised as an imperious necessity. We have traced some indications of the course which either party has pursued: if they had conflicted less, the purposes of both would have been more easily and adequately fulfilled. After the survey we have attempted to take of the measures actually before the country, we might be tempted to relapse from the high hopes with which the contemplation of these beginnings inspired us into a despondency proportioned to the resistance and frustration which has met them; nevertheless, we are filled with more sanguine anticipations. It was a just remark of Mr. Coleridge, that the surest source of political prophecy lay in the speculative opinions of men, just merging into the age of full manhood, on the great questions of religion and philosophy. In the gradual recognition of what |