Page:A Plea for the Middle Classes.djvu/13

 perous, the mass of the labourers must be left without sufficient time for even such a secular education as is sufficient to fit them to be intelligent members of their class. And this perhaps will in part account for the fact, that there is so little (difference in the number of those who can write now, and fifty years since. They cannot be kept at the national school now a sufficient time to do them any permanent good, and when they leave they are so absorbed by the pressure which civilisation causes, that they lose in a short time the little they did know. Now perhaps, some may think it no very serious evil that they cannot write; but what do they know of the creeds, of the Parables, the Old and New Testament history, the Psalms, &c? Or again, of the Church, her divinely-appointed institutions, the sacraments, divine services, or ministry? They are distressingly ignorant on all these subjects, and that, too, in spite of the thousands that are spent yearly in national education. And why is this? because the Church has left the employers uneducated, has suffered them to seek instruction where they chose, regardless of the injury that must ensue to society. Whereas, when the seventy-seventh, seventy-eighth, and seventy-ninth Canons, relating to schoolmasters, were in force, you could scarcely have asked a poor person about his faith without obtaining an intelligent reply. There were no national schools then, nor could the people read or write, but their masters had received a Church education, and this, though scanty, found its way effectually to their dependants. While, therefore, we spend all our strength upon educating the poor, our forefathers spent theirs on those of the middle ranks; for besides requiring schoolmasters "to be licensed by the Bishop, to give guarantees for their faith and morality, and to take their scholars to church on Sundays and holidays,"