Page:A Sermon Preached in Westminster Abbey (Lichfield).djvu/12

 schools would have had no existence, if there had been no National Society, I leave it to you to udgejudge [sic].

But what would schools be, what, I may say, have they been in times past, without well-qualified teachers to occupy them? teachers of whom we may have a good hope that they will give a really useful education to the children under their care, imparting to them such kinds and measures of instruction as may be helpful to them in their several occupations, and may at the same time raise their intellects and purify their tastes, and indispose them to sensual and brutalising habits; but above all, teachers who will train up the sons and daughters of the Church to be (God helping them) Christian men, and Christian women, and to show themselves worthy of the Church, by their faithful and peaceable discharge of their duties to God, and man. But such teachers and trainers we cannot hope to have, unless they have been themselves taught, and trained; unless they have had a moral, as well as an intellectual, preparation for their incalculably important calling, inferior in importance only to that of the parochial pastor.

Hence, to point to the second branch of the Society's usefulness, its Training Institutions: from which, during the last thirteen years, it has sent out more than 3000 masters and mistresses. Hence also the aid which, with a liberality hardly warranted by its means, it has given to almost every one of our diocesan training schools. That the trained master or mistress would prove incomparably superior to the untrained, might reasonably have been anticipated: and experience has fully justified the anticipation. That there may be, and are, individual exceptions to this distinction, I willingly admit; but they are only exceptions, bright, but rare.

In the third place, the Society has done, and is doing, very much for the improvement of the means, and machinery, through which the work of our National Schools is carried on. This it has done chiefly through the agency of a valuable class of officers attached to it, known under the name of Organising Masters; intelligent and experienced men, whose business it is to put into order, and remodel, and thus to render more effective, the schools where their services are needed, and desired. Many such schools there must always be. Truly it is said, in one of the Society's reports, that, "in the great majority of parishes, the services of a person whose eye is able to detect faults of arrangement in the schoolroom, who is qualified to give an opinion upon the books and school-materials