Page:A Sermon Preached in Westminster Abbey (Lichfield).djvu/13

 used for the purposes of instruction, and who, from his experience, can impart many useful practical hints to teachers, must be of very high importance." And not less truly is it said also, that "the services of these officers are, without exception, gratefully acknowledged by those managers of schools who have employed them." A most satisfactory instance of which there is, at this present time, in my own diocese.

Yet further, the Society has a Depository for the sale of books (carefully prepared in a gradually-ascending series, and excellently adapted to their purpose by attractiveness, as well as by intrinsic value), and of every kind of apparatus necessary for the effectual working of schools. To the usefulness of this Depository the steadily advancing increase of its issues bears incontrovertible testimony.

While engaged in this detail, I must not omit to mention the Society's Monthly Paper; which has a circulation of many thousand copies; and which contains not only a record of the proceedings of the Society, and of other educational boards, but also a multiplicity of information, (much of it in the form of letters from persons actually engaged in the work of education) which cannot fail to be of interest and use to the promoters, and managers, and teachers of schools.

But we should do scanty justice to the merits of the Society, if we were to measure them by its own immediate agency, and not to take into the account the effects of its example, its encouragement, and its assistance, in other quarters: for it has called into action, and helped, and directed aright, an amount of individual zeal and liberality which cannot be estimated. It has been instrumental in establishing boards of education (most of them having training institutions of their own) in almost every diocese. It has given countenance and aid to the plans, now so generally adopted, for the purely Church-inspection of Church-schools by inspectors acting under the sanction of the bishops of the several dioceses. Nay more, is it too much to say, that the Society, by bearing continual witness to the importance of national education, has brought into the field an agency more powerful than its own, because supplied with much larger means from the national purse, the agency of the Committee of Council on Education? How mightily this agency has worked, and is working, we can none of us be ignorant. And if it do not work beneficially for the Church, the blame, I am bold to say, must rest with ourselves.

Has, then, this agency superseded, or ought it to supersede,