Page:A charge delivered at the ordinary visitation of the archdeaconry of Chichester in July, 1843.djvu/30

26 It is bidding God speed to us in the work in which we have been already engaged, and exhibiting in a multiplied light the importance of the organized system and material of education which in the last four years the Church has been steadily forming.

It is not to be denied that the civil powers of any country have a right to call on the Church to do something vigorous and effective for the education of the people. As a matter of political economy education is absolutely required to repress crime, and to imprint the great laws of immutable morality and of natural justice upon a people; and this, if the Church fail, a Government must do in mere self-defence. It is the duty of the civil powers, so long as they profess to maintain relations of amity and communion with the Church, to abstain carefully, in the course of legislation, from all acts which can, even by remote consequences, endanger the purity of its doctrine or discipline. But if it should fail, at any time, to mitigate or to restrain the moral evils, which render a people lawless and ungovernable, it is obvious that the civil ruler must take precautions within his own sphere; and if these precautions be so planned and executed as to thwart the action of the Church, whom shall we have to blame but ourselves? We have to be thankful then for the withdrawal of a scheme, valuable in the judgment of those that framed it, which would have probably contravened the free action of the Church, by anticipating her movements, and