Page:Address on the opening of the Free Public Library of Ballarat East, on Friday, 1st. January, 1869.djvu/13

 7 entire confusion of those prophets of evil consequences, which it was predicted must flow from educating the masses.

Many of us can recollect the lamentations of those alarmists of the old school, and it seems strange that the race of apostles of ignorance was not effectually silenced, and for ever, by the pregnant sentences of Archbishop Cranmer, uttered more than three hundred years ago, preserved by his biographer. Your indulgence will allow me to transcribe them. In the year 1540 a change was made in the Cathedral of Canterbury, and prebendaries, canons, choristers, and scholars were substituted for monks.

A question arose as to the election of scholars and some of the commissioners, amongst whom were the Archbishop, Lord Rich, Chancellor of the Court of Augmentations; Sir Christopher Hales, the King's Attorney-General; Sir Anthony Sentleger, would have none admitted but sons or younger brethren of gentlemen.

"As for husbandmen's children, they were more meet," they said, "for the plough and to be artificers than to occupy the place of the learned sort."

"Whereupon the Most Reverend Father the Archbishop, being of a contrary mind, said—"He thought it not indifferent so to order the matter, for poor men's children are many times endued with more singular gifts of nature, which are also the gifts of God, as with eloquence, memory, apt pronunciation, sobriety, and such like, and more apt to apply their study than is the gentleman's son delicately educated."