Page:The "Conscience Clause" (Denison, 1866).djvu/20

16 Church people for the worship of God by all the parishioners, and the parish churchyard was set apart for the sepulture of the bodies of all the parishioners; such parishioners having been baptized in the Church, and not cut off from it by any act of their own, or by sentence of excommunication. This was in a time when there were no Sects. The common right of all parishioners has remained, subject to the conditions of the Church order, and the use of her formularies, and it is as well that it should remain.

The parish school was built with the money of Church people when there had long been many Sects. Built, as the Church had been, for all parishioners who would send their children to it, subject to the like conditions; but built expressly, as in the presence of religious divisions and the setting up of religious opinion against the Faith, for giving the religious education of the Church as contradistinguished for any other "education."

I take my stand, then, not upon any opinion of my own, but upon the fact of what the Church requires, and has a right to expect, from her ministers. I put aside the allegation, so powerful in these days, when it would almost seem that what the Apostle says of the state of things before Christ was revealed, is about to be true again of the Christian world—"the world by wisdom know not "—I put aside the allegation that any manner of knowledge, even if it be only secular, and wholly confined to this life and its interests, is better than any manner of ignorance. I deny it: I say, that all manner of knowledge, I care not what it is, which is not based, wherever this may be had, upon the revelation of Christ as the God-man, and interpenetrated with a definite objective and dogmatic faith, is not only no blessing, but is a curse.

I put aside again all theories which sever in any manner between religious and secular teaching. Religious and secular teaching and example combined is education. Secular teaching and example without religion is not education. I put aside, then, all such things as these; I cannot stoop to discuss such things.