Page:The "Conscience Clause" (Denison, 1866).djvu/24

20 It is something to have a cause in your hands which is so good and strong in itself, for which there is so truly everything to ho said, against which there is, as truly, the more it is sifted and examined, so absolutely nothing to be said, that it takes the most perverse ingenuity to spoil it. It is something, too, to have a grievance which can never be overstated, because of the depth of the injury which it inflicts upon the Church. Now, I am not going to use any hard language about the Committee of Council. I never do; and it would be unbecoming this House, and in all ways unfitting. Besides, the case is so strong that there is really no room and no excuse for it. People use hard language who have no case,—which, as I have always comforted myself with thinking, may be one reason why I get so much abused myself. There would be too a personal unthankfulness in it of which I would not be guilty. I am under deep obligations to the Committee of Council for enabling me to prove every tittle of what I have against them out of their own books. I assume then that the Committee of Council desire to assist what they regard as the Education of the Poor quite as honestly as I do, according to their lights—only these happen to be very bad lights, and such as no Churchman can see his way by. There was a time when they were content—it is not many years since, out of the 26 years they have lived—to let the Church walk by her own lights without incurring penalties thereby. But all this is out of date. It is wonderful how few years it takes now-a-days to revolutionise a system in the wrong direction; and now it must be the Committee of Council lights or none at all. Wherefore, as was natural and necessary and inevitable, things have come to a dead lock, and the Committee of the National Society have closed their correspondence with the Committee of Council on the subject. The two bodies, once so harmonious, are in direct opposition. Who has done this? The Committee of Council has done it. The Committee of the National Society has held by their Charter and their terms of union—that is, has held by