Page:The Conscience Clause (Oakley, 1866).djvu/11

 think, has characterised the conduct of the Committee of Council in making the present proposal, and which, as I am convinced, should characterise the conduct of the Church in meeting it. The latter gives forcible expression to the thought which is, I own, the background of my own mind upon the subject. If the Conscience Clause were all that its enemies assert it to be, yet I believe it ought to be submitted to by the thoughtful and patriotic, if it tends in any degree, as I believe it does, to avert our share of that "great danger" which, as M. de Laveleye truly says, "threatens modern civilisation," and certainly none more than our own; if it tends, as I believe it does, to break the neck of the "religious difficulty" which ties our hands and clogs our feet in extending elementary education; if it thereby tends, as I believe it does, to break up the great deeps of ignorance and degradation in England.

Nor can I forbear to add that if the ecclesiastical line of argument against it be really embodied in Archdeacon Denison's seventeen reasons against it, and in his published evidence and letters and speeches in Convocation and elsewhere, then I thank him for his unconscious demonstration of its necessity; for if his own account of his own policy and practice be a fair expression of the kind of toleration for which Dissenting parents may look from the clergy of the National Church, and of the risks which attend the faith of their children, then on his own showing, and on the strength of that alone, many politicians and many Churchmen will say. Welcome, if need be, a hundred Conscience-Clauses, each of a hundred Conscience-Clause power!