Page:The Conscience Clause (Oakley, 1866).djvu/16

4 learn any catechism or other religious formulary, or to attend any Sunday-school or any place of worship to which respectively his or her parent or guardian shall on religious grounds object, but the selection of such Sunday-school and place of worship shall in all cases be left to the free choice of such parent or guardian, without the child's thereby incurring any loss of the benefits or privileges of the school the trusts whereof are hereby declared."

The bare existence of these words, in papers issued in 1840, whether they were largely used or not, is a sufficient refutation of the hardy statement that the Conscience Clause is an abrupt invention of the year 1860. But they prove more than this. For this form is stronger than the recently-proposed Conscience Clause, since it provides for the total exemption of certain scholars, in a given case, from any religious instruction whatever, which the clause now under consideration does not do. Such, however, strong as it is, was one of the trusts framed twenty-five years ago for schools of the Church of England not in union with the National Society: not, it is true, much used, for the large majority of Church of England schools have always been, and are still, in union with that society; hence the urgency of the present dispute.

And a similar trust was used for all schools not in union with either of the two societies, being varied to meet the cases of different denominations and different schools.

With reference to schools in union with the British and Foreign School Society, which excludes all catechisms and formularies, and allows no religious instruction except reading and expounding the Bible, "the principles of the Society," which are expressly referred to in the precedent, are ipso facto equivalent to a Conscience Clause, without setting it out in extenso.