Page:The Conscience Clause (Oakley, 1866).djvu/21

9 Conscience Clause which many men accord on the first blush of it is most easily driven into a corner. It was a case of a parish of some 10,000, with no day-school regularly attached to the parish church. A private individual had caused a small one to be opened in a dwelling-house, as a nucleus for the intended national school, and that was all. Naturally—who can reproach them?—the clergy desired to have a Church school of their own, obtained a site, and applied to the Privy Council for aid to build a school to be in union with the National Society.

The subsequent inquiries disclosed the facts that the parish and neighbourhood was fully supplied with school accommodation for its proportion of poor children—some said over-supplied; that the British and Foreign schools existing in the place were not full, but were largely made use of by the Church of England population—such as it was—who made no complaint of the religious instruction provided, and that the committee of management of these schools was composed indifferently of Churchmen and Dissenters, the latter, of course, being in the majority; that somewhere about 120 Church children was the maximum that could at present be depended upon for the new Church school, if started, and that these might, as a matter of fact, be accommodated in the existing schools. Moreover, a national Church school had, in former years, been built with a public grant of 200l., and, after a brief experiment, had failed, the building being closed, and, at the very time of this new application, in ruins. What could the Council Office do? On the one hand was the praiseworthy zeal of a younger generation of clergy, and the revived interest of some of the younger local laity anxious to complete the organisation of their Church; on the other an Office constituted for the one object of making the means of education, provided from the public funds, available to the utmost possible extent for the benefit of the whole community, and not of one portion of it, and