Page:The Conscience Clause (Oakley, 1866).djvu/22

10 bound to administer those funds with that economy which is the first condition of any fair expenditure of the taxes of the people. I do not use the phrase that I am about to use with the least invidious or reproachful intention, but the case was clearly one in the lay official eye of a more or less proselytising character. The Church promoters wished to win back to the care of the Church those children whom long neglect or other causes had alienated from her. Who shall blame them? The Council Office certainly did not: it treated them very fairly. It might have refused aid outright to build a school that could almost be proved to be unnecessary. In fact, it stretched a point in favour of the Church, and offered them an alternative. It assented to the erection of a school for 200 children in consideration of the increasing population and the consequent increase of Church people naturally to be expected, and other local circumstances; the school to be in union with the National Society, if the society would admit the following clauses in the trust deed, otherwise not; in no case without the admission of these stipulations:—

1. An equivalent version of the old Conscience Clause (already quoted), to the effect of the exemption of any children whose parents might desire it from Church of England instruction or worship (as such); and

2. That the first committee should consist of Churchmen; that it should be perpetuated by annual re-election in the usual way—but without any religious qualification or test—by the majority of the subscribers for the time being.

These two provisions were the necessary method of securing the one object of the Committee of Council, that the school should be adapted to its surrounding population. Unaccountably, as it seems to me (on studying the tone and the turns of the correspondence), the promoters declined these terms. Aid was refused, and the parish was thrown back, as I deliberately maintain, righteously and happily, on private enterprise for its