Page:The Conscience Clause (Oakley, 1866).djvu/23

11 Church schools. Righteously, for though it was a project naturally commending itself to individual consciences, and having by parity of reasoning a claim on individual pockets, it had no point of contact with the State conscience, still less a claim, being what it was, on the State purse. Happily, for it called, as all such cases call, attention to the fact that a National Church, which is practically the Church of the minority, is a National Church only in name. It was very hard, no doubt, for the active clergyman of Llanelly, but the hardship arose from the faults of himself, or his predecessor, or the system which he had inherited, and not from the fault of the civil power, which could regard nothing but the facts of the case. For, in truth, the battle which the Committee of Council is constituted to conduct is that of Education against Ignorance, not that of the Church of England against Dissent. The discovery of this distinction should have warned Churchmen at Llanelly, and this whole controversy, as I shall assert more fully hereafter, should warn all English Churchmen, to consider their whole position, to take stock, so to speak, of their present materials and their existing machinery, to set their whole house in order!

Mutatis mutandis—this is the gist of the question raised in case after case that has been in dispute between the Council Office and the National Society any time this half-dozen years, till at last it has reached a crisis. It has become necessary that the Government should know—for the Committee of Council on Education is practically a Committee of the Cabinet—whether the Church of England intends to accept the policy which the experience of twenty-five years has forced upon the Education Department, and of which the experience of every day is demonstrating the necessity, and, I believe, the justice. No one who studies the published correspondence which has passed in the more important cases presented to Parliament, no one who reads carefully the controversy on the Management Clauses, can fail to