Page:The Conscience Clause (Oakley, 1866).djvu/35

23 first construction of forms of trust deed. Either clause should be regarded not as something isolated, but as part of a trust deed full of every sort of precaution for securing the Church character of a school.

The latter of the two is that proposed to the National Society by the Council Office, after eighteen months' expectation of some proposal from the society.

It is obviously stronger in two respects—one making against (if so it be), and one directly for, the National Society's view of the case.

1. It provides expressly for the admission of other than Church children, while the old form only does so by implication.

2. On the other hand, it guards emphatically the integrity of the Church teaching, and allows nothing but exceptional exemption from it.

I venture to think that if the society would discuss the question with the Council Office, the form might be even now improved by a combination of the two—at least so far as the embodiment in the clause of the old enactment that it be "the fundamental regulation and practice of the school that the Bible shall be daily read and taught therein." With this proviso, I believe that the assent of the National Society and of the Church ought to be, and will be, readily given to the clause.

Here at length I leave the mere history of this vexed question, and its bearings on that association of Churchmen which assumes the direction of Church education. I do so with a most earnest appeal to the committee and the subscribers of the National Society to reconsider their position—to retrace their path of uncompromising opposition—to effect, as they easily may, another concordat with the civil power, in furtherance of the great end of popular and Christian education.