Page:The Conscience Clause (Oakley, 1866).djvu/39

27 is apparently made as a deprecatory argument to his correspondent, but it serves to enable him and those who head the controversy to accuse Mr. Lingen of throwing dust in their eyes. The clause as it stands provides simply and solely, with no arrière pensée, with no second intention in view, for the exemption from instruction in the principles of one creed of those children whose parents profess and wish their children to be brought up in another. That the onus probandi lies on the opponents of the clause, when its principle is reduced to this elementary statement, I have never heard any reasonable man deny. Whether such children as are provided for by the clause ought to be provided for in Church of England schools at all is another question altogether. But none who apprehend the office of a National Church will, I think, doubt that all should be included in her schools who will come; and to this end it is necessary, in the present day, that the rights of conscience should be formally recognised and guaranteed. The very outcry, if the duty be admitted, proves the necessity of the stipulation.

But the unreasonableness of that outcry will appear more clearly from the specific questions put to Mr. Lingen by Mr. Caparn. To begin with, they are not so much bonâ fide statements of practical difficulties that had actually arisen in a given case as ingeniously put dilemmas, so framed, in perfect good faith (I do not hesitate to believe), as to put the clause in the most invidious light, and to bring the most discredit on its authors and abettors, and partaking so plainly, however unintentionally, of the nature of traps, that I wonder Mr. Lingen ventured so far into them as he did. The two questions and their answers have been so grossly misrepresented that I repeat them. They were these:—"In a school which has inserted the Conscience Clause