Page:The Conscience Clause (Oakley, 1866).djvu/50

38 the work of the parish school—"Feed my lambs." And it must in no wise be pressed to the point of contravening that other evangelical maxim of education—may I call it the first Conscience Clause?—"Suffer the little children to come unto me"—"Καὶ μἡ κωλὐετε αὺτὰ"—hinder them not!

Let that pass, however. The State has certainly claimed no such authority in the controverted clause. As to the matter of Christian teaching in schools, the State has left, leaves, and expressly proposes to leave, it wholly untouched. The State merely claims as regards the manner of it, to define and regulate certain circumstances in which certain parents may claim that a certain form of that teaching which they disbelieve shall not be taught at all to their children.

One may add, however—since the Archdeacon has suggested the analogy of "parish churches"—that the State of England—by which I understand the totality of the nation, has gone so far as to "define," or at least to legalise a definition of, what the manner of Christian teaching shall be—at all events so far as to "regulate" the expression of it in outward act and worship, by legalising the Book of Common Prayer, and by enacting that the matter of the minister's teaching shall not contravene or "deprave" those formularies, or the Articles of Faith appended to them and legalised with them. So that the assumption of defining the manner and also the matter of Christian teaching in schools would be no such unheard-of pretension on the part of the State if it were made. As a matter of fact, however, at present it is not, and the Conscience Clause expressly avoids making it.

3. "Because the Church may not do harm to the souls of the children of the Church by putting before them in her daily practice that the 'privileges' of a school do not necessarily not only include, but flow out of and depend upon, the teaching of religious truth."