Page:The Conscience Clause (Oakley, 1866).djvu/56

44 maintain that it is over-sensitiveness, a misplaced sense of honour, which is loath to teach the Bible where it may not teach the Catechism—which will not allow sectarian prejudices to lie at rest when they would—which will not let the schoolmaster, being a Churchman, teach like a Churchman while he may, ignoring, except in certain specified particulars, the differences of religious opinion. It is the very spirit which produces Dissent in the first instance, which will not let it die a natural death when it might do so. No doubt this practice might be inconvenient, no doubt it would bear witness to something wrong somewhere -, but let us fight the mischief, not the evidence of it.

9. "Because the Church of England may not of her own act and deed place herself in a position at which the Church of Rome can justly point the finger of scorn as untrue and faithless—in one word, as un-Catholic."

10. "Because the Church may not seek or hope to win the respect and confidence of the Nonconformist by being faithless to her trust."

It is not because I am insensible to the importance of standing well in the eyes of any Christians that I own myself impatient of this nervous reference to the criticism of the Church of Rome—i.e., of Roman Catholics in England. I will not say that Rome's finger of scorn would be a tribute to the soundness of our position, but I do protest against the notion that the Church of Rome is to be looked to as having the right to acquit or condemn us. Let her see us cease to emulate her own exclusiveness; let her hear us rebuke her ludicrous inversion of her own noble name of Catholic; let her learn from our tone and from our policy that it is only Greek for universal.

However, let the Church of Rome point as many "fingers of scorn," and call us as "un-Catholic" as she pleases, she cannot do it with consistency on this point. The distinction between secular and religious instruction is recognised in the fullest terms in the Minute (of Dec. 18, 1847) under which a