Page:The Conscience Clause (Oakley, 1866).djvu/73

61 National Church, the corresponding narrowing of sectarian organisation.

All theological considerations apart, is not a National Church in great measure the national organisation for the purposes of education? Is she not the trustee of what Coleridge calls the national "reserve fund" for moral and spiritual purposes? Other duties and relationships, of course, the Church has as one of the subordinate organisations of the Christian body. There is not, nor ever has been, any risk of these being forgotten or neglected in England; and this question of the Conscience Clause does not in reality touch any of these spiritual responsibilities of the Church. It is hard, at least, to understand how a Church can maintain that its prerogatives of religious teaching are invaded when the fundamental provision of the trust deed of every one of her schools must be one which, directly or indirectly, lays down that "the Bible must be taught," and when she is only asked to exempt, not from the teaching of the Bible, but from the learning of certain of her special formularies, or from the inculcation of the characteristic doctrines of those formularies, the children of Dissenting parents who express their conscientious desire to have them so far exempted. The request is only made where other provision for their education is impossible or unreasonable; and it is made of a body specially pledged to make her institutions as comprehensive as possible. Is it, I ask, so light a thing, so mean a privilege, to have the position of a national arbitrator, so to speak, in matters of religion; to be able to offer a meeting-point for the various schools of theology in the country; to be able to deal a silent but effectual blow at the multiplication of sects, and the spread of schism; to be the strong right hand of the nation in drawing together the parted strands of our weakened and divided faith, in holding open the wide door of charity to our scattered flocks, whereby