Page:The Conscience Clause in 1866.djvu/30

26 Church school builders as a condition of a grant is a bond to give a secular education on demand.

2. The Conscience Clause being repugnant to Churchmen has greatly obstructed the progress of school building as indicated by the gradual diminution of the Government Building Grants.

3. Dissenters of the labouring class whether in England or Wales entertain generally no dislike to the religious teaching of Church schools.

4. The Conscience Clause alleged by the Education Department to be especially requisite in Wales, is there rejected by Churchmen, and is repudiated as insulting and degrading by the representatives of the leading Nonconformist sects.

5. In the British and Foreign schools of Wales, supported by the Calvinistic Methodists, Baptists, and Independents, the religious instruction is merely nominal.

6. The means for promoting education in Wales recommended alike by Churchmen and Dissenters is to make grants impartially for any school for which an adequate number of scholars can be secured. (The Education Department have published plans of schools for thirty children.)

7. Denominational minorities, inadequate separately to maintain a school, might be assisted to found a school in combination.

And now a few words upon the action of the Education Department, and then upon the duty and prospects of Churchmen touching this question.

I confess that the pertinacity with which the Education Department has clung to this obnoxious and unwarrantable clause in spite of remonstrance, evidence, and argument, has filled me with astonishment. They still, as I understand them, advance three pleas, in justification, and those pleas we will briefly examine.

They allege that an official precedent for the Conscience Clause is to be found in the Minutes of 24th September and 3rd December, 1839, and in an annexed form of conveyance for schools not in connection with the National Society or with the British and Foreign School Society, which does contain a Conscience Clause, but with the prefixed notice, "the Committee do not require the adoption of any of these forms."