The Express.
London, England, 1847-04-08 00:00:00

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LONDON, THURSDAY, APRIL 8.

IT is painful to observe so respectable a body of '
men, such approved staunch friends of liberal prin-
ciples, as the Scotch voluntaries, condescending to
become the fag-end of the BAINES agitation, with
which they have no little in common.
The characters of Scotch and English dissent are
marked by strong generic differences. This is said
without any want of respect for either class of non-
conformists; simply because it is the fact—a fact by ,
overlooking which the Scotch voluntaries are in ,
imminent danger of placing themselves in a false
position.
Dissent in Scotland dates from the days of the
Easxmes—from the era of the foundation of the
Secession Church. To this day, the great mass of ,
dissenters in Scotland acknowledge the confession of
faith of the established church, in all its leading
features, as their standard. The congregationalist., ,
the only other in any degree numerous dissenting 1
body, concurring with them in doctrinal views, have
also in Scotland approximated more nearly to the
presbyterian forms of church discipline than is the
case with their brethren in England. Among the
presbyterian dissenters of Scotland, the recognition
of the voluntary principle is an event of comparatively
recent date. There is no reason to believe that the
principle was held by the fathers either of the
Secession or the Relief: at all events the question was
not raised in their controversies, and no judgment
was pronounced on it. The Scotch dissenters were
voluntaries in practice long before they became colon- '
tuft" in theory. Their congregations little
or no property: their ministers rarely, ever, accept
from their congregations a bond securing them in a
ent salary. When the voluntary movement
permanent
tnadnecidedly commenced in Scotland, dating from
the great public breakfast at Glasgow some twenty
years back, its promoters merely avowed a principle
upon which they had long acted. They held the
tenet in the uncontaminated purity of comparatively
new converts, and there was nothing in their social
half-
hearted to inspire them with temporising, half-
compromises between conscience and conduct.
The English dissenters are somewhat differently
circumstanced. ,South of the Tweed, the epithet
" dissenter" has come, by a kind of tacit convention,
to be in a great measure restricted to the old denomi-
nations of nonconformists, who date from the
ejections under CHARLES IL The newer noncon-
formists, Wesleyans, Whitfieldites, Moravians,
have never fused thoroughly with that old aristocracy
of nonconformity, and have generally been found
opposed to them. The " denominations" (with the
exception of the presbyterians, who, by the way,
have never thoroughly amalgamated with the rest)
held from the beginning the voluntary principle.
Bat the congregations which adhered to the ejected
pastors numbered among their members many wealthy
citizens, and knights and squires, and even a few of
the peerage. These gentlemen took care that their
pastors should not want, and that their peculiar
tenets should not run the risk of becomingobsolete on
account of the expense of maintaining pastors and
schools for disseminating them. All over England are
to be found funds vested in trustees for the support of
dissenting chapels and schools, pastors, and teachers.
In the matter of endowment the ' denominations"
are rather rival and less wealthy establishments,
than dissenters from the establishment. The un-
questioning spirit which makes men adopt a religion
simply because it was their fathers', has been as rife
among the old endowed nonconformist congregations
SS within the church : they, too, have, and have had
their old high and dry formalists.
The different character of English and Scotch dis-
sent was felt and complained of by the zealous Scotch
voluntaries, at the outset of their movement The
endowed nonconformists of England had, in truth,
little relish for a dogma which denounced all endow-
ments. True, the dogma was one of the fundamental
doctrines of their churches, but it was one which
they had long agreed to regard as among those fine
theories which are too good for every-day use. They'
gave a languid assent to the arguments of the Scotch
voluntaries, but, save in a few exceptional cases,
no efficient aid to their propagandist efforts from the
north was to be had from them. Missionaries were
sent from Scotland to re-animate the zeal of the
Laodicean brethren in England, but though WARDLAW
himself was one of these missionaries, they had few
" seals of their mission."

But the English " denominations" are as jealously
sensitive of any possible ester: lion ofthe establishment's
influence, as they are indifferent to its permanent
endowment. Their temper inclines them to an armed
neutrality—to a tacit agreement that they will not
seek to make converts from the church of England,
provided the church is polite enough not to seek to
make converts from them. They have no objection
to remain shut up within their old limits, provided
the church is also forbid to extend her boundaries.
This is the plain English of their anti-state education
diatribes. If the church continues to educate the
children of churchmen, and the denominational con-

=ems the children of nonconformists, the
of power between these sections of Christian-
ity is pretty sure to be preserved unaltered. But if
once the state begins to educate, its pupils may be
inclined to change sides, or perhaps to set up a third
WV-
Until within these few weeks it was never under-

stood that the Scotch voluntaries had any objection
to state education. They threw themselves frankly
and unhesitatingly into the scale of the government
which introduced the Irish system of national educa-
tion. They may entertain doubts u to whether the
scheme now propounded by Ministers for England
and Scotland holds the balance even between the

church and dissent; and if so, they are wise to scru-
tinise it narrowly, and ask for modifications and safe-
guards before they assent to it. But they who have
hitherto avowed Maros's principles in matters of
ecclesiastical government, have also hitherto avowed
Mu.ros's principles in respect of state education.
Any objections they can have to the government
education scheme can only be in respect of
details : to the extension of national edu-
cation, so long as it is not made a cloak
for sectarian proselytism, they can have no objection.
Mr. BAINES, on the other hand, with whom they
have shown a disposition to ally themselves, criticises
the details of the measure only in so far as he can
thus strengthen the prepossession against it : what
he really dreads is a national system of instruction,
which, by strengthening the sense of common citizen-
shiph., might weaken sectarianism ,though it strengthened
trut

If the Scotch voluntaries will give themselves the
trouble to examine the Minute of Council for them-
selves, instead of taking Mr. BAINES' caricatures of it
for exact likenesses, they will find little that can cause
them a elision, and that little confined to the
P sad easily susceptible of amendment.

The distinction between schools promoted by the
National, and those promoted by the British and
Foreign Society, is not applicable to Scotland.
In that country, the parochial schools, and a number of
schools established and supported by churchmen, are
those over which the church has exercised a control.
On the other hand, independent of the Free-Church
schools—all, necessarily, of recent institution—there
are a great number of schools scattered throughout
the country, over which the established church never
was entitled to any jurisdiction. There are schools
connected with dissenting congregations—as for ex-
ample the very efficient school of the congregation in
Glasgow to which the late excellent Dr. HEUGH so
long ministered. In the manufacturing districts
there are many villages—long entirely neglected by
the Establishment—which have been supplied both
with religious ministrations, and with schools by the
United Secession or the Relief. Again, the Roman
Catholic schools in Glasgow—among the best managed
in Scotland—have been, we believe, entirely managed,
and in great measure supported, by dissenters.
The burgh schools throughout Scotland have long
been de facto administered by the corporations, not
by the church ;and such institutions as the Ayr, Irvine,
and Kilmarnock academies have been, from the be-
ginning, independent of it. Lastly, a great number
of the schools towards which grants have been contri-
buted by government, have been established by the
co-operation of churchmen and dissenters, on the un-
derstanding that the established church was in
no wise to interfere with them. All this numerous
_ .

class of schools, and the widely-diffused interest which
has upheld and is anxious to extend them, are jealous
of church interference. They have no reason to be
satisfied that an inspector, approved by the British
and Foreign School Society, could enter into their
views and maintain tin ir rights. They have quite aslittle
faith in inspectors approved by the kirk of Scotland,
or the Free Kirk. It is the want of some recognised
organ to represent the sentiments of this important
section of Scotch society, that has awakened the
jea►ousy of the Scotch dissenters. But it requires,
we are sure, only a frank expression of this feeling
on their part to government,to ensure them respectful
attention and any guarantee they can ask in reason.
We submit these considerations to the dispassionate
examination of the Scotch voluntaries. We should
regret to see a mission, sent from England to inocu-
late them with the local jealousies of a section of
English dissent, have more success than attended the
exhortations of their own missionaries sent to incul-
cate a doctrine from which we may dissent, bat must
admit its disinterested character and abstract logical
consequence.

Tots is unquestionably the age of material civilisa-
tion. Other great epochs in the world's history
have been especially characterised by particular men-
tal or moral manifestations: there has been an age of
. . . ..

violence, an age of faith, an age of chivalry, an age of
learning, an age of manners, and so forth; but these
middle decades of the nineteenth century constitute
pre-eminently an age of physical development On
whichsoever side we tarn, the same class of evidence
meets us. Everywhere the phenomena that are most
striking are material. Enormous docks, railways,
and other works, equal in magnitude to the pyramids,
and with infinitely more of human purpose in them,
grow around us with something of the rapidity of
magic. There are no bounds to onr activity. Nearly
all the working intellect of the age is in some way
evolved and realised in these physical conquests. The
complexion of the time is scientific. Art may almost
be said to be is abeyance. Eighteen hundred and
forty-seven would not build a St. Paul's, nor a West-
minster Abbey ; but, in its own way, does things
sally wonderfuL In the social history of man a
ny steamboat from Westminster to London
is an achievement not less marvellous than
the glorious dome of St. Pais; and a twopenny
omnibus from Paddington to the Strand is the result
of a problem infinitely more difficult and more useful
than the elevation of the monument of Cheops.

This train of thought is suggested by a perusal of
the account of the festivities held Birkenhead—
the new port on the river Mersey opposite to Liver-
pool—on Monday last, when Lord Alorterrir and
other distinguished personages officiated, on occasion
of the opening of the new docks, the new railway,
and the new park; a report of which appeared in our
columns of Tuesday.
Birkenhead is certainly one of the great pheno-
mena of the age ; and, in its rapid growth and leading
physiology, strikingly exhibits the character of that
influence which commerce is beginning more and
more potently to exercise in the social and political
affairs of nations. Formerly, kings and courts were
the principal founders of cities ; and to their pleasures
and expenditures the inhabitants looked for support.
We have changed all that. Other kind of considera-
tions altogether determines the sites of towns now.
The interests of commerce are become more powerful
than the interests of courts. New elements entered
into our social system with the introduction of steam
as a motive power, and revolutionised all the old modes
of national development. Other authorities prescribe
the grooves in which human events shall move than
political legislators. Governments could not have
made a Birkenhead without enormous cost and loss.
Of commerce, it has sprung up with a good per
center of profit in its hands. Here is a large, a
beautiful, and wealthy town, rising as it were spon-
taneously out of the earth, not at the arbitrary dictate
of a powerful despot, but in the quiet way of national
growth, and solely in obedience to the requirements of
an ever-increasing commerce. Commerce has certainly
become a most imposing power! A very few years
ago—we remember it perfectly—a few houses front-
ing the river, looking very desolate in their solitude,
and some poor fishermen's huts, constituted the
whole of the town, now counting its inhabitants by
tens of thousands, and boasting its splendid squares,
streets, crescents, and parks ; and within these dozen
years we recollect the hounds of Sir WILLIAM
STANLEY running down a fox, and hearing the hunts-
man's bugle in a wild spot where now stands a square
of considerable architectural pretensions, larger than
Belgrave-square in London, and every mansion in
which has long been tenanted by the commercial and
monied aristocracy of the place.

Birkenhead has grownup chiefly under the direc-
tion of a few enterprising individuals. It has conse-
quently had all the advantages of unity of effort and
design, in its general arrangements, both of puqic
and private buildings, and in carrying into effect the
original plans with regard to all those sanitory regu-
lations which the researches of the last few years have
placed at the service of the large builder. The
founders of Birkenhead determined to make it a model
city. They have studied the requirements of ponulous
towns for the betterpreservation of the public health,
and they have no cost to render their infant
community as free from the ordinary elements of de-
terioration as posaible. In this respect they have set
a noble example to the rest of England. The streets
are wide, airy, and straight, cutting each other at
right angles or ninnthOn parallels. This arrange-
ment gives them something of the prim monotony, of
the streets of Washington; but if it detract from the
picturesque, it serves to promote a free circulation of
air—the great desideratum of crowded cities. The
houses are only permitted to be built on approved
plane. Model cottages for the poor, furnishing many
of the conveniences which the houses of the middle
classes are without in the metropolis of the country,
have been erected, and are let out at an incredibly
low rata—and yet they are found to produce a good
per tentage on the outlay. The market is a fine
building—one of the finest of the kind in the kiag-
dom—airy, spacious, plentifully supplied with
water, and cooled with refreshing fountains—in every
respect utterly unlike the reeking nooks and dens
which to the disgrace of London are permitted to en-
gender all sorts of foul air and disease in the densest
districts of the metropolis. The slaughter-houses—
those fatal hotbeds of fevers in London—are built at
some distance from the town, and are so constructed
as to prevent accumulation of decaying matters, and
are provided with effective means for carrying them
off. Besides these enlightened regulations—tending
to procure a constant supply of fresh air, light, and
water—for the preservation of the public health, a
wise forethought determined the projectors to set
aside for ever, for the benefit of the public, a large
piece of ground as a park. This has been laid out
with waUu, trees, and so forth, at a cost of nearly
130,0001. Yet this will soon be repaid in the ad-
vancing value of the surrounding properties, all of
which will be let or sold for budding purposes.
Commercial transactions have taught the inhabitants
of Birkenhead that the most liberal policy is ever in
the end the most remunerative ; a fact that cannot be
too well and widely known.
As a port, Birkenhead offers many advantages to