The Sun.
London, England, 1839-07-01 00:00:00

lic Church in-Ireland, to the exclusive education of the
people, obtain the sanction of Paeliament, you may soon
bid farewell to your rights as Britons, and your collec-
tive existence as Christian Churches. Surely you will
not be accessary to sour own ruin ; you will not be
lured by a cry put forth only to deceive you ; you will
not throw yourselves into the arms of one enemy,
merely to escape another?
Dissenters and Seceders—Are you asking what shall
we do—how shall we impress upon the Legislature the
righteousness of our claims to be exempt from the
interferes
with of any scheme of education which
with the rights of conscience ? I answei; imitate the
people at a place of worship in Oxfordshire, who, through
the medium of Lord Brongham, presented to the House
of Lords a petition against, every system of educa-
tion which tended to propagate particular doctrines.
What good man, unless blinded by an unreasonable
bigotry, would object—that the State should supply
secular, and the Catholic, Protestant, and Dissenting
Churches religious instruction to the youth of their re-
spective communities ? Why should we, under pre-
tence of a concern for the religious welfare of
others, attempt to force our creed on the children dour
neighbour, without his consent ? Every denomination
amongst you believes its own peculiar doctrines to be
true—you ask for equality and protection, for a share
of the funds which the country provides for the educa-
tion of your children, but disclaim all State support for
your clergy. You believe your cause to be the cause of
God and of truth ; and if truth prevails over error, vir-
tue over vice, and wisdom over folly, you are content.
Then act on your own principles—act in concert ; and
though you may be as small in numbers and us
impotent in influence as your enemies assert,
yet, strong in the goodness of your cause; and remem-
bering veritas vincit—the certainty of the ultimate
triumph of truth, you will at least modify, if not pre-
vent,
With
mischief contemplated by your adversaries.
the permission of the Editor, I will, in another
letter, lay before you some reasons that should induce
you to refuse to become the unnatural allies of the
Established Church in her opposition to a liberal plan
of education.

AMICUS VERITATIS.
Cheltenham, June, 1839.

(From the Examiner.)
There is no circumstance connected with the history
of society in England so melancholy and so disgraceful,
as the small amount of attention—or rather the utter
and hopeless neglect and contempt—which has fallen
to the lot of schoolmasters, and through them to the most
momentous interests that can affect society. What
Dryden said to the public of his idle and debauched
day, has even yet lost nothing of its sad significance.
" It will continue to be the ingratitude of mankind, that
"They who teach wisdom by the surest merns, shall
generally live poor and unrewarded, as if they were
horn only for the public, and had no interest in their
own well-being, but were to be lighted up like tapers,
and waste themselves for the benefit of others." Nor
has this continued to be only the ingratitude of men
It his been still more their grave and serious loss. Few
thing; are so sickly and inefficient ai the light of an ua-

profitably wasting taper.
The stumbling-block in the way of Education this
country has lain in that very institution, which—regard
being had to its origin and the condition of its own ex-
istence—should have its greatest cherisher and sup-
porter. Whenever the slightest attempt has been made
with any equitable care for those rights of conscience
which are still more essential to civil freedom than the
rights of property or person, to remove the ignorance of
the people—a piercing cry of robbery and blasphemy has
been instantly raised by the (Thumb. With Oxford on
the one hand and Cambridge on the other—with the
wealthy and well-fed brood of Eton% Wintthesters,
Westminsters, and Harrows, under her ample and

hly furnished lawn—she manages to set up such
a discordant screaming in all men's ears, that, " for a
quiet life," they have generally been content to leave
her what she clamoured for. And we must confess

that among all the numerous sacrifices that men are
called upon to make for a quiet life, this seems to us
to be about the least reputable. We have never
wondered at these clamourlngs of the Church—since
nothing is more natural than that an abatement of popu-
lar ignorance should encroach upon ecclesiastical power
—but there seems to us much baseness and senility,
as well a; a scandalous disregard of the high and
enduring- interests of religion, in the sort of success
they have met with.
A triumph to the most odious spirit of exclusiveness
is implied in that success. Let the people beware of it
in time. If we admit it to be a genuine success, if we
give way to it as a truth, if we do not treat it as a
deliberate artifice, and do our best to strip all its pre-
teheiig" bare—we sliall find that whatever we have been

labouring at for this quarter of a century, and whatever
in that time we have achieved, some day or other, and
that no very distant day, will come tumbling down
about our cars as things that are not true.
that are not successful, that are not worth
preserving. It is too common a notion to sup
pose that what has been once done for liberty
of just Government can never afterwards be undone.
The Tories know better. They passed the Test and
Corporation Act, which they had all their lives opposed,
but only to keep in their hands the means of counteract-
ing its fruits. They passed the Catholic Relief Bill, in
resistance to which their leaders bad staked their repu-
tation on earth, and very nearly their claims to heaven
—but they passed it when they did not dare to refuse
it further, and because there was still the chance that
. the power and popularity it would give them might be
turned against the people. Then they resisted Par.
liamentary Reform, and they fell—but in violent
defeat and overthrow, as in mean compliances and
submissions, their instinct of self-preservation still
kept them true to that false-hearted creed, which
never surrenders the hope, and is too often able to
retain the power, of making a dead letter of a living
law. There is not an act of popular improvement, of
civil or religious concession, passed since Mr. Canning's
Administration, that this party of political hypocrites
and pretenders have not—whether seeming to favour,
Jr professing to yield to with the eracefulneis of con-
fessed defeat—hated with a hatred that will never be
exhausted till the essential benefits of every such act are
baffled or exhausted also. It becomes every friend of
rational improvement to look to this. It becomes every
one who thinks sincerity in public affairs, with all its
occasional errors—a better thing than falsehood, with
all its plausible pretence. There is no better time
to check its progress than now—no better cause in
which to engage with it than that of Education. The
Conservatives have fought their fight ever since the
Reform Act by the help of a series of very paltry am-
buscades—but we have them now on the old ground.
They have come out in the flush of an insolent success,
and never have such detestable principles or arguments
been openly urged in the worst days of this party, as in
the recent canting exhibitions with which the Education
grant was resisted. This subject of Education is their
cloven foot. They have shown it before, when they had
more reasons for concealing it than now. When, in-
deed, have they ever been able to avoid showing it,
whatever pretences they put on ?
4‘ Whatever title pleased their ear,
Dean, Drapier, Biekerstaff, or Gulliver"
—whatever names of Toryism or Conservatism they
rejoiced in, haters of education they have still been
found. Let them, then, on this question be fairly
grappled with, and the result need not be feared. Edu-
cation is precisely one of those subjects that requires
practice to give it efficacy. Let the people know what
it is that is proposed—let them see it in positive opera-
tion—let them, in having their sources of education
widened,-feel the circle of their social comforts enlarged
—let them ascertain, moreover, that nobody means to
teach Deism or Atheism or blasphemy of any kind, and
that all the village churches throughout England are
still to remain standing.