The Sun.
London, England, 1869-06-07 00:00:00

ARCHBISHOP MANNING'S PASTORAL ON
NATIONAL EDUCATION.

Archbishop Manning has issued, on the occasion of the
Feast of the Sacred Heart, a pastoral which is practically
a plea for denominational education in England, not as
absolutely the best possible system—that being realisable
only where the whole people being of one mind in religion
are religiously brought up in schools which are at once
schools of the Church and of the State—but as the best
of which the English people have the choice.
The following passage fairly represents the import of the
whole :—" Water cannot rise above its source. The State
has no rights, therefore no duties, higher than those of
the parents. Sacerdotalism claims no such rights against
the natural rights of parents. The Church claims and
possesses the right and the commission to direct, and by
all moral power to constrain, its members to educate their
children as Christians, and, further, to protect them
in these rights and duties against all adversaries ; and of
all adversaries, from Julian to Voltaire, the State, when it
exceeds its rights, is the worst. A Christian civil power
educating by its public action an united people in sound
Christian schools, is the most perfect example of the moral
character of tl:c State. A civil power holding the balance
of justice even in a firm neutrality among the religious
sections of a divided people, assisting them to educate their
children, partly by private and partly by public means,
in schools proper to their respective religious convictions,
is the less perfect, but the inevitable, condition of a State
which has forfeited its religious unity. A civil power
rejecting all religion from its public action, and excluding
it from its popular education, and nevertheless meddling
with teachers, schools and books, becomes the worst of
social tyrannies, the tyranny of bureaus and of pedants.
In such a system the State has not only got rid of sacer-
dotalism ; but has usurped the parental rights of the
people. Its usurpation upon the office of the Church is an
usurpation also upon the authority of every father and
mother in the land. We cannot be too prompt in mea-
suring the full extent of the conflict into which we may be
entering. It is no less than a trial of strength between
the traditions of Christian England and the demands of
those who, while they strip the State of all Christianity,
claim for it a supreme control over the education
of the people. They tell us that the time is
come for enlarging our conceptions of the State, by
claiming for it a right to exercise those functions
which the clergy have hitherto regarded as their own.
But those functions are essentially and exclusively reli-
gious; and the clergy claim a direction of education,
because education in its essence is the religious forma-
tion of children by the law of Christian faith and morals.
This claim then of the State is equivalent to a State
supremacy over the conscience. What was once claimed
for Kings is now claimed for States. But Kings
claimed a supremacy to direct their people in matters
of religion ; the State is now to claim a supremacy to
strip the education of the people of Christianity, and to
exclude their pastors and clergy from directing the
education of children. Now, this is nothing else than
the deification of the civil power, which Christianity
overthrew. It is the lrx regia of Ancient Rome, in which
Emperors were pontiffs, a true tyranny over body and
I ,
soul.