The Sun.
London, England, 1868-02-24 00:00:00

4RCHBISHOP MANNING ON ED&CATION.

The Lenten pastoral of Dr. Manning was read in all the
churches and chapels of the Roman Catholic diocese of
Westminster yesterday. It consists exclusively of a treatise
on popular education, and is diametrically opposed to the
State undertaking the instruction of the people. The
Archbishop says the duties and rights of parents are
derived from the natural and the Divine law, but the
Church is the guardian and executor of that law. " The
State has no commission, either natural or revealed, to
educate ; and no jurisdiction over the rights of parents or
of the Church in the education of its children. Here we
are at direct issue with Erastian and latitudinarian poli-
ticians. The wisest policy of the State, for its own sake,
is to assist both parents and the Church in the work of
education. The public revenues cannot be better applied
than in preventing ignorance and crime; nor more unpro-
fitably spent than in punishing what it ought to have
prevents It is true, indeed, that the State may pro-
tect itself. If parents, through criminal neglect of their
offspring, suffer them to grow up in ignorance, and thereby
to commit crime, society, in self-defence, may punish the
parent and endeavour to reclaim the child. But even
then it has no rights against the faith and conscience of
the parents or their children." " A Minister of Public
Instruotion," he goes on to say, "is intelligible :
Minister of Public Education there cannot he. The office
is not vacant. The Church has received' this com-
mission from its Divine Head. It will never resign its
trust, 'and no earthly power can deprive it of its
office To-establish a system of mere secular
instruction, to avoid `the religious difficulty,' as it is
called, is a poverty-stricken device. It has been tried in
America, and proved by experience to be neither,efficient
nor moral in its result. France and Prussia, which have
led the way in State education, have shewn a higher
sense of what education is. Both have been wiser and
-more Christian than to attempt a system of mere secular
instruction. Both have carefully preserved and employed
to the fullest extent what is called the denominational
system. Moreover, where is the justice of paralysing the
free action of a majority who are already labouring to
Christianise the people, in favour of a minority who reject
or are careless about Christianity.? Every sign of the
times warns us of our public danger. Pauperism and
crime have steadily increased, and drunkenness, deny it
wk.) will, the cause of both, is steadily spreading among
our people. They who believe that these moral diseases
can be cured by instruction— that is, by reading, writing,
and arithmetic—know little of human passion and human
wickedness. The miserable religious divisions of England
are driving our legislation into a complete exclusion o!
Christianity from its public acts. But this is to desecrate civil
society, and to reduce it to the mere natural order ; en
once reduced to the mere natural order, two consequences
are inevitable—the moral action of public law
expires, and the immoralities of the natural order straight-
way revive and multiply. But we may yet hope that a
system of merely secular education is not likely to exist
among us." After condemning the present Irish system,
which some, he says, would wish to have adopted in Eng-
land, the Archbishop urges that instead of new expedients
fatal to the integrity and efficiency of the vast, if inade-
quate, system of education we have already formed, the
course of true policy and of just toleration would be, first
to develope and extend the existing system, and, secondly,
to increase the grants of public money for education:'
purposes. " A million and a half," he says, " spent in a.
true Christian education of our people would in the
end save millions now loss in punishing crime and in
re' ie ving pauperism. There was, perhaps, never a mument
when Christianity had a feebler hold over the people of
this country,and that for two 'reasons— the action of reli-
gion over the massed has grown perpetually less, and the
masses have multiplied year by year. At such a time as
this to hasten and extend tile separation of religion from
education is an imprudence bordering on infatuation.
Better let even our sectarian divisions exist' than rob
Christian children of Christian education, ho vsoever im-
perfect. To be in earnest for a fragment of divine truth
is better than to be indifferent about the whole of Chris-
tianity. Excepting a handful of doctrinaire and a few pro-
fessed secularists, there is not-to be found any number of
people in the coantry who would prefer a school without
Christianity."