The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1842-01-11 00:00:00

Eibtrpool &tanbatti.

TUESDAY MORNING, JANUARY 11, 1842

The recent decision of the Municipal Council on
the question of education, is so highly important, that
we shall make no apology to our readers for reverting
to it, and noticing, as briefly as we can, one or two

points brought forward by gentlemen who voted in

the minority, and by them enlarged and dwelt upon as
if they possessed much intrinsic weight and conse-

quence

In the view of one of the adverse aldermen, the
Council have passed a decree which is fully equivalent
to an incipient reconstruction of the abrogated penal
laws against Popery; and visions of ropes, screws,
and hatchets danced through his mind in galloper and
sarabands of varied confusion. It was somewhere
about the time when this worthy alderman was horn,

(we take his own word for the statement,) that still no

•
living professor of the Roman Catholic religion might

be lawful owner of one rood of his mother earth, and

that a busy informer might even unhorse him from the

horse he bestrode to fair or market, as one whom our
stern and cruel laws deemed altogether unworthy of

equestrian elevation. Oppression like this it was pain-

ful to think of in these days when profession of every
sort was so free; but it was irresistibly recalled to his
mind by the fact of the municipality of Liverpool be-

ing instantly engaged in remodelling their schools on

a strictly Protestant and scriptural basis. To do this
upon an unreserved, non-excepting, and exclusive
plan, he regarded as an absolute revival of penalties
and the intolerant principle, and he imagined it as the
most painful retrogression on the march of intellect
which it was possible to conceive. Now as our nerves
happen not to he quite so delicate in their texture as
those of the liberal alderman, we confess that we are
not terrified by this bugbear of penalisrn and persecu-
tion against Popery which he would conjure up to
frighten us from our propriety. To intolerance, in a
rightful construction of the term, we are as much op-
posed as the alderman himself; we are no advocates
for any, even the smallest invasion of the rights of
conscience; but we contend that the Corporation of
Liverpool are pure from that offence, and that, in the
course they have taken in remodelling their schools,
they have strictly adhered to the path of principle and
duty, and have violated no rule of toleration in its
most enlarged.and liberal, but, at the same time, its

just and correct sense.
Alderman Evans—for it is to him we allude—would
not say that any penal law is an unjust law ; if this
were the case, how should virtue and honesty be de-
fended in a world where vice and dishonesty so largely
abound ? Penal laws are necessary for the preserva-

tion of civilised society; they cannot be dispensed
with ; but, beyond all question, no punishment, pri-
vation, or loss of any kind ought to attach to the dG-
ing of that which is in itself right, truthful, and de-
serving of praise. An exclusive system of scripturally
religious education is, we will admit, penal; but penal
on whom, or on what ? Why penal on the irreligious,
penal on unbelievers in the Christian dispensation, or
penal on those who would mix up with truth some-
thing which is not true, and thereby corrupt and de-
file the truth itself. On all such a strictly Protestant
system of education is certainly penal; but it is not
for this reason objectionable. Here we take issue with
the objector, and we affirm that it is he who is in er-
ror, and not we.

The question may be put in another form, thus—
shall error inflict its penal laws upon us, or shall we
pass a penal law against it ? We submit that this is
exactly the question, and that, according to th 9 plain
dictates of that first law of nature, self-protection, we
have no choice in the business, but are enjoined, by
the highest and strongest obligations, to take care that
we do not palter away a valuable—a sacred deposit
committed immediately to our trust. It is one thing
to tolerate dissenters in the utmost latitude of free
will and free action in what concerns themselves; it is
another to allow them to obstruct and hinder us in the
exercise and enjoyment of the same justly valued pri-
vileges. Romanists may establish schools for them-
selves ; there is no prevention offered them ; but they
have no right to come forward and dictate to Protes-
tants what system they shall adopt in their institutions,
and convert the toleration which they receive at our
hands into a right of obstruction and persecution as
against us; for such is what, in effect, they claim. If
a system of education which is right and sound in it-
self operate as an exclusion, and so far penally, against
Romanists, we cannot help that ; that is their fault,
and not ours. Are we to corrupt our system because
they will not receive what is true ? We do not compel
them to accept what we submit for their adoption ; but
we maintain and defend it because we believe it to he
true in itself, and best for all who will avail themselves
of it. On this ground we are ready to meet all gain-
sayers ; we stand, as it were, upon a rock, and cannot
be moved.

So much as to the penal character of the resolution
taken by the Council ; with regard to its actual opera-
tion, in this point of view we confess that our presci-
ence is a little at fault. 'We do not know whether the
priests of the Church of Rome will be able to expel
the Romanist children from the schools or not ; we
hope they will not; we are conscious that children who
stand so pre-eminently in need of it, should have the
full benefit of the essentially valuable instruction which
shall hereafter be afforded in these schools ; but what-
ever course the priests may take, and whatever success
may attend their exertions, we shall find nothing either
in the defeat or triumph of their efforts to make us in
the least regret the decision of the Council. This we
say upon deliberate consideration.
Let us suppose the ecclesiastics of Romanism to
succeed in their- pious anathemas, and Romanist chil-
dren withdrawn from the schools ; they will, in this
case, have been able to provide other schools for them.
This we take as an inevitable consequent; the project
is, we believe, already a-foot ;at least we read a letter
signed Catholicus in the Liverpool Journal of Saturday