The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1842-12-02 00:00:00

TO THE CONSERVATIVE MEMBERS OF THE

TOWN COUNCIL

GENTLEMEN,—To gain an honourable victory is one
thing. To reap the fruits by maintaining all the fair.and ge-
nuine results of victory is another thing. The special cha-
racteristic requisite for the former is courage ; for the latter,
wisdom. You and your supporters have evinced the cou-
rage ; you have gained the victory ; and now you are called
to the exercise of wisdom, that you, and we, and the whole
community may reap the good fruits.
Gentlemen, unsuspecting natures are easily taken by sur-

prise ; generous men, in the conscious possession of power,
are ready to exhibit the magnanimity of their generosity by
unadvised concessions ; and men of unstable minds are made
to hesitate, and something more, even in matters of princi-
ple, by the adventitious changes of outward and temporary
circumstances. All these elements are now at work ; and
there exists a risk at this moment, that some of you may be
softly conciliated into a betrayal of some of those high Chris-
tian principles, for which, as a party, you have been nobly
and successfully contending,

I will explain myself, without pretending to any gift of
prophecy. The question concerning the management of your
schools will be again urged upon your consideration. You
have now in the council, a gentleman who from the first has
been active and prominent, and as to competency facile
princeps, against what he calls the intolerance and bigotry,
and exclusiveness and meanness of your party in the matter
of the schools. He will not allow the question to rest, even
if you all were disposed to do so ; and if he finds that you
are divided among yourselves about some half measure which
some of you vainly hope might have the effect of concilia-
tion and peace, without the compromise of any principle; he
will, of course, avail himself of this, as his only hope of pre-
sent success.

Be prepared therefore. Gentlemen, for an appeal to your
sympathies, on the multitudes, the poverty, and the igno-
rance of the Roman Catholic population of the town ; accom-
panied by an appeal to your consciences upon the injustice of
enforcing such regulations in your schools as amount to an
exclusion of the children of those ignorant multitudes. These
are topics for popular declamation, which even in the hands
of an orator far inferior to Mr. Blackburn, may be made
exceedingly influential upon the unwary. Be prepared,
moreover, for an appeal learned in the law. You will be told
(as we were all told in a letter printed in the newspapers last
March, and signed T. Blackburn) that the language of the
Municipal Act itself confines you in the disposal of your sur-
plus funds, to such objects as are for "the benefit of the in-
habitants, and the improvement of the borough ;" and it
will be coolly taken for granted that the public benefit of the
inhabitants cannot be advanced by any system of education,
unless it be divested of every peculiarity to which any por-
tion of the public choose to object : that if any such pecu-
liarity be retained and enforced, the system is thereby ren-
dered exclusive, sectarian, and cannot therefore come within
the range of the discretion given to the council by the terms
of the act. It will thus be proved to demonstration, that
any educational system which the act justifies the council in
establishing ; in order to he so general, so universal, in its
application, as to be a public benefit to all, must be so point-
less, so useless in itself, as to be a personal benefit to none.
The question being opened, and these and similar general
arguments in favour of concession having been urged, the
nature and the amount of the concession itself now sought
for will next be presented. And here due caution will be
practised. You will not, I think, be required to reintroduce
the Irish extracts. This would be going too far. Neither
will you be required avowedly to exclude the authorised ver-
sion of the Holy Scriptures during school hours. Neither
will you be required to have your schools opened and closed
without prayer forthe divine blessing. All these will be osten-
sibly respected, so far as your Protestant children are con-
cerned. Neither will you be invited to sanction the intro-
duction into your schools of Roman Catholic Catechisms, or
any other direct instruction in the peculiarities of Roman
Catholic doctrine. This also would be felt to be too open an
assault upon our revived and ascendant Protestantism. But
you will be invited (it is quite possible that some two or
three among yourselves may feel disposed to volunteer the
invitation) to separate between RELIGIOUS and SECULAR
instruction, and to give secular instruction only to the
children of Roman Catholics.
Concerning the details which must arise in the proposed
practical management of this unchristian separation, differ-
ences of opinion will probably be found amongst you. Some
of you will be disposed (at least at first) to insist upon all the
children admitted to the schools, joining in the opening and
closing prayer. Some of yon may require a distinct stipula-
tion that the Roman Catholic priests are not to be admitted
into the schools on any pretence whatever. While doubtless
it will be urged, on the other hand, that any such jealous and
ungenerous conditions would only tend to mar the concilia-
tory effects of the timely concession.
Various practical difficulties must be encountered, and va-
rious bye paths of inconsistency trodden, by those who are
willing to concede the first step. But, Gentlemen, with re-
ference to this first, this fatal step, bear, I entreat you, with
a few words, written in honest affection, by an old and un-
changed friend.

Is secular instruction, by itself, a good thing, or an evil
thing? If it be a good thing so far as it goes, and if religious
education be only a better thing, then the question is open
as to whether it may or may not be right and wise to give a
good thing to those who will not allow you an opportunity of
giving them a better thing : but if secular instruction, when
systematically divested of all reference to religious principle,
be actually an evil thing, then the question seems at once
closed ; because whatever difference of opinion might exist
about the wisdom or duty of giving a minor good, there can
be no difference of opinion about the folly, and worse, the
wickedness of giving what is in itself evil.
Now, Gentlemen, one of the fundamental principles, for
which you, and your champions and supporters, lay and
clerical, have been contending all through this controversy,
is—that contemplating man, as he is by nature, ever since
the fall of Adam ; cultivation without counteraction, in other
words, secular instruction without religious principle, is at
the best only a refinement of evil, a weed forced in a hot-
house ; and that as Christians we could not, dare not, be

parties to it.
Turning to the report (published under the sanction of the
committee) of the great meeting, held in the Amphitheatre,
on the 13th of July, 1836, I find at page 6, in the speech of
your rector, the Rev. Jonathan Brooks, the following pas-

" The extract I intend to cite is one which struck me forcibly. It
is from one of the charges of one of our most celebrated prelates.
I am sure I shall thus do more justice to the subject, than I should

by attempting to put his principles into any words of my own. It
is from a charge by the present Archbishop of Canterbury. He was
speaking of the difficulty of finding any system which might be in-
troduced into a school, so that the children of all denominations of
Christians might be led to approve of it ; and he mentioned an ex-
pedient which had been proposed to remove this difficulty, which
he states to have been as follows :--` That, as there was so much

difficulty as to amount to an impossibility in agreeing on a mode
which should be convenient and satisfactory to all, it had been
' "

proposed that they should abandon the substance—that letters and
ciphers, and morals, should be taught in our schools, but that reli-
gion should be left to the care of the parent, or pastor. It is my