that Society to be provided "for the Orthodox Congregational Dissenters and for the Society of Friends." How indignant must Mr. Dunn and the Committee of that Society be, when they find their principle so misrepresented in a pamphlet sanctioned by the Committee of Council on Education! We think we hear them exclaim, “Our schools are neither schools for Orthodox Dissenters, nor schools for Congregationalists, nor schools for the Society of Friends, nor schools for Presbyterians, nor schools for Baptists, nor schools for any other denomination, OUR schools are schools for all. Our principle is, that all children whose parents will permit them to read the Bible, may come to our schools, without having their particular religious opinions interfered with." This is unquestionably the principle of the Society. It is as remote as possible from classification or grouping of sects. It knows nothing of sects, but to exclude alike the peculiar tenets of all. This is its principle; and to this object its regulations are directed. To a certain extent (indeed) those regulations must be insufficient to enforce the principle, and secure the intended neutrality. Catechisms, and creeds, and books of special religious instruction being excluded from the schools of the Society, the schools of religious instruction must (even more than in other schools) essentially depend on the schoolmaster, who, unless restrained by a conscientious adherence to the principle of the Society, or by the watchful inspection of the governors or committee of the particular school, may, in his oral instruction, in his conversation with the children, in his comments on the portions of Scripture read, convey to his pupils his own peculiar views of religion. But the principle is to exclude all special religious instruction; and we are not aware that, in their model school, under the vigilant superintendence of a Committee comprising individuals of different religious denominations, there has been any departure from this principle. The threatened alternative, therefore, when examined, is found to vary from the plan, which, until April last, had been pursued by the government (viz., the plan of promoting education through the instrumentality of the National Society, and of the British and Foreign School Society,) in two particulars: 1st, in proposing to establish a separate model school for the Wesleyans, and 2ndly, in proposing to establish a separate model school for the Roman ists. The Wesleyans have never (that we have heard) complained of the former distribution of the funds between the two Societies; they have not asked for a separate grant to their own body; for what other purpose then can it have been suggested that a separate model school should be established for them, unless it be to countenance the suggestion of a separate model school for Romanists-a school which, it is obvious, must be put under Popish management, and in which the children must be instructed, and the teachers trained, in the peculiar tenets of Popery -in rites which the National Church pronounces to be idolatrous and superstitious! Such is one of the schools, which this pamphlet, sanctioned by the Committee of Council on Education, proposes to establish at the public expense. Such a proposal from such a quarter is truly alarming-alarming in itself alarming in the principle which it recognizes, and the consequences to which it necessarily leads. If such a school were established, and the principle were not further pursued, the nation would at least have taken another downward step in the sinful course on which it entered, when the college of Maynooth was established. Every shilling of public money, which is applied in promoting Popish instruction, whether in the chapel or in the school, plunges us deeper and deeper in the national guilt of promoting idolatry and apostacy; and we know who has said, “Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues." But the principle once conceded, will assuredly be worked out in all its consequences; and what is the principle on which this suggestion is based? It can be no other than this: that all forms of religion are equally true and equally to be patronized; not merely tolerated, for tolerance is out of the question-but equally to be patronized by the government; that public money is equally to be granted to all ". religionists,' no matter what creed they profess, or what doctrine they teach; that public money is equally to be granted to them, not for secular education, for it is now conceded that in National Education "Religion" is "to be combined with the whole matter of instruction, and to regulate the entire system of discipline," but for religious education, for education according to the peculiar doctrines of each sect. If the Romanist is to be assisted in educating the poor children of Papists in Popery, why not the Socinian in educating the poor of his sect in Socinianism? Why not the Socialist in carrying on education on the principles of Socialism? Why not the Jews in carrying on Jewish education? Will it be said, that we are a Christian nation, and that Christianity is part of our civil constitution? This is true. But it is equally true that we are a Protestant nation, and that our constitution is a Protestant constitution. And, if the one be a reason why public money should only be granted for Christian education, the other is a reason equally valid, why it should only be granted for Protestant education. But will the principle, if once adopted, be applied only to education? If the children of the poor need religious and moral education, do not the poor themselves need religious and moral instruction? If it be right, that public money should be granted to promote popish education, is it not equally right that it should be granted for the support of popish chapels and popish priests, to instruct adults in the doctrines of Popery? And can any thing be more absurd, as well as sinful, than to pay with public money Romish priests, to teach "the Romish doctrine concerning Purgatory, Pardon, Worshipping and Adoration of Saints," while the clergy of the National Church are bound to teach that such doctrine "is a fond thing, vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture, but rather repugnant to the word of God," (Art. 22); to pay with public money Romish priests to celebrate "the sacrifices of Masses," while the clergy of the National Church are bound to teach that such rites are 66 blasphemous fables, and dangerous deceits," (Art. 31.) Yet these are consequences which legitimately flow from the principle of the plan suggested in the pamphlet. Grant the principle, and it will assuredly be pursued out into its consequences. It behoves all who value the blessings of the Reformation whether civil or religious, all who either view the Church of Rome as an apostate and idolatrous church, or have learnt from past history or modern experience witness the persecution of the Protestants at Zillerthal, in the enlightened nineteenth century-that Popery is a system utterly hostile to liberty, whether civil or religious-let all such, whether Churchmen or Dissenters, unite in opposition to the project of the pamphleteer. It is, indeed, only a suggestion, but it is suggested in terms most peremptory, in a pamphlet circulated by the Committee of Privy Council. It is not thrown out to feel the pulse of the country? Let the pulse of the country be felt, and let it beat so high, that its state can be neither misunderstood nor misrepresented. If "a Normal school for Roman Catholics" be a dose not sufficient to quicken the Protestant pulse of the nation, the next dose will be a Roman Catholic college for England and Wales and then-an endowment for Popery. Why not? The one is just as consistent with Protestant principle as the other. The Normal school would be an excellent instalment. No time should be lost. We have, indeed, at present only a suggestion in an official pamphlet; but if Protestants are silent, the suggestion may be adopted by the Committee of Council, and its adoption not made public till a vote of the House of Commons is asked for money to carry it into effect. If the necessity of Christian education for the people needed to be demonstrated, it would receive a new accession of evidence from the disastrous occurrences at Newport; for, as was most appropriately and impressively stated by Chief Justice Tindal to the grand jury, "No remedy can be applied successfully to counteract a state of mind and feeling so unhealthy and diseased, and infecting so large a portion of the community, except the diffusion amongst them of the benefits of religious in. struction, and of a sound religious education amongst the rising generation." For this, churches as well as schools are necessary; and ministers as well as churches; and, blessed be God, all are in a course of rapid increase; though, alas! very inadequate compared with the enormous amount of the exigency. The Episcopal Church is hopefully enlarging her borders, as well as cultivating more sedulously her present portion of her Lord's vineyard. Three documents at this moment lie on our desk, which strikingly corroborate this. The first is the account of the ordination held by the Bishop of London, at which out of thirty candidates very nearly one half were ordained under the title of "assistant curates," and two to go out as missionaries by the aid of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, and three by that of the Church Missionary Society. We know not that such an ordination is paralleled in the annals of the Church. again from the far West we have before us a proposal for building the first episcopal church in the new state of the Texas; doubtless a very humble beginning, but a hopeful sign of the times; while from Then arrives the magni. ficent plan of the Metropolitan of India for erecting a noble church, where one is much needed-near Chowringhee, in the vicinity of Calcutta, and upon a scale of magnitude and in a style of architecture which shall fit it to be the cathedral of the see. It is proposed, should the endowments be sufficient, to have a dean and four canons; and to take measures for the daily celebration of our Protestant service; and to make the cathedral of St. Paul Calcutta, a centre for various fabours of piety and mercy among the native population by a body of missionary clergy. The sum of money wanted for these objects is £60,000; but the Bishop himself has begun with a munificent subscription of £10,000, which he engaged to advance at once, and to commence the work instantly; and other subscriptions had been promised in Calcutta, making, with the Bishop's, £15,300; to which the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge has added £5,000; and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel has given equivalent to £3000 for endowing a prebendal stall; and the East India Company has presented a valuable plot of ground. A committee has also been formed in London for collecting subscriptions. The sum required is large; but the object is large also; for though money is much wanted elsewhere for building many churches, this cathedral is not to be measured by ordinary rules; but by what is suitable to the place and circumstances; as the chief metropolitan Protestant temple of India. The Bishop's stirring appeal we doubt not will call forth donations, large in amount from the rich, and large in number from others. His own liberality is only equalled by his energy; and we shall not be surprised to learn, by an early arrival from India, that the spade and the mattock are already at work. His project for building three new churches in Islington, was by many deemed impracticable; but before men had done wondering, they were built and consecrated, and new ones have been added to them. The Extracts from the Bible Society's correspondence, appended to our present Number, exhibit the Bishop rejoicing in that institution as zealously as if there were no other one to think of; and his attestation to its character and "thirty-five years unparalleled suc. cess," is highly important; but in the church societies of course lies his chief scene of missionary exertion; and by the Divine blessing his cathedral will form the pinnacle of all his labours. May this faithful servant of his Saviour be long spared to the church in India; and may his latter years be abundantly gladdened by seeing the work of the Lord prosper in his hand. We have to record the decease of another right reverend prelate, the Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry. His lordship was less known to the public as a bishop than in his former capacity as the master of a public school, and as the writer of several publications, chiefly classical; having been unfitted, during a large portion of his episcopate, for onerous labours, by ill-health and increasing infirmities. We call to mind the following remarks which we made upon his lordship's election to the office in 1836. "With regard to this appointment, we should doubt the wisdom of placing in a post, which requires great labour and unremitting diligence, any individual who has worn out his best days in the arduous care of a public school, from which he had actually retired; for how can a superannuated member of another profession hope to be so vigorous, after even a few years, and when he has just begun to master the business of his diocese, as to be able to discharge the onerous and active duties which devolve upon a Prelate who wishes adequately to pervade the whole sphere of his superintendence? Bishop Ryder, whom Dr. Butler succeeds, had been able to give many years of health and strength unremittingly to laborious and overwhelming exertion, first as a parochial clergyman, and afterwards as a Prelate.' ANSWERS TO CORRESPONDENCE. W. W. E.; R. W. J.; F. S.; A Friend to Missions; R. B. B.; A. B. K.; T. M.; An Inquirer after Truth; A Warwickshire Curate; are under consideration. In reply to several correspondents who take different views of the bearing of the Pre-Millennarian question upon Missionary Societies, we think enough has been said on both sides for the purposes of truth, and that more might not promote love. We were quite as much "annoyed" as AN OLD FRIEND can be at Dr. Wolff's having spoken as he did of various persons and things in our pages; and we disclaimed at the time any participation in his censures, many of which related, as we said, to matters of which we were wholly ignorant. We had furnished no handle to the writer to go into those details; and we should have declined inserting his letters, or at least have omitted parts of them, but that, as we remarked at the time, we well knew what would have followed if we had pursued either of those courses. It would have been said that Christian Observers, Christian Lady's Magazines, Christian Records, Jew Society committees, and Church Missionary committees, were afraid to allow Dr. Wolff to disclose the truth; and that they were all in league to spite the Oxford Tract writers, and to silence Dr. Wolff as their defender. We therefore admitted his letters; for their statements he alone was responsible; and he shot his bolts so widely, that we did not suppose any person would be injured, or even think it worth while to be offended, by them. We did not heed what he said of ourselves; but it was vexatious to us that he introduced the Editress of the Christian Lady's Magazine, and the Conductors of the Record; for though we may not concur in every syllable in either of those publications as assuredly the writers in them do not in all that goes forth in ours-yet they both vindicate the great principles of the faith-the doctrines of our church and herself as a national establishment; and they have done good service-especially the Record in many able articles-in opposing the Oxford Tract school of theology, of which Dr. Wolff has become so zealous a champion. If the parties alluded to by him thought it worth their while to reply, we doubt not they could do so effectively; but they would waste their ink and labour. We had begun to cross out some of his animadversions; but we soon found we must cross out nearly the whole of his letters. His reference to the Record was professedly to justify the charges in his Journal, on which we had remarked; but it did not accomplish that object. He had asserted in his Journal, that the writers in the Record acknowledged "the authority of ladies" for settling theological questions; and that they censure the writings of the Oxford Tract divines without having read them. As these averments happened to come incidentally before us, in our quotations in the review of his Journal, we were not willing to allow such palpable mistatements to go forth uncorrected; and we therefore replied (page 700), that the writers in the Record certainly could not be accused of setting up ladies as "authorities," for that they justly disclaimed all human authority in matters of faith, even that of the Fathers themselves; and that as to their not having read the Oxford Tracts which they commented upon, they must then be conjurors, as they quoted largely from them; and Dr. Wolff would do well to weigh their arguments. Now it was no reply to this for Dr. Wolff to turn aside to something quite different, about Mr. Newman and the Bishops of Winchester and Chester; and in a matter of which we know nothing. Besides, it was not obliging, to make our pages the vehicle for remarks upon other publications. If he disapproved of anything in the Christian Lady's Magazine, or the Record, he should have sent his objections to the parties concerned, and not to us. We admitted them only lest it should be represented, and believed, that his arguments were so stringent, that the only way of meeting them was by a confederacy to stifle them. We have entered into this explanation; because it would be extremely painful to us to be supposed to approve of Dr. Wolff's printing his remarks upon so much that he sees and hears wherever he goes. Could we speak our mind upon this point more strongly than we did, when we said to him, that we "abhorred" the practice," which he has so largely adopted, of printing what persons say in ordinary conference. He does it, we admit, in a good-natured off-hand way; and he candidly admits that he is apt to write "in an unguarded and foolish manner;" but still it is not a good habit. We extremely dislike such personal allusions; and now drop the subject. It is a bad habit, Dr. Wolff: do unlearn it. We have no recollection of the purport of a paper which R. N. L.'s friend concludes we declined using, in order "not to offend our pluralist subscribers." The advocates for unnecessary or unjustifiable pluralities, must have been offended "considerably often" during our more than "thirty years' war." T appears, as I observed in my last paper, from the structure and general bearing of the parable of the Ten Virgins, that, by the kingdom of heaven which it illustrates, we are to understand that portion of the visible church which has separated itself from the ungodly world, and made a more open and decided profession of religion -in fact, the religious world." This is compared to ten virgins; five of whom were wise, and five were foolish: and, in its practical bearing, suggests for our inquiry two principal questions: 66 First, in what particulars the foolish virgins differ from the generality of professing Christians, and agree with the wise? And, Second, in what particulars they differ from the wise, and so come short of salvation? The foolish virgins agree with the wise, and differ from the generality of professing Christians in this, that they do not treat religion with indifference and contempt, but consider it a subject worthy of some attention. Nor is this merely hypocritical pretence. If they have deceived others into a belief that they are truly religious, they have deceived themselves also: for until the Bridegroom has actually come until that deeper self-examination and searching of heart which death and judgment force upon all, they never appear to have suspected the danger and unpreparedness of their state. One cause of this was, that their conduct presented no contrast to their profession,-their lamps, equally with those of the wise, were full and burning. The light too which their practice held forth was not merely moral: it must have been also, as far as man can judge, religious,— it was a lamp with which they waited for the Bridegroom. And let me now, with all plainness, infer from this, that men may be most punctual in the discharge of religious as well as moral duties: most regular in their attendance upon church and sacrament, and yet not be in the eye of God Christians. All may be, in His sight, mere formality a drawing near with the lips, while the heart is far from Him. But their religion was not mere formality. They did not separate themselves from the wise virgins the moment they quitted the CHRIST. OBSERV. No. 26. K |