and as loud in the board-room and the committee-room, as in the arena of philosophical controversy. It is possible that the exertions of the zealous, on both sides of the question, may outrun the pens and tongues of speculative inquirers; and, if we are not mistaken, every year will contribute to the solution of the question by the practical measures to which it has given birth. To these practical measures we intend more particularly to call the reader's attention. Our sympathy will go with the party, whichever that may be, which will present the world with the best and amplest results. Our approval will attend the schools in which the machinery of instruction is so adapted as to facilitate, but not to overshadow, the work of education,-in which the minds of children are best supplied with religious truths, united to a consciousness of their own duties as the Christian holders of those truths, and most suitably prepared for their place in society, their liberties as Englishmen, and their future obligations as labouring men and fathers of families.

It will be denied by none but the extremest sectarians among the dissenters, that the Church of England has a claim to take an active part in the education of the people. She exists for the purpose of education in its highest sense; it is her duty to afford it-it is her right to combat such impediments as may be thrown in her way. The theory of the Church of England, as propounded by Coleridge and Mr. Maurice, and as illustrated by several excellent contemporary writers, affords the fairest picture that can be conceived of the ministration of Christianity in the performance of its perpetual function-the civilization of mankind on earth, and their preparation for a state of being hereafter. The Church of England is not a doctrine, but an institution. "It presents Christianity," to use the language of the bishop of Salisbury on a recent occasion, "as "a definite substantial unity committed to the Church, and "by her embodied in formularies which thus constitute an "authoritative exposition of the truths she holds contained "in the word of God." But whilst she is the depository of the Christian truths and formularies which are professed by the State, and by a majority of the educated classes

tution of the realm, the full possession of a system of machinery adapted to maintain her existence and extend her utility. The tradition of property has set aside the tenths of the land for her support. In every parish her minister receives the peasant at the font, and consigns him to the grave: it is in the power of the priest to complete the lessons of the school by the lesson of the pulpit; and, by his constant presence and counsel in the emergencies of life, to maintain and apply the principles which it has been his duty to inculcate. He is the servant of that Master who said, "I will not leave you comfortless;" and his calling as a Christian priest does not confine him, like the hierophant of heathen mysteries, to the recesses of the temple, but rather sends him to the hearths of the humble, and bids him walk beside those who have no other friend. Such, indeed, are the functions common to the Christian priest of almost every Church: but the Church of England has a peculiar importance of its own, which will hardly be found to belong, at the present day, even to the Church of Rome in other countries. She is co-ordinate with the State; her prelates constitute an estate of the realm; her temporal head sits upon the throne, and her services form part of the law of the land. But in the union between Church and State, of which these traditional and existing rights are the constitutional symbols, neither institution is absorbed in the other, but each stands to each in the relation of mutual assistance by the performance of the duties respectively allotted to them. In no other country in Europe are the Church and State placed in a similar relation. Wherever the Church of Rome exists, that is to say, wherever the government of the Church is in the hands of a foreign potentate, there must be a perpetual struggle for predominance, ending either in the subjection of one element to the other, or in a truce effected for some political purpose. At this moment the Romish Church in Austria, Bavaria, and the most Catholic countries of Europe, is notoriously subject to the State, and to the absolute despotism of the State, in the discharge of many of its first duties,-in particular, the education of the people. The emperor Francis observed to the emperor Napoleon, that he had one army in

and that the former was the more effective of the two. In Protestant Prussia, the national church is identical with the government. It would be an abuse of terms to assert that the Church as it is constituted in Prussia could originate any act whatsoever; accordingly, the duties of a church are performed in Prussia by agents of the State, in the churches and the schools as well as in the public offices or the army. In England it is far otherwise: we have a Church, which is closely allied to the State by her duties and her powers, without being dependent on the State by her commission or her interests. With these rights are connected, by their very essence, the responsibility and the duty of promoting the education of those committed to her charge.

But here we are stopped by the question, Why has a church, endowed with such remarkable gifts, possessing abundant means of promoting the work of education by its influence with the crown and its presence in the upper house of the legislature,-a church, whose essence and origin is traced by her most zealous and sincere defenders to the need of those very services, and the fulfilment of those very duties, which have been so long and generally neglected, a church, whose funds might enable her to annex the school to the altar, if it be one of her most important maxims that teaching and preaching should be one,—a church, pervading the whole country, and commanding the sympathies and highest feelings of the nation as no other institution can or ought to command them,-a church, whose own canons prescribe the work of education, and even provide for the purpose machinery not unsuited to our actual wants,-how comes it, we repeat, that the Church, enjoying these privileges and bearing these sacred obligations, has done so little to promote the advancement of sound education? Is it possible, that a body, professing allegiance to Christ as its head, should allow the project which is to supply deficiencies in things so essential to its own standing and importance, to originate with laymen, and to be ripened by the unwholesome heat of party controversies? Is it possible, that with so much to do, and so much power of doing it, so little should have been done?

part of her divine commission, and that she exists for the purpose of spreading religion and true knowledge among the young and old, in the class and the congregation. But when we inquire for facts, what do we discover? We ask for EDUCATION, We are met by the dry formularies of religious instruction; we ask for an efficient control exercised over all the young generation in England, and we are referred to the exertions of a few amiable and zealous individuals, who have happily succeeded in infusing into the parishes committed to their care that spirit which we seek in vain wherever individual zeal and enlightenment has not come to the relief of the imperfect system. We ask what the Church of England, the assemblage of the prelates, the priests and the communicants at the established altars of the land, have done for education; and we are either met by a defence of the theory which they ought to have carried into practice, or by the reports of the 'National Society for the education of the poor in the principles of the Established Church.'

The exertions of that society should not be undervalued: it has been sanctioned by good men; it has been served by well-meaning officers; it has done a great deal towards spreading the notion that schools were to exist, and human beings to be taught to think, or at least to read, in spite of the prejudices of the last half-century. But it is high time to ask by what claim the National Society is to be regarded as the Church herself? The Church has made over the high and inalienable duties of the education of the poor in the principles of the Established Church' to an association of an humbler character and of a far less indisputable title. An attempt is made to settle the question by the high argument of church authority, and we are told of the efficiency of " machinery actually working "well, and promising before long to embrace in its operation "the whole body of the peasantry." But whatever may be the results of the present system, they are due to the National Society, established and conducted under the auspices of churchmen-not to the Church herself. We say that it is high time to call the attention of the public to this state of things; because as, on the one hand, many of the arguments used in defence of education by the Church do not belong,

sociation called the National Society, so, on the other, the results of the National Society are not the results of education by the Church of England,-they are the results of the supposititious institution destined to effect what the Church has neglected. By what right then has the National Society acquired the powers it affects to exercise, of prescribing tests and methods to all the schools of the Church of England, of enjoining beneficed clergy of the Church to perform or to abstain from performing certain acts,—of treating with the Government in the language of an estate of the realm,—and, in fact, of legislating on a subject which affects so deeply the most important interests of the public and the Church? Such language on such a subject would be appropriate in convocation, in a synod, or even in the senate; but there is nothing which gives the National Society a claim to that deference which we should be inclined to exact even from the highest authorities of the State to the Church herself. In short, there is a material difference between the archbishop of Canterbury and the bench of bishops going down to the House of Lords to bring in a bill for the establishment of a system of national education, (if their lordships had ever been so minded,) and the same right reverend prelates sitting as the committee of the school at the Sanctuary, Westminster, from which they censure the efforts of the laymen at Whitehall and control the schools of the clergy all over the country.

The National Society has derived much of its importance in later years from having been made the channel through which the largest part of the parliamentary grant was distributed by the Treasury. The change which was effected last year by the transfer of this distribution from the Treasury to the Lords of the Council as the givers, and from the National Society generally to the applicants individually as the receivers, is in itself a very good thing; for it substitutes on the one hand an enlightened and responsible committee of the advisers of the Crown for the subordinate financial agents of the administration, and on the other it deals with the merits and the necessities of zealous and able individuals, in lieu of the inefficient machinery of the society. Of course, the National