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Committee of Council with which I am acquainted, is that of Broadway, Worcestershire. I have the particulars of it certified to me in writing. It is in 1856—two years before the first published cases. There is in it a peculiarity which, if the subject-matter were not so grave and so full of issues injurious to the Church, would be ludicrous enough. It is not only Broadway parents who are to judge about what children are to be taught, or not taught, in the school, but it is also Broadway children. I think I remember somewhere in the "Essays and Reviews" a statement as to the age at which children may be taken, as able to exercise a "discriminative judgment" touching "dogma." My recollection is that it is at the age of seven years that this "discriminative judgment" may be assumed reasonably to begin its exercise. This then is, I suppose, what the Committee of Council would call the happy condition of Broadway parish. Anything more painfully silly it would be hard to imagine.
Wherefore no action taken by the Committee of Council up to 1856 can be said to be in favour of "Secular Education." After 1856 the action comes in. The "Conscience Clause" is the first direct attempt to establish the principle of "Secular Education" in connection with the schools of the Church of England; and every founder who is betrayed into accepting a "Conscience Clause" admits that the parish school may be a place for "Secular Education" only. It is not then so much the injustice, nor the want of equity of which I complain—these things might have been borne with by the Church, as they have before and must be again. It is the poisonous and deadly principle of "Secular Education," as sought to be engrafted upon the Parish Schools of the Church of England by means of a "Conscience Clause;" it is this against which I contend and shall contend as long as I have life and voice; because it is with this that the Church may not bear. To bear with it is to betray her trust. Better, ten thousand times, that the Church should not have one sixpence from the state for her schools than admit one
