scores remunerated at a lower rate than labourers and farm-servants, and hundreds at a rate at least as low; and if we except the fortunate hundred and twenty-nine who receive the Government grant, few indeed of the others rise to the level of the skilled mechanic. Greatly more than two-thirds of our teachers were placed originally on the £15 and £20 scale of salaries: these are now paid with £10 and £13, 13s. 4d. respectively. There are many localities in which these pittances are not more than doubled by the fees, and some localities in which they are even less than doubled; and so a preponderating majority of the schoolmasters of the Free Church are miserably poor men: for what might be a competency to a labourer or hind, must be utter poverty to them. And not a few of their number are distressfully embarrassed and in debt.
Now this will never do. The Church may make herself very sure, that for her £10 or £13 she will receive ultimately only the worth of £10 or £13. She may get windfalls of single teachers for a few months or years: superior young men may occasionally make a brief stay in her schools, in the course of their progress to something better,––as Pilgrim rested for a while in the half-way recess hollowed in the side of the Hill Difficulty; but only very mediocre men, devoid of energy enough of body or mind to make good masons or carpenters, will stick fast in them. We have learned that, in one northern locality, no fewer 64 than eight Free Church teachers have since Martinmas last either tendered their resignations, or are on the eve of doing so. These, it will be found, are superior men, who rationally aspire to something better than mere ploughman’s wages; but there will of course be no resignations tendered by the class who, in even the lowest depths of the Scheme, have found but their proper level. These, as the more active spirits fly off, will flow in and fill up their places, till, wherever the £10 and £13 salaries prevail,––and in what rural district do they not prevail?––the general pedagogical acquirements of our teachers will present a surface as flat, dull, and unprofitable as ditch-water. For what, we again ask, can be expected for £10 or £13? And let the reader but mark the effect of such teaching. We have seen placed side by side, in the same burgh town, an English school, in which what are deemed the branches suitable for mechanics and their children, such as reading, writing, and arithmetic, were energetically taught, and a grammar school in which a university-bred schoolmaster laboured, with really not much energy, especially in those lower departments in which his rival excelled, but who was fitted to prepare his pupils for college, and not devoid of the classical enthusiasm. And it struck us as a significant and instructive fact, that while the good English school, though it turned out smart readers and clever arithmeticians, failed to elevate a single man from the lower to the middle or higher walks of life, the grammar school was successful in elevating a great many. The principle on which such a difference of result should have been obtained is so obvious, that it can scarce be necessary to point it out. The teaching of the one school was a narrow lane, trim, ’tis true, and well kept, but which led to only workshops, brick-kilns, and quarries; whereas that of the other was a broad, partially-neglected avenue, which opened into the great professional highways, that lead everywhere. And if the difference was one which 65 could not be obviated by all the energy of a superior and well-paid English teacher, how, we ask, is it to be obviated by our Free Church £10 and £13 teachers? Surely our Church would do well to ponder whether it can be either her interest or her duty to urge on any scheme, in opposition to a national one, which would have all too palpably the effect of degrading her poorer membership, so far as they availed themselves of it, into the Gibeonites of the community––its hewers of wood and drawers of water. Never will Scotland possess an educational scheme truly national, and either worthy of her ancient fame or adequate to the demands and emergencies of an age like the present, until at least every parish shall possess among its other teachers its one university-bred schoolmaster, popularly chosen, and well paid, and suited to assist in transplanting to the higher places of society those select and vigorous scions that from time to time spring up from the stock of the commonalty. The waking dream of running down the ignorance and misery of a sinking country by an array of starveling teachers in the train of any one denomination––itself, mayhap, sufficiently attenuated by the demands of purely ecclesiastical objects––must be likened to that other waking dream of the belated German peasant, who sees from some deep glade of his native forests a spectral hunt sweep through the clouds,––skeleton stags pursued by skeleton huntsmen, mounted on skeleton horses, and surrounded by skeleton beagles; and who hears, as the wild pageant recedes into the darkness, the hollow tantivy and the spectral horns echoing loud and wildly through the angry heavens.
It is of paramount importance that the Free Church should in the present crisis take up her position wisely. We have heard of invaders of desperate courage, who, on landing upon some shore on which they had determined either to conquer or to perish, set fire to their ships, and 66 thus shut out the possibility of retreat. Now the Free Church––whether she land herself into an agitation for a scheme of Government grants rendered more liberal and flexible than now, and dissociated from the religious certificate, or whether she plant her foot on a scheme of national education based on a statutory recognition of the pedagogical teaching of religion––is certainly in no condition to burn her ships. Let her not rashly commit herself against a third scheme, essentially one in principle with that which the sagacious Chalmers could regard, after long and profound reflection, as the only one truly eligible in the circumstances of the country, and which she herself, some two or three years hence, may be compelled to regard in a similar light. The educational agitation is not to be settled in the course of a few brief months; nor yet by the votes of Presbyteries, Synods, or General Assemblies, whether they belong to the Free or to the Established Churches. It rises direct out of the great social question of the time. Scotland as such forms one of its battle-fields, and Scotchmen as such are the parties who are to be engaged in the fight; and the issue, though ultimately secure, will long seem doubtful. And so the Free Church may have quite time enough to fight her own battle, or rather her own two battles in succession, and, when both are over, find that the great general contest still remains undecided.
For what we must deem by much the better and more important battle of the two––that for a statutory demand on the part of the State that the Bible and Shorter Catechism should be taught in the national schools––we are afraid the time is past; but most happy would we be to find ourselves mistaken. The Church of Scotland, as represented by that majority which is now the Free Church, might have succeeded in carrying some such measure ten years ago, when the parish schools were yet in her custody; just as she might have succeeded seven years earlier in 67 obviating the dire necessity which led to the Disruption, by acting upon the advice of the wise and far-seeing M’Crie.[10] But she was not less prepared at the one date to agitate for the total abolition of patronage, than at the other to throw open the parish schools on the basis of a statutory security for the teaching of religion. In both cases, the golden opportunity was suffered to pass by; and Old Time presents to her now but the bald retreating occiput, which her eager hand may in vain attempt to grasp. Where, we ask, are we to look for the forces that are to assist us in fighting this battle of statutory security? Has the Establishment become more liberal, or more disposed to open the parish schools, than we ourselves were when we composed the majority of that very Establishment? Alas! in order to satisfy ourselves on that head, we have but to look at the decisions of her various ecclesiastical courts. Or is it the old Scottish Dissenters that are to change their entire front, and to make common cause with us, in disregard, and even in defiance, of their own principles, as they themselves understand them? Or are we to look to that evangelical portion of the Episcopacy of England, with whom Establishment means Church, and the ‘good of the Establishment’ a synonyme for the ‘good of the Church,’ and who, to a certainty, will move no hand against the sister Establishment in Scotland? Or are we to be aided by that portion of English Independency that has so very strangely taken its stand equally against educational grants and educational endowments, on the ground that there is a sort of religion homœopathically diffused in all education––especially, we suppose, in Lindley Murray’s readings from the Spectator and Dr. Blair––and that, as the State must not provide religious teaching for its people, it cannot, and 68 must not, provide for them teaching of any kind? Scientific Jews are they, of the straitest sect, who, wiser than their fathers, have ascertained by the microscope, that all meat, however nicely washed, continues to retain its molecules of blood, and that flesh therefore must on no account be eaten. We cannot, we say, discern,