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and doctrine on which the society have ever stood. But what inducement have the National Society to act upon either of these suggestions? They have it from Mr. Lingen's mouth, (3453,) "that supposing a trust deed to provide that the clergyman with an appeal to the Bishop shall have the superintendence of the religious instruction of the children, there is nothing in such a deed which in absolute terms is inconsistent with exempting a certain number of children whose parents desire it from the religious instruction which is to be given in the school …" "But if in addition the trust deed puts the school in union with the National Society, it really is the same thing as if those terms of union were set out in the deed, and then it is necessary to consider whether those terms require that every child shall receive certain specific religious instruction. That is the point to which the Committee of Council has endeavoured to call the attention of the National Society, in the hope of coming to an understanding upon it."
Union with the National Society is here distinctly recognized as the only barrier to the gradual establishment of a system of education from which every particle of religious instruction might be eliminated; and when Mr. Lingen claims for a Conscience Clause the precedent afforded by trust deeds prepared with a Conscience Clause in 1839 for Church schools not in union with the National Society, he only suggests a feeling of thankfulness that few, if any, schools have declined union with the National Society, and to be constituted under provisions which would expose them to the obligation of teaching anything or everything but the knowledge of God.
It has been held by the advocates of the Conscience Clause that even though in England it might have been dispensed with, the relative majority of Dissenters to Churchmen in Wales rendered its introduction there an indisputable necessity. The larger portion of the recent Report is occupied with the evidence of witnesses on the state of education in the Principality, and on that evidence I shall now comment.
Mr. Hugh Owen is chief clerk of the Poor Law Board, and has for many years taken great interest in education in Wales. In 1843, by means of circulars, he invited the attention of many hundred persons to the defective state of education in Wales;
