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contrary to what the Act prescribes, these schools should be open to Dissenters who, without constraint in any religious matter, would be admitted to the benefits of the school.
The admission of Dissenters with a Conscience Clause as their title was in the case of the endowed schools granted specifically upon the grounds of doubt as to the founder's intentions in the matter of religious instruction. Is there any doubt of the intentions of the founders of those elementary Church schools upon which the Privy Council have attempted, but in vain, to force the Conscience Clause? There is, and there can be none, and the conduct of the Education Department in pointing to the Endowed Schools Act (which expressly exempts National Schools from the operation of the Conscience Clause) as a precedent for forcing a Conscience Clause on National Schools, is disingenuous in the extreme.
One more plea I have to examine, and it is this—"That as many excellent clergymen admit Dissenters' children without teaching them religion in the words of the Catechism, or taking them to Church against their parents' will," "there can be no reasonable objection to the Conscience Clause being forced upon every school in England." Now even if the education spontaneously given in what are called liberal schools were identical with the education to which the Conscience Clause gives a title, it would be sufficient to reply that liberality cannot be coerced. But the education spontaneously given in Church schools to Dissenters, and the education which the Conscience Clause would secure to them, are essentially different. The Conscience Clause could secure to the Dissenter nothing but a purely secular education. The education given to Dissenters in Church schools unfettered by the Conscience Clause is, (judging from the evidence before us,) a religious education peculiar only in this, that the Church Catechism, in some few instances, is dispensed with, but generally is so taught as to adapt it to the capacity and position of the child. The clergyman, usually the promoter and supporter of a rural school, may feel restrained by conscience from giving a mere secular education, but his sense of duty and his Christian charity alike dispose him to welcome the children of all his parishioners, and even to indulge on particular points the prejudices of parents, if he can do so
