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It is proposed that we approach the Prime Minister with a statement of the damage inflicted on popular education by the maladministration of the Building Grants, and with a complaint of the officials of the Education Department, who have pleaded as Advocates in a cause in which they had no clients, and have carried on a vexatious process against religious instruction in the name of plaintiffs who repudiate and disown them. I cannot doubt that our address will be favourably received. Lord Derby is the chief of a Conservative Ministry, and in what is a Conservative Government distinguishable from any other unless in this, that it takes care that in the general assertion of religious rights, the rights of Churchmen be not alone ignored. And be it remembered, that these are rights depending for their exercise not on an infringement of the rights of nonconformists, but on the principles of impartial and equal justice.
And now. Sir, I have done. I have been charged with speaking harshly of those among the clergy who have advocated the Conscience Clause. I trust that I have always spoken truthfully and charitably. Upon those who knowingly and willingly accepted the Conscience Clause I pass no judgment, much as I regret their decision. Of those who, disapproving the Conscience Clause, have succumbed to the temptation of a Grant, I can only think with sorrow and with shame. But the number of these defaulters combined is, I rejoice to think, quite inconsiderable. Of the clergy at large I have said, and this great meeting will by its vote declare if I am right, that they will not banish from their schools the religion which they preach from their pulpits, and that as English Gentlemen and as Christian Priests they will be neither seduced nor terrified to surrender or to compromise the rights of Christian Education.
I beg, sir, to move the resolution with which I prefaced my remarks, and which I now place in your hands.
The Rev. Canon Trevor then rose and spoke as follows:—Mr. Dean: In opening these proceedings you reminded us that we have had meetings enough in this city during the last three days to content the most voracious appetite for public discussion. Those of us especially, to whom those meetings have brought the anxiously expected termination of cares and labours sustained with
