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great and increasing pressure through many preceding months, might now fairly claim to rest and be thankful. Yet this is the second meeting which you have presided over to-day, and encouraged by your example, I am here to renew, and if need be, to increase my humble exertions for the settlement of a question which I am persuaded is not of inferior importance to any one that has occupied the attention either of the Church Congress, or of the supplementary meetings which have been held amongst us.
My honourable friend, who has come from London for the express purpose of repeating here those exertions to which the Church is so largely indebted to him on this question, has favoured us with a clear and comprehensive review of the administration of these grants by the Education Department. He has set before us, necessarily at some length, the evidence taken before the Committee of the House of Commons in the last session of Parliament, and as a question of State policy our whole case might be safely rested on the statement which he has compiled of the decrease in the Government grants, compared with the increase of those of the National Society, since this Conscience Clause began to be imposed. He has shown that while the voluntary contributions of the Church through that Society have increased a hundred per cent., the grants of the State have been gradually diminished by what he justly terms the "repelling power of the Conscience Clause," to no less an extent than ninety per cent. It requires no other argument to prove to a demonstration that this clause has inflicted a very serious injury on the progress of popular education.
In moving this proposition, my honourable friend has treated the question as a statesman and member of Parliament. It will be my business to approach it from the parish clergyman's point of view. I shall throw aside the details of Parliamentary reports and evidence, and endeavour to grapple with the very heart of the evil which alarms us. My first business must be to clear away some of that cloud of ambiguity in which the Education Department, if not intentionally, at least most culpably, has succeeded in involving it. My honourable friend has indeed shown that the legal construction of the clause is no longer in question; it is at last admitted by the Education Department itself that it
