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A very numerous meeting was held in the Chapter-House of York Minster on Friday the 18th of October, 18GG. The spacious hall was filled to overflowing, and large numbers were unable to find seats.

The Hon. and Very Rev. the Dean of York presided, and having congratulated the meeting on the large and influential assemblage gathered to consider so important a subject as the progress of popular elementary education, he called on Mr. Hubbard, Member of Parliament for Buckingham, to move a resolution.

Mr. Hubbard said: Mr. Dean, No subject has been considered at this congress, fraught with more important consequences than that to which you have now invited the attention of this crowded audience. The following is the motion which I shall venture to submit to them:—

"That a deputation be appointed to wait on the Prime Minister and represent to him the serious injury to popular education which had resulted from the practice of the Education Department of the Privy Council in making the Conscience Clause a condition of Building Grants."

I can assure this meeting that my opinion expressed in this resolution has not been hastily formed, but is the result of long and careful study of all available evidence, and especially of the Reports of the Select Committee on Education, the last of which has been recently printed, and I purpose to present to their notice such portions of that evidence impartially collected as may justify their affirming the resolution which I propose,

​In proposing the Educational Grants for 1866 in the House of Commons, the Vice-President of the Committee of Council on Education remarked that the sum of £18,880, then proposed for Building Grants was £9,400 less than the grant for 1865.

The retrospect may be profitably carried further. The Building Grants for Elementary and Normal Schools, actually paid by the Education Department for the last seven years have been as follows:—

Why (is the instinctive inquiry) Why this rapid and progressive decrease? Is it that the country is thoroughly supplied with schools, or that the country has become indifferent to the spread of education and that school promoters have ceased their efforts?

The Reports of the National Society for the Education of the Poor, may answer this inquiry, and show that, while the Church Educational organ increased the number of its grants 25 per cent., and the amount of its grants 100 per cent., the State Education Department decreased its grants 90 per cent.

The number and amount of school grants made by the National Society in the last seven years have been as follows:—

From a comparison of these tables, it is obvious that the decrease in the Building Grants of the Education Department is due, not to any relaxation in the voluntary efforts of school ​promoters, which are still far from having satisfied the need of the country, but (partly to the previous rate of 45. per foot having been decreased to 2s. 6d. in 1861, yet) mainly to the repelling power of the Conscience Clause, which in most cases is presented to the acceptance of Church school builders as a condition of their receiving the share of the public grant to which they are entitled.

The country has been already abundantly supplied with controversies and communications touching the Conscience Clause. The publication of the Evidence on Education, taken in 1865, by a Committee of the House of Commons, assisted in disclosing its origin, purpose, and character; but the recent Report of the Committee re-appointed in the last session, presents us with additional information upon this most important subject which it would be culpable to neglect.

The evidence of 1865 contained a vast deal of discussion upon the true construction and legal force of this Conscience Clause. This question at all events is now decided, and the interpretation of the Clause may be stated authoritatively in the words of Mr. Bruce, the late Vice-President of the Education Department, who prefaced a question (5079) to Mr. T. Gee, on the 4th May last, with the information, that "as a matter of fact according to the interpretation which is put upon the Conscience Clause by the Committee of Council, in every Church school with a Conscience Clause, the parent has the power of withdrawing his child from any portion of the religious teaching, even from the exposition of the Bible lesson, if he chooses to do so." And again, he asks (5088) "Does it not appear from the Conscience Clause interpreted by the Department, who may be fairly supposed to understand it, you have a power to withdraw the child from all religious teaching." And he answers the question himself (5089) "I state that you have the power."

The dilemma in which this interpretation of the Conscience Clause places its authors by showing that they have been insisting upon secular education as the condition of a grant to Church schools, is obviously felt by Mr. Lingen, who, under the able handling of Lord Cranborne, in vain endeavoured to reconcile the recognition of a right to secular instruction on the part of ​all who asked for it, with the provision appended to the Clause, that "it shall not otherwise interfere with the religious teaching of the scholars, as fixed by these presents," (3439)—and to the searching inquiry "how in your mind, would the two operations be combined by the clergyman who remained charged with the religious teaching of Dissenting scholars, while he was bound not to teach them the doctrines of the Church of England?" Mr. Lingen answers, (3443,) "it would be entirely in his hands so long as he and the parents of those children agreed upon the matter; it might vary conceivably in every individual case."

"Agreed," indeed! Mr. Lingen is here sketching not the operation of the Conscience Clause which implies disagreement, but the liberal, wise and judicious course spontaneously pursued by the clergy who are unfettered by a Conscience Clause. Mr. Lingen admits (3446) that a clergyman is, by the Conscience Clause, placed under no obligation to teach a mutilated religion. He affirms (3450) that he would have felt entire confidence if a clergyman in saying to the Dissenting parent, "Your child may come to the secular lessons of my school, but under the conditions which you impose I can have nothing to do with his religious instruction."

Of the legal construction of the clause as now laid down by Mr. Bruce and Mr. Lingen there can be no further doubt. It gives a title to a secular education to all who choose to ask it at the hands of such school managers as have been unwary enough to admit the Conscience Clause into their trust deed. Remembering the repeated and unequivocal declarations of Parliament that National aid should be given only to such education as comprehended instruction in Religion, it is not surprising that the Education Department should wish to escape from or conceal a result so contrariant to the national will (3447, 3451—3453, 3482, 3483.) Their object would be attained by inducing the National Society either to sanction the Conscience Clause, and so veil its irreligious character—alter its terms of union so as to delude school builders with the idea that they can consistently serve two masters (the Church and the Education Department)—or better than either, that they should get their charter altered and destroy the foundations of faith ​