Lord Salisbury made yesterday week a clever though rather -extreme
and dangerous speech on National Education, at the meeting of "The National Society for Promoting the Education -of the Poor," in St. George's Hall, Liverpool. He described the cry for " ansectarian " religions teaching as indicating "excellent motives, though somewhat innocent intelligence." "It indicates .a belief that when you come to try, you may teach Christianity without any Christian truths." However, he soon admitted that' -there is a sense in which the teaching of the young ought to be unsectarian,—and for our parts, we never heard of any other sense,—namely, that it should be content with the simple central truths, and not follow the windings of theological controversy. That does not apply to the Roman Catholics, who, accepting the authority of the Church as their fundamental truth, regard all that it distinctly authorizes as independent of controversy,—unless, indeed, so far as there may be a dispute like the present as to what the Church's authority means,—but it is the sense, and the -only sense, in which Protestants speak of unsectarian teaching. Lord Salisbury, in admitting that in this sense the religious teach- ing of the young ought to be unsectarian, virtually gave up his
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