The proceedings of a meeting summoned by Archdeacon Denison to
consider (of course in a sense very hostile towards undenominational education) the proposal of the Endowed Schools' Commission to devote the surplus of the Iluish Charity to a new unsectarian middle-class school of the third or lowest order, in Taunton, and held last Thursday week, with the result of defeating the Archdeacon, and sustaining the intentions of the Commission by a large majority, will be found to throw a certain light on the controversy between "Alpha" and the Rev. J. J enkyn Brown which has appeared in our columns. This meeting was the one at which the venerable Archdeacon expressed his firm and very cheery belief that the Conscience-clause was the invention of the devil, to which we have elsewhere referred ; and he would obviously have been very glad to avail himself of any expression of opinion from the opposite camp, the Dissenters, that the plans of the Endowed Schools' Commission were also inventions of the devil (as Sir Charles Dilke suggested at Birmingham that the Education Department had recently appeared to be)—..because they gave too much power to the Church. But no such voices were raised at all, though very influential Dissenters took part in the meeting. 'rime Vicar of St. Mary's, who was in favour of the plan of the Commission, defeated his Archdeacon both morally and politically (the numbers were 64 to 39), the Archdeacon frankly admitting the right of Nonconformists to vote on the undeniable ground that "the laity consisted of the people, and that certainly the Nonconformists were people." We are not quite sure that the Birmingham League would admit even so much of Nonconformists so demoralized as to decliue to regard the Education Department as " Powers of Darkness."
Previous page
