NEWS OF THE WEEK • O N Thursday night, Mr. Gladstone
seized the opportunity of moving that the House go into Committee on the Education Bill to explain that the Government, having attentively studied up to the very last moment the feeling of the public as to the proposed Bill, wished to adopt one or two changes, which would diminish, lie thought, the fears so generally and fairly entertained, that the Bill would foster sectarian discord in the election of the School Boards, and among the members of those Boards after election. The Government could only reject the prescription for this pur- pose offered by Mr. Vernon Harcourt, namely, for the Education department to secure that in all schools assisted by public rates, such religious teaching as may be given should be " unde- nominational in its character, and confined to unsectarian instruc- tion in the Bible,"—for that would be to exalt the Education Department into a sort of Pope, able to decide infallibly what teaching is and is not denominational and sectarian. For so vast an undertaking the Government could not be respon- sible, but it was willing to accede to Mr. Cowper Temple's proposal to exclude from all rate-built schools every cate- chism and every formulary distinctive of denominational creed. The Government was further prepared to sever alto- gether the relation between the local school boards and the denominational schools, leaving the latter to look solely to the central grants for help. But in order to deal fairly by the schools of those bodies which, like the Roman Catholics, insisted on a very distinctive religious teaching, and which had the charge of some of the most degraded and ignorant of our people, Mr. Gladstone proposed to increase the central grant to all schools, rate-built or voluntary, from about one-third to one-half of the total cost, the remaining half being raised by rates and school- pence in the case of school-board schools, and by voluntary subscriptions and school-pence in the case of denominational schools.
