The Bishop of Manchester, in laying on Wednesday the corner-
stone of a group of three schools at Padibam, in Lancashire, made some sensible observations on the new crusade proposed against the Education Act,—a crusade based on the ground that the Education Department permit parents so poor that their children must receive gratuitous education, to choose their school even amongst the quali- fied denominational schools, if they will, in which case the School Board must pay the child's fees at a religious school, and some ratepayer's conscience" may be hurt at contributing rates which :go towards supporting what he thinks a false creed. Bishop Fraser said, very sensibly, that he had never been a vehement partizan of the sort of thing generally known as religious teaching in primary schools, which was often purely technical, and far inferior in value yto a good deal of good secular teaching ; but that, nevertheless, le did not understand the extreme delicacy of the supposed rate- payer's conscience, and did believe that without concord we should never get half the good out of the new Education Act which we -otherwise might. For our own parts, we quite agree with him. We maintain that that ratepayer who feels his conscience more injured by paying rates some of which may possibly fall into the purse of the schools of a denomination he disapproves, than he would by arbitrarily denying a poor parent with convictions any • discretion as to the place of his child's education, has a conscience -so sensitive that it strains out a gnat and swallows a camel.
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