Of the incidents of the Conference we can mention only
a few salient features. Mr. Richard, after quizzing with some vivacity the newspapers opposed to his policy, especially this journal, and dealing a hard blow at Mr. Matthew Arnold, whose entreaties to the Dissenters to exemplify " the lowliness and sweet reasonable- ness of Christ" he compared to the demeanour of an old school- mistress, who, when asked to let her pupils sing, seized her cane, and ence, that the State, while giving the children of the English people the needful literary and scientific education, should "leave the religious education where God had left it,—to the care of the Christian Church." But he didn't say how he had discovered that God divides human beings into two capacities, and regards literary teachers as acting in their secular capacity and bound to keep back their faith. Mr. Richard was much more temperate than many who succeeded him in relation to Mr. Forster, and read a passage from one of Professor Tyndall's Alpine adventures about helping Mr. Forster, " a climber gifted with perfect courage and a faultless head, but two atone too heavy," up a difficult snow- bank, from which he had once fallen back. Mr. Richard thought Mr. Dixon and Mr. Dale would be quite willing to give him a second chance to master the Education difficulty (in their own sense, of course) ; but if not, they would " try a fall with him." They had wrestled with and thrown stronger men,—to wit, Lord Russell. Mr. Richard dropped no tears over Lord Russell's fate, who has joined the Birmingham League just in time to be repu- diated wholly by them, and see his unsectarian Bible teaching thrown contemptuously aside. Mr. Dixon has, we hope, returned Lord Russell's subscription.
