A meeting was held yesterday week at Willis's Rooms, in
connection with the new Church Schools Company, the object of which is to establish good and moderate Church day schools, into the teaching of which religion should enter on moderate Church lines, though in no sense on the lines of theological seminaries. The Archbishop of Canterbury was the chief speaker, and his speech was a very sensible one, especially guarding against the notion that no Dissenter should be admitted, or that every boy in these Church schools was to be submitted to all the religious teaching in these schools, whether his parents wished it or not. The Archbishop anticipated the best results from the successful establishment of these schools, and their co-ordination in this sense with the higher-class schools,—that the most successful pupils should have the means of passing into the schools where they would obtain still higher teaching of the kind for which they had shown themselves specially fitted. Whether these schools will do much towards un- dermining Dissent in the next generation, as the Archbishop seems to hope, is another question. We are not quite sure even that, as -citizens, we entirely desire it. Unity, no doubt, is a great boon. But it is a question whether the absence of union between 'Church and Dissent is not less harmful than the internal dis- union which almost always exists in a Church not checked by moderate and conscientious exlernal criticism.
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