As respects what is commonly called “religious” education, the power of the Minister of Education is even more despotic.  An interest, almost amounting to pathos, attaches itself, in my mind, to the frantic exertions which are at present going on in almost every school division, to elect certain candidates whose names have never before been heard of in connection with education, and who are either sectarian partisans, or nothing.  In my own particular division, a body organized ad hoc is moving heaven and earth to get the seven seats filled by seven gentlemen, four of whom are good Churchmen, and three no less good Dissenters.  But why should this seven times heated fiery furnace of theological zeal be so desirous to shed its genial warmth over the London School Board?  Can it be that these zealous sectaries mean to evade the solemn pledge given in the Act?

    “No religious catechism or religious formulary which is
    distinctive of any particular denomination shall be taught in
    the school.”

I confess I should have thought it my duty to reject any such suggestion, as dishonouring to a number of worthy persons, if it had not been for a leading article and some correspondence which appeared in the Guardian of November 9th, 1870.

The Guardian is, as everybody knows, one of the best of the “religious” newspapers; and, personally.  I have every reason to speak highly of the fairness, and indeed kindness, with which the editor is good enough to deal with a writer who must, in many ways, be so objectionable to him as myself.  I quote the following passages from a leading article on a letter of mine, therefore, with all respect, and with a genuine conviction that the course of conduct advocated by the writer must appear to him in a very different light from that under which I see it:—­

“The first of these points is the interpretation which Professor Huxley puts on the ‘Cowper-Temple clause.’  It is, in fact, that which we foretold some time ago as likely to be forced upon it by those who think with him.  The clause itself was one of those compromises which it is very difficult to define or to maintain logically.  On the one side was the simple freedom to School Boards to establish what schools they pleased, which Mr. Forster originally gave, but against which the Nonconformists lifted up their voices, because they conceived it likely to give too much power to the Church.  On the other side there was the proposition to make the schools secular—­intelligible enough, but in the consideration of public opinion simply impossible—­and there was the vague impracticable idea, which Mr. Gladstone thoroughly tore to pieces, of enacting that the teaching of all schoolmasters in the new schools should be strictly ‘undenominational.’  The Cowper-Temple clause was, we repeat, proposed simply to tide over the difficulty.  It was to satisfy the Nonconformists and the ‘unsectarian,’