of the Privy Council on Education was appointed, but bowed to the will of the Archbishops, setting forth the decree of “their lord-ships” that “the first purpose of all instruction must be the regulation of the thoughts and habits of the children by the doctrine and precepts of revealed religion.”  In 1850 a bill for secular education was denounced as presenting to the country “a choice between Heaven or Hell, God or the Devil.”  In 1870, Forster, author of the still unpassed bill, wrote that while the parsons were disputing, the children of the poor were “growing into savages.”

As with Education, so with Social Reform.  During the struggle to abolish slavery in the British colonies, some enthusiasts endeavored to establish the doctrine that Christian baptism conferred emancipation upon negroes who accepted it; whereupon the Bishop of London laid down the formula of exploitation:  “Christianity and the embracing of the gospel do not make the least alteration of civil property.”

Gladstone, who was a democrat when he was not religious, spoke of the cultured classes of England: 

In almost every one, if not every one, of the greatest political controversies of the last fifty years, whether they affected the franchise, whether they affected commerce, whether they affected religion, whether they affected the bad and abominable institution of slavery, or what subject they touched, these leisured classes, these educated classes, these titled classes have been in the wrong.

The “Great Commoner” did not add “these religious classes “, for he belonged to the religious classes himself; but a study of the record will supply the gap.  The Church opposed all the reform measures which Gladstone himself put through.  It opposed the Reform Bill of 1832.  It opposed all the social reforms of Lord Salisbury.  This noble-hearted Englishman complained that at first only a single minister of religion supported him, and to the end only a few.  He expressed himself as distressed and puzzled “to find support from infidels and non-professors; opposition or coldness from religionists or declaimers.”

And to our own day it has been the same.  In 1894 the House of Bishops voted solidly against the Employers’ Liability Law.  The House of Bishops opposed Home Rule, and beat it; The House of Bishops opposed Womans’ Suffrage, and voted against it to the end.  Concerning this establishment Lord Salisbury, himself the most devout of Englishmen, used the vivid phrase:  “This vast aquarium full of cold-blooded life.”  He told the Bishops that he would give up preaching to them about ecclesiastical reform, because he knew that they would never begin.  Another member of the British aristocracy, the Hon. Geo. Russel, has written of their record and adventures: