It is sometimes asked how the Church is to fulfil this obligation without being subsidized in some way by the State.  The principal requisite is greater faith in its Divine mission.  If the Bishops and clergy had a stronger conviction that what they are divinely commissioned to undertake they will be divinely assisted to fulfil, this question need not be suggested.  The first teachers of the Christian religion performed their task without either “Rate-aid” or “State-aid” and the result of their labour is still to be seen; whereas now the object of leaders of religion seems to be to get done for them what they ought to do for themselves.  It may be well to quote an utterance of the Bishop of Oxford at the time when the Liberal Government was dealing with education.  “We are now, more or less, in the middle of a crisis.  We are always in the middle of a crisis.  This crisis is about the religious question in our day-schools.  I would ask you, then, to get at the root of our difficulty.  What is it?  The heart of our difficulty is partly that we have shifted on to the wrong shoulders the central function of teaching children; secondly, that we have so lost the idea of what the teaching of the Church is, and the meaning of religious education, that we are considered by the public to be unreasonable and uncompromising people if we are not disposed to admit that the County Councils can settle the standard of sufficient religious knowledge for everybody.”

The difficulty as to means might be overcome if the Church would mind its own business, and leave to the State what the State can do so much more effectively.  Let me quote the words of a great Christian and a great Churchman—­Mr. Gladstone—­written in 1894:  “Foul fall the day when the persons of this world shall, on whatever pretext, take into their uncommissioned hands the manipulation of the religion of our Lord and Saviour.”

Surely Churchmen will best serve the religion which they profess by joining with other “men of goodwill,” though of different faiths, who desire the secular solution.  In that way only, as far as I can see, can the interests of Education be reconciled with the higher interests of Justice.

V

THE STATE AND THE BOY

When Mr. A. J. Balfour was a very young man he published A Defence of Philosophic Doubt.  Nobody read it, but a great many talked about it; and serious people went about with long faces, murmuring, “How sad that Lord Salisbury’s nephew should be an Agnostic!” When Mr. Balfour had become a conspicuous figure in politics, the serious people began to read the book which, so far, they had only denounced, and then they found, to their surprise and joy, that it was an essay in orthodox apologetic.  Thenceforward Mr. Balfour ranked in their eyes as a “Defender of the Faith” second only to Henry VIII.