of reformers who would secure the peasantry of England against seduction by future maniacs and blasphemers. Something more than this must be done. Non-resi In 1838, an Act passed, the object of which was to correct the abuse of non-residence, to render it impossible dence Act. henceforth for the beneficed clergyman to be absent, at his own pleasure, from the field of his duties, while enjoying the proceeds of his living. If absent for between three months and six, for other than professional purposes, without a license, he must forfeit a third of the income from his benefice; if between six and eight months, half the income; if twelve months, three-fourths of the income. These requisitions were not new; but they were to be fenced about with strong securities. Before granting the license, the bishop must be satisfied that the intended absentee has provided a proper substitute, duly salaried. Other regulations came in with this, methods by which the bishop can keep himself informed of the condition of the parishes under the care of his clergy, and not only check the tempting practice of non-residence, but form some idea of the state of the relation between the pastors and their flocks. This was a great improvement, not only as securing to the flocks the presence of their pastors, but as discouraging the entrance into the service of the Church of men who have no taste for its duties, but come in merely for a maintenance. The condition of residence is as terrible or disgusting to such a class of clergy as it is welcome to those who are worthy of their function. Great as this improvement was, much more was wanted; and, two years after, another considerable step was taken. In 1840, an Act was passed which made a great sweep of Abolition of abuses, and applied the accruing funds to good pursinecures, &c. poses.1 It abolished many ecclesiastical sinecures, or deprived the holders of their emoluments; it abolished the old self-elected deans and chapters, decreeing that deans should be appointed by the crown, and canons by the bishops; it authorized the purchase and suppression of sinecure-rectories in private patronage, and the devotion of the proceeds to the spiritual wants of the people at hand or elsewhere. All the profits arising from these proceedings were to form a fund at the disposal of the commissioners, for the supply of the most pressing spiritual needs. which came to their knowledge. There was a good deal of outcry, from the clergy as well as others, about granting such powers as this Bill conveyed to such a body of functionaries placed so high above the level of popular feeling as constituted the ecclesiastical commission. Pages might be filled with the remonstrances, serious and jocose, of Sydney Smith upon the occa 1 Polit. Dict. i. 801. sion; and there was much truth in the objections which he made: but it was so great a thing to get rid of so much scandal, to sweep away so much abuse, and administer a stern rebuke to the sinecurists of the Church and their patrons, that the Act was, on the whole, regarded as the most considerable advance yet made by the commission towards a reform of the Church. As far as it went, it was a clearing of the ground. But this, after all, was a small matter; and more must be done. Act. The Tithe-commutation Act for England and Wales, which passed in 1837, was a great promoter of peace and Tithe-comgood-will between the Church and the people at large. mutation From year to year, the irritation on both sides on the subject of tithes had become more and more intolerable; and, as we have seen, in one place a peasant was shooting his rector, and in another a rector was tithing the peasant's wages and throwing him into jail for the sum of 4s. 4d. Such things have not been heard of since; for the admirable measure of 1837 has put an end to the quarrelling which was discreditable enough to the nation, and perfectly scandalous in connection with the Church. Tithe, not being a tax paid to government, nor to any institution, but to almost as many lay as clerical individuals, could not be swept away or repealed like an ordinary tax. It had become so mixed up with a mass of interests and affairs, that its abolition could not have been effected but by a confiscation which would have put the gain into the pockets of men who had no business with it. The true method was to convert tithe into a rentThe charge; and this was done in a very effective manner.1 charge, payable in money, was determined by the average price of corn for the seven preceding years; and all kinds of tithe were to come under this arrangement. Every facility was given for a voluntary agreement between the tithe-owner and payer; and both were, in a large number of cases, glad to settle their disputes upon this basis; but if, after the lapse of a sufficient time, no such agreement was made, the tithe-commissioners had power to enforce it. In eight years from the passing of the Act, about half the business of assigning and apportioning rent-charges throughout the kingdom was completed; and a very large proportion of the agreements was voluntary. Provision was made for a redemption of the tithe-charge, where desired; the payer being authorized to make over land to the owner, not exceeding twenty acres in one parish, in purchase of his release from tithecharges for ever. This power of redemption, though good, was less valuable than it would have been thought at an earlier date. Formerly, men would have sacrificed much to free themselves from the perplexing and galling uncertainty of tithe-charges, 1 Polit. Dict. ii. 812. which prevented them from undertaking improvements, or deprived them of all the profit. But now the uncertainty and malicious incidence of the tax were removed by its conversion into a rent-charge, on a broad and ascertainable basis. Here, again, was a great clearing of the ground for improvement of the relation between the Church and the people. But it was not enough: the worst evils remained; and there were some at the time who expressed their sense of these evils in the words of Milton, which tell how the poor "sit at the foot of a pulpited divine to as little purpose of benefiting, as the sheep in their pens at Smithfield." Popular education. The desideratum was a system of education. Everybody knew this; that is, everybody knew that the great mass of the working-classes, and all the vast pauperclass of England, were deplorably ignorant. But who could say what was to be done, while the Church did not educate its own body, and yet rose up in opposition at every mention of a plan which did not give the control and administration of education to the clergy, and the Dissenters could not possibly agree to any such condition? The Dissenters exerted themselves much more than the Church to educate the children within their respective bodies; but, besides that the instruction they could give was desultory, partial, and superficial, those bodies did not comprehend the most ignorant and destitute classes, the very poor agricultural laborers and the abandoned of the towns, who belonged to no religious denomination at all. The majority of all denominations objected to secular education; and on any system of religious instruction they could not agree. In various parts of the Continent, the spectacle might be seen of children sitting on the same bench, Catholics, Protestants, and Jews, having their understandings opened, their consciences awakened, and their affections flowing out upon one another, with a prospect before them of co-operation in their future lives; the duties of citizenship rendered easy by associations of school-days, and purged from the sectarian taint that renders English society an aggregate of bodies which distrust and dislike each other, through prejudices sent down from generation to generation. But among us such a spectacle could not be hoped for; for no subject is less understood by our nation at large than that of religious liberty. Religious liberty could not become understood but by improved general education; and general education could not be had for want of religious liberty. It was truly a desperate case. We have seen how fruitlessly efforts had been made, by Mr. Brougham and others, to extinguish this fatality; and, while such efforts resulted only in increased positiveness and bitterness on every hand, thousands and tens of thousands of children had been passing off into a condition of hopeless ignorance and depravity, amidst which the most erroneous views of the Christian religion would have been as the dayspring from on high to those who sit in darkness. Combined with what else they would have learned, there were no views of Christianity which could have been imparted in England that would not have been salvation to the host of children in the Durham coal-pits, and the wilds of Wales, and the hovels of Dorsetshire, and the cellars of Liverpool, and the precincts of Canterbury, and the rookeries of London, who have sunk, the while, into abysses of guilt and misery, through the neglect of the State, of which they were the helpless and unconscious members. The high honor of being the first to lay a hand on the barrier of exclusion belongs to the Whig Administrations of this period. It was little that they could do; and that little could not expand into an effective system. From the nature of the case, their plan could be but of temporary duration, as well as most restricted operation; for they could only help those who could, more or less, help themselves; whereas the aid was needed especially by those who were unconscious of their own need: but, if they could drive in only a little wedge which must be thrown away, it was they who found the crevice, and struck the first blow. It was the fashion of the time to laugh at the Whig Administrations for their resort to special commissions, a resort, however, for which the country is much indebted to them. That they did not employ this method, in the early days of their rule, as a preparation for an educational system, while they used it with eminent success in their poor-law and municipal reforms, is an indication of their hopelessness about establishing a system at all. Without a full and protracted inquiry, the results of which should be offered in a comprehensive report, no measure could be framed which had a chance of working well. The question of endowments was under investigation; and nothing could be proposed about funds till the results of that inquiry were known. The actual state of education was not ascertained; nor had the Legislature any definite notions as to the kind and degree of education which should be desired or attempted for the people at large. It was a rare thing to meet with an English gentleman, in or out of Parliament, who had any clear views on the question of State or voluntary education, which was best for us in itself, which was most procurable for us, and whether they should, could, or might be in any degree united. Such a Whig commission as it was the fashion of the day to laugh at, would have brought knowledge to legislators, and made them think and discuss till their minds had attained some clearness. The public attention would have been fixed, and its interest roused, by the same means; and in a few years perhaps two or three -the matter would have been ripe for legislation. But it was clear that ministers dared not employ this method. Parliament, being yet blind to the importance of the project, would have complained of the expense; the Church would have risen up to oppose an invasion of what she considered her province; and the Dissenters would, as we see by the light of a later time, have attacked with fury any proposal to modify their operations among the young of their own sects. So, nothing was said about any broad plan of an extensive commission, with a view to future legislation; and ministers and Parliament could learn only from such information as came in through the Factory Inspectors, the Charity and Poor-law Commissioners, and the witnesses who gave testimony before an education committee of the House of Commons in 1834-5. Lord Lord Brougham ventured to proceed, upon the partial and most imperfect information thus obtained, to form and Brougham's propose to Parliament a scheme of national education scheme, 1837. in the session of 1837; and the result was what might have been anticipated, a plan too crude for adoption. His plan would have placed the school-system under the control of the Administration of the day, while leaving it subject to the worst evils of voluntaryism; and thus it could never have commanded general confidence, while it left unsolved the sectarian difficulties which have been the chief embarrassment throughout. There were yet other objections, so evident to those who knew most on the subject of which all knew but too little, that the measure, introduced in two succeeding years, was dropped without Ministerial a contest. What the ministers did was very modest scheme, 1834. in comparison with this; and, modest as their effort was, it cost them so much trouble and opposition, that no one will venture to say they could have done more. As we have seen, a committee of the Commons sat during two sessions, to receive and report upon evidence as to the condition of education. This is a subject quite unmanageable by a parliamentary committee, by its vastness, and the impossibility of securing an average a true representation of witnesses. The committee, therefore, was of little use, except as an evidence that the great subject of education was becoming really interesting to the Legislature. In 1834, the government obtained from Parliament the first grant in aid of education. It was only 20,000l.; but it was a beginning, and it went on through subsequent years till 1839, when a vote of 30,000l. was asked for. The grant was distributed in different proportions through the National-School Association, which was in strict connection with the Church of England, and the British and |