sand
pounds more. The minimum sum regarded as essentially necessary for
carrying on the Free Church Educational Scheme had been estimated at
twenty thousand pounds. If the Free Church raise but twelve thousand
of these, we said, Government will give her six thousand additional in
the form of grants, and some two thousand additional, or so, for the
training of her pupil-teachers; and the Church will thus be enabled to
realize her minimum estimate. We did not take the fact into account,
that of our Free Church teachers a preponderating majority should fail
successfully to compete for the Government money; nor yet that the
educational funds should be so broken up into driblet salaries,
attached to schools in which the fees were poor and the pupils few,
that the schoolmaster, even though possessed of the necessary
_literary_ qualification, would in many cases be some twenty, or even
thirty, pounds short of the necessary _money_ qualification, _i.e._
the essential forty-five annual pounds. We did not, we say, take these
circumstances into account,--indeed, it was scarce possible that we
could have done so; and so we immensely over-estimated the efficacy of
the State grant in maintaining the solvency of our Educational Scheme.
We learn from Dr. Reid's recent Report to our metropolitan church
court, that of the forty-two Free Church teachers connected with the
Presbytery of Edinburgh, and in receipt of salaries from the Education
Committee, only thirteen have been successful in obtaining Government
certificates of merit. And even this is a rather high average,
compared with that of the other districts; for we have ascertained,
that of the six hundred and eighty-nine teachers of the Free Church
scattered over the kingdom, not more than a hundred and twenty-nine
have received the Government grant. There are, however, among the
others, teachers who have failed to attain to it, not from any want of
the literary qualification--for some of them actually possess the
parchment certificate bearing the signature of Lansdowne--but simply
because they are unfortunate enough to lack the pecuniary one.

That which we so much dreaded has come, we repeat, upon our
Educational Scheme. The subject is a painfully delicate one, and
we have long kept aloof from it; but truth, and truth only, can now
enable the Free Church and her people to act, in this emergency, as
becomes the character which they bear, and the circumstances in which
they are pl