every one of which belonged to the
Government? Would a pious Voluntary soldier keep aloof from a
prayer-meeting on no other ground than that it was held in a
barrack?--or did the first Voluntaries of Great Britain, the
high-toned Independents that fought under Cromwell, abstain from their
preachings and their prayers when cooped up by the enemy in a
garrison? Where is the religious Voluntary who would not exhort in a
prison, or offer up an unbought prayer on a public, State-provided
scaffold, for some wretched criminal shivering on the verge of the
grave?

Now the schoolmaster, in the circumstances laid down by Chalmers, we
hold to be in at least as favourable a position with respect to the
State and the State-erected edifice in which he teaches, as the
ship-captain or the non-commissioned missionary--the devout Voluntary
soldier, or the pious Independents of Cromwell's Ironsides. He is, in
his secular character, a State-paid official, sheltered by an erection
the property of the State; but the State permits him to bear in that
erection another character, in relation to another certain employer,
whom it recognises as quite as legitimately in the field as itself,
and permits him also--though it does not enjoin--to perform his duties
there as a Christian man. Though, however, the objection to religious
teaching under the State-erected roof may be suffered to drop, there
may be an objection raised--and there has been an objection
raised--against the teaching of religion in certain periods of time
during the day, for which it is somehow taken for granted the State
pays. Hence the argument for teaching religion in certain other
periods of time not paid for by the State--or in other words, during
separate hours. Now the entire difference here seems to originate in a
vicious begging of the question. It is not the State that specifies
the hours during each day in which State-endowed and State-erected
schools are taught; on the contrary, varying as these hours do, and
must, in various parts of the town and country--for a thinly-peopled
district demands one set of hours, and a densely-peopled locality
another--they are fixed, as mere matters of mutual arrangement, to
suit the convenience of the teachers and the taught. It is enough that
the State satisfy itself, through its inspectors, that the secular
instruction for which it pays is effectually imparted to its people:
it neither does nor will lay claim to any one hour of the