day as its
own, whether before noon or after it. It will leave to the English
Establishment its canonical hours, sacred to organ music and the
Liturgy; but it will set apart by enactment no pedagogical hours,
sacred to arithmetic or algebra, the construing of verbs, or the
drawing of figures. If separate hours merely mean that the master is
not to have all his classes up at once--here gabbling Latin or Greek,
there discussing the primer or reciting from Scott's Collection,
yonder repeating the multiplication table or running over the rules of
Lindley Murray--we at once say religion must have its separate hour,
just as English, the dead tongues, figuring, writing, and the
mathematics, have their separate hours; but if it be meant that the
religious teaching of the school must be restricted to some hour not
paid for by the State, then we reply with equal readiness that we know
of no hour specially paid for by the State, and so utterly fail to
recognise any principle in the proposed arrangement, or rather in the
objection that would suggest it.

As to the question of a separate fee for religious tuition, let us
consider how it is usually solved in the adventure schools of the
country. The day is, in most cases, opened by the master with prayer,
and then there is a portion of Scripture read by the pupils. And
neither the Scripture read nor the prayer offered up fall, we are
disposed to think, under the head of religious tuition, but under a
greatly better head--that of religion itself. It is a proper
devotional beginning of the business of the day. The committal of the
Shorter Catechism--which with most children is altogether an exercise
of memory, but which, accomplished in youth, while the intellect yet
sleeps, produces effects in after years almost always beneficial to
the understanding, and not unfrequently ameliorative of the heart--we
place in a different category. It is not religion, but the teaching of
religion; not food for the present, but store laid up for the future.
With the committal to memory of the Catechism we class that species of
Scripture dissection now so common in schools, which so often mangles
what it carves.{14} And religion taught in this way is and ought to be
represented in the fee paid to the teacher, and is and ought to be
taught in a class as separate from all the others as the geography or
the grammar class. Such is, we understand, a common arrangement in
Scottish adventure schools; nor does