e Church as good Christians as themselves. And by
attempting to make them half ecclesiastics, we have but succeeded in
making them half mendicants, and somewhat more,--a character which
assuredly no efficient schoolmaster ought to bear; for while his
profession holds in Scripture no higher place than the two _secular_
branches of the learned professions, physic and the law, he is as
certainly worthy of his reward, and of maintaining an independent
position in society, as either the lawyer or the physician. In
schools truly national--with no sheepskin authority to sleep over on
the one hand, and no idle dream of semi-ecclesiastical 'induction' to
beguile on the other--the item of religious teaching, brought into
prominence by both the Free and the Established Churches in the
preliminary struggle, would assert and receive its due place.
Scotland would possess what it never yet possessed,--not even some
twenty years or so after the death of Knox,--a system of schools
worthy, in the main, of a Christian country. We are told by old
Robert Blair, in his Autobiography, that when first brought under
religious impressions (in the year 1600), 'he durst never play on
the Lord's day, though the schoolmaster, after taking an account of
the Catechism, dismissed the children with that express direction,
"Go not to the town, but to the fields, and play." I obeyed him,'
adds the worthy man, 'in going to the fields, but refused to play
with my companions, as against the commandment of God.' Now it is
not at all strange that there should have been such a schoolmaster,
in any age of the Presbyterian Church, in one of the parish
schools of our country; but somewhat strange, mayhap, considering the
impression so generally received regarding the Scottish schools of
that period, that Blair should have given us no reason whatever to
regard the case as an extreme or exceptional one. Certainly, with
such a central board in existence as that which we desiderate, no
such type of schoolmaster would continue to hold office in a
national seminary.

Further, it really seems difficult to determine whether the difference
between the old educational scheme of Knox and that proposed at the
present time by the Free Church, or the difference between the
circumstances of Scotland in his days and of Scotland in the present
day, be in truth the wider difference of the two. Knox judged it of
'necessitie that every several kirk should have one schoolmaster
appo