ch he promulgates are _written_ laws, and that what he
writes for the guidance of the people, the people ought to be enabled
to read; seeing that to punish for the breach of a law, of the
existence of which he who breaks it has been left in ignorance, is not
man-law, but what Jeremy Bentham well designates dog-law, and
altogether unjust. We are, of course, far from supposing that every
British subject who can read is to peruse the vast library which the
British Acts of themselves compose; but we hold that education forms
the only direct means through which written law, as a regulator of
conduct, can be known, and that, in consequence, in its practical
breadth and average aspect, it is only educated men who know it, and
only uneducated men who are ignorant of it. And hence the derivation
of the magistrate's _judicial_ right and duty. But on this part of our
subject, with Free Churchmen for our readers, we need not surely
insist. Our Church has homologated at least the general principle of
the civil magistrate's right and duty, by becoming the recipient of
his educational grant. If he has no right to give, she can have no
right to receive. If he, instead of performing a duty, has perpetrated
a wrong, she, to all intents and purposes, being guilty of receipt, is
a participator in the crime. Nay, further, let it be remarked that, as
indicated by the speeches of some of our abler and more influential
men, there seems to exist a decided wish on the part of the Free
Church, that the State, in its educational grants, should assume a
purely secular character, and dispense with the certificate of
religious training which it at present demands,--a certificate which,
though anomalously required of sects of the most opposite tenets,
constitutes notwithstanding, in this business of grants, the sole
recognition of religion on the part of the Government. Now this, if a
fact at all, is essentially a noticeable and pregnant one, and shows
how much opposite parties are in reality at one on a principle
regarding which they at least _seem_ to dispute.

The right and duty of the civil magistrate thus established, let us
next consider another main element in the question,--the right and
duty of the parent. It is, we assert, imperative on every parent in
Scotland and elsewhere to educate his children; and on the principle
that he is a joint contributor with the Government to the support of
every national teacher--the Government giving _salary_