olicitous that no unkindly element should mar it in its
effects. Now where, we ask, is the ecclesiastical office-bearer who,
in his official character, or in any character or capacity whatever,
has a right authoritatively to challenge our rejection, on our own
parental responsibility, of the religious teaching of even a converted
schoolmaster, on purely reasonable grounds such as these? Or where is
the ecclesiastical office-bearer who has an authoritative right to
challenge our yet weightier Free Church objection to the religious
teaching of a schoolmaster whom we cannot avoid regarding as an
unregenerate man, or whom we at least do not know to be a regenerate
one? Or yet further, where is the ecclesiastical office-bearer who has
a right authoritatively to bear down or set aside our purely
Protestant caveat against a teacher of religion who, in his
professional capacity, has no place or standing in the word of God?
The right and duty of the civil magistrate in all circumstances to
educate his people, and of parents to choose their children's teacher,
and to determine what they are to be taught, we are compelled to
recognise; and there seems to be a harmony between the two rights--the
parental and the magisterial, with the _salary_ of the one and the
_fees_ of the other--suited, we think, to unlock many a difficulty;
but the authoritative standing, in this question, of the ecclesiastic
as such, we have hitherto failed to see. The parent, as a Church
member or minister, is amenable to discipline; but his natural rights
in the matter are simply those of the parent, and his political rights
simply those of the subject and the ratepayer.

And in this educational question certain political rights _are_
involved. In the present state of things, the parish schoolmasters of
the kingdom are chosen by the parish ministers and parish heritors:
the two elements involved are the ecclesiastical and the political.
But while we see the parish minister as but the mere idle image of a
state of things passed away for ever, and possessed in his ministerial
capacity of merely a statutory right, which, though it exists to-day,
may be justly swept away to-morrow, we recognise the heritor as
possessed of a real right; and what we challenge is merely its
engrossing extent, not its nature. We regard it as just in kind, but
exorbitant in degree; and on the simple principle that the money of
the State is the money of the people, and that the people