standard of education in our poor schools. Now the talents, the knowledge, and the tact of Mr. Marshall are placed at the disposal of our schools. In him every Catholic school has an adviser and a friend, ever ready to apply the results of a general experience to the disentanglement of local difficulties; and we count a visit from the Inspector to be not the lowest of our gains. At all events, we may safely value the advantages of possessing such an Inspector at his cost to the Committee of Council on Education; and this will be about 1000l. per annum." Having no knowlege of Mr. Marshall, beyond the fact of his having seceded from the Church to whose ministry he had not many years before sought admission, and violated all the solemn engagements entered into by him at his ordination, we have no wish to give an opinion as to the correctness of the valuation put upon him by his new friends. He may be worth 1000l. per annum, for aught we know, to the Roman Catholic body, among whom, "Catholics bred and born," fit for the office of Inspector of Schools may not be very plentiful; and he may be worth that to the Committee of Council, likewise, as a standing type and symbol of insult to the Church of England, the only religious body in the land, against which there exists at the Council Office an inveterate prejudice, and whose members are treated with marked disrespect. But we question, we will not say the policy, nor the propriety, but the common decency of a public board, invested with the authority of the Crown, and composed of members of the Government, selecting for an office of trust and emolument, the position of which brings its holder prominently before the eyes of the whole country, a renegade minister of the established Church of which the Sovereign is the temporal head, and to the forbearance of which alone it is owing that the individual in question has not been visited for his treachery to her with the merited process of formal degradation. Nor is the grossness of this outrage diminished by the fact that the religious community in which the individual in question has been raised to so important a station by the Government, assumes towards the National Church an attitude of determined hostility and active aggression, and that, by virtue of its principles, its loyalty to the Sovereign is more than questionable. We cannot bring this article to a conclusion without drawing attention to the unconstitutional manner in which this scheme of popish1 education, under the patronage of the State, and in part 9 Catholic School, No. VI. p. 84. 1 We have, we perceive, incurred the wrath of a Romanist writer in The Catholic School, by the observations which we made in our last number on the Minute of the Committee of Council, granting aid from the parliamentary fund for defrayed by its funds, has been smuggled into the country. In the dark recesses of political intrigue, statesmen who in their official capacity have divorced themselves from all religious creeds and communions, and whose party necessities make them anxious to secure what support they can get, without being over nice as to the character of their partisans, or the means of enlisting them among their auxiliaries, ascertain the views and wishes of a hierarchy intruded into this country, in defiance of the Queen's supremacy, and in violation of the rights of the National Church, by a foreign prelate, the head of a church which has separated itself from Catholic Christendom, by one of the most flagrant acts of schism on record,-the adoption of the decrees of the Council of Trent and the creed of Pope Pius IV. Having learned what these enemies of the National Church, and of the constitution of our State, will consent to take as an equivalent for their political support, the ministers of the Crown, acting by their Committee of Council, determine upon appropriating a portion of the public funds entrusted to their distribution for the purposes of national education on scriptural principles, to the suicidal end of promoting a system of anti-national and anti popish schools. To the abusive language employed by that writer,- -so abusive that even he feels the necessity of apologizing for it in some sort,-it is altogether beneath us to reply; and his fallacies are too palpable to call for serious refutation. What we may be "unconsciously conscious" of, we are of course unable to tell, being unskilled in Romish metaphysics; but of this we feel confident, that it will take a long time to persuade the British public that the Church which alone claims for her schools exemption from "the question regarding the number of children reading the Holy Scriptures," is the Church destined in the providence of God to "win back the unhappy population of this island to true reverence for the Holy Scriptures." There is one point, however, on which we must beg to correct a misapprehension into which our irate opponent has fallen. He charges us with contravening "the laws of the land, the usages of decent society, and the rules of civilized life," by the use of the terms " Popish" and "Romanist." From the soreness betrayed in this remark, we are led to suspect that the writer is one of the late "converts," who having long enjoyed, in the communion from which he has deserted, the privilege of confessing himself a true member of the "Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church," has not yet learned to accommodate himself to the exigencies of his new position. It is quite a mistake to suppose that there is any slur conveyed, or any discourtesy involved, in the use of the terms "Popish " and "Romanist." There are no other appellations which express with equal precision the status of that communion and of its members. They maintain that the standard by which Christians are to regulate their faith and practice, is the doctrine and discipline of the Church of Rome, their distinctive tenet is that the Pope is of the essence of the Church,-the terms "Romanist" and "Popish," or Papist," are therefore applied to them with as much propriety, and with as little discourtesy, as the terms "Wesleyan," "Lutheran," "Calvinist," "Genevan," &c. &c., to the sects and schisms which are severally known by these names. Why should a believer in the infallibility of the Pope and the Church of Rome object to a designation which points out accurately the foundation of his faith? Can it be that he is "unconsciously conscious" of the untenableness of his position? that he unblushingly blushes for his own principles ? VOL. XI.-NO. XXII.-JUNE, 1849. 66 A a 66 scriptural education; and having recorded this their determination in the secrecy of their office, they communicate the fact, not to Parliament and the country, but to the parties in furtherance of whose designs this extraordinary and disloyal measure has been adopted; nor until many months after, at the last moment at which, as a matter of form, it becomes indispensable that they should do so, do they present the brief record of it—and that not conspicuously, in such a manner as to attract attention to so great a constitutional change, but "unostentatiously," in a huge mass of papers,-to the Lower House of Parliament, then about to pass the annual education vote. The Minute of the Committee of Council which introduces an entirely new element into the education of the country, and places the most inveterate enemies of our Church and State in a new and most advantageous position, having slipped through unnoticed, and the usual money grant having passed, the Ministers of the Crown thereupon assume the sanction of Parliament" to have been given to their unrighteous and unconstitutional schemes, and forthwith proceed to carry those schemes into effect. Nor should it be lost sight of that simultaneously with their alacrity to advance the designs of the popish faction, and to support schools in which the Word of God is set at nought, and a system of idolatry is inculcated which the Queen in her Coronation Oath solemnly repudiates and abjures, the Ministers of the Crown have exhibited the utmost tenacity in refusing to give the support of the State to the schools of the established Church of the land, of that Church which by the same Coronation Oath the Queen solemnly swears to protect and to uphold, except on such terms as greatly abridge the freedom, conceded to all other religious bodies, of organizing her educational work in consistency with her own principles. The same Ministers who jealously circumscribe the lawful authority of the bishops of the established Church of the land, recognize the autocracy of the alien prelates set up by the Pope's decree; the same Ministers who cavil at the salutary control which the clergyman naturally exercises over the parochial school, admit the pernicious power of popish priests over schools taught by monks and nuns ; the same Ministers who loudly express their regret at the introduction of the Church Catechism in Church schools, have not a word to say against the setting up of the image of the Madonna in schools aided by the money of the State, as the type and symbol of the distinctive errors, superstitions, and idolatries of Rome. While it is impossible to contemplate with any other feeling than that of unmitigated disgust such a glaring departure by the highest officers of the State, from every rule of just and fair dealing, and from their own boasted principle of civil and religious liberty to say nothing of the grievous violation of the fundamental principles of the constitution, and of the outrage to the nation's faith and to God's holy truth, involved in the public support of popish education, there is an useful lesson which we trust our own Church will learn from these transactions. If the established Church of this land, with her bishops at her head, had presented as compact and determined a front as that organized by the popish bishops, in opposition to the encroachments of the Committee of Council, her well-founded rights would have met with the same respectful consideration as the unfounded pretensions of the Romish body, at the hands of statesmen whose principle is expediency, and their measure of right the amount of pressure brought to bear upon them. Let the Government once understand that the bishops, the clergy, and the laity of the National Church are determined to carry out her system in its integrity, and to repel all undue State interference, and the difficulties which have so long beset the question of Church education in connexion with the parliamentary grant, will speedily vanish; and if our Church be but left at liberty to act up to her principles, and to put forth her energies, unobstructed by the State, we have no fear for the issue of the struggle in which she is engaged in defence of God's truth. On the field of education, as on every other field, she will be well able to encounter her enemies, and by God's help to conquer them all, not excepting the proudest and mightiest of them, the Church of Rome. ART. VI.-Poems. A new Edition. By ROBERT BROWNING. By ROBERT BROWNING. In two Volumes. IF it be important, be indispensable, that the organs of the Having said so much by way of preamble, we must proceed to assert, lest we should appear to do Mr. Browning injustice, that he is always reverential, and sometimes directly Christian. His main error, indeed, is one of a serious nature; but some of our readers may perhaps esteem it a virtue. We know that there are enthusiastic Churchmen and earnest Christians, who applaud the murderous deed of Tell, and warmly sympathize with, if they do not sanctify the memory of, Charlotte Corday. We do not belong to this class of thinkers: in our eyes, murder is always murder; and political murder is perhaps the most odious of slaughters. Once admit the possible right, in such a case as Tell's for instance, and the meanest scoundrel has but to allege conscience, and he is justified in assassinating the best of kings, or the first of heroes, because, forsooth, he regards their existence as fatal to the rights |