The principal subject of discussion this last week has been the Education Board in Ireland, the object of which is to combine the education of Catholics and Protestants by an arrangement with regard to the religious part of their instruction that may be compatible with the doctrines and practice of both. This arrangement consists in there being only certain selections from the Bible, which are admitted generally, while particular days and hours are set apart for the separate religious exercises of each class. This will not do for the zealous Protestants, who bellow for the whole Bible as Reformers do for the whole Bill. While the whole system is crumbling to dust under their feet, while the Church is prostrate, property of all kind threatened, and robbery, murder, starvation, and agitation rioting over the land, these wise legislators are debating whether the brats at school shall read the whole Bible or only parts of it. They do nothing but rave of the barbarism and ignorance of the Catholics; they know that education alone can better their moral condition, and that their religious tenets prohibit the admission of any system of education (in which Protestants and Catholics can be joined) except such an one as this, and yet they would rather knock the system on the head, and prevent all the good that may flow from it, than consent to a departure from the good old rules of Orange ascendency and Popish subserviency and degradation, knowing too, above all, that those who are to read and be taught are equally indifferent to the whole Bible or to parts of it, that they comprehend it not, have no clear and definite ideas on the subject but as matter of debate, vehicle of dispute and dissension, and almost of religious hatred and disunion, and that when once they have escaped from the trammels of their school, not one in a hundred will trouble his head about the Bible at all, and not one in a thousand attend to its moral precepts. March 10th, 1832 {p.268}