Meanwhile, we would fain say to our country folk and readers of the north of Scotland: You, of all the Free Churchmen of the kingdom, have an especial stake in this matter. Examine for yourselves,--trust to your own good sense,--exercise as Protestants your right of private judgment,--and see whether, as Christian men and good Scotchmen, you may not fairly employ the political influence given you by God and your country, in possessing yourselves of the parish schools. There will be deep points mooted in this controversy, which neither you nor we will ever be in the least able to understand. You will no doubt be told of a theocratic theory of the British Government, perfectly compatible, somehow, with the receipt of educational _grants_ from which all recognition of the religious element on the part of the State is, at the express request of the Church, to be thoroughly discharged, but not at all compatible with the receipt of an educational _endowment_ of exactly the same character, from which the same State recognition of the same religious element is to be discharged in the same degree. You will, we say, not be able to understand this. The late Dr. Thomas Chalmers and the late Rev. Mr. Stewart of Cromarty could not understand it; we question much whether Dr. William Cunningham understands it; and we are quite sure that Dr. Guthrie and Dr. Begg do not. And you, who are poor simple laymen, will never be able to understand it at all. But you are all able to understand that the parish schools of your respective districts, now lying empty and useless, belong of right to you; and that it would be a very excellent thing to have that right restored to you, both on your own behalf and on that of your children. ----- {7} 'The sixth resolution [of the Educational Manifesto], in which the opinion of Dr. Chalmers is quoted, that Government [should] abstain from introducing the element of religion at all into their part of the scheme, must, as here introduced, be presumed to mean, that in the Act of the Legislature which shall carry the views of the resolutionists into practical effect, nothing shall be said about religious instruction; but that power shall be given to the heads of families to manage the schools, and prescribe the subjects to be taught, according to their own convictions of what is sound in religious and useful in secular instruction. But this would leave the religious rights of the minority completely unprotected. Government must do something more than _omit_ the religious element: it must limit the power of the majority to introduce this element into their schools to the injury of the minority.'--_Letter of Mr. George Combe on the Educational Movement._ CHAPTER FOURTH.