we had a Parliament sufficiently theological to discriminate between the right and the wrong in religion, and to endow accordingly. But failing this, it seems to us the next best thing, that in any public measure for helping on the education of the people, Government were to abstain from introducing the element of religion at all into their part of the scheme; and this not because they held the matter to be insignificant,--the contrary might be strongly expressed in the preamble of their Act,{13}--but on the ground that, in the present divided state of the Christian world, they would take no cognizance of, just because they would attempt no control over, the religion of applicants for aid,--leaving this matter entire to the parties who had to do with the erection and management of the schools which they had been called upon to assist. A grant by the State on this footing might be regarded as being appropriately and exclusively the expression of their value for a good secular education.' ----- {10} To demand of that Parliament which carried the Reform Bill the repeal of the Patronage Act, instead of enacting, on her own authority, the Veto Law. {11} 'I see,' said Knox, when the Privy Council, in dividing the ecclesiastical revenues of the kingdom into three parts, determined on giving two of these to the nobility, and on dividing the remaining part between the Protestant ministry and the Court,--' I see two-thirds freely given to the devil, and the other third divided between God and the devil: if the end of this order be happy, my judgment fails me!' Our church courts, if they declare for the system of denominational grants, in opposition to the territorial endowments of a scheme truly national, will be securing virtually a similar division of the people, with but this difference, that God's share of the reserved moiety may be a very small share indeed. And can it possibly be held that the shame and guilt of such an arrangement can be obviated by the votes of Synods or Assemblies? or that, with an intelligent laity to judge in the matter, the 'end of this order' can be other than unhappy? The schools of the Free Church have already, it is said, done much good. We would, we reply, be without excuse, in taking up our present position--a position in which we have painfully to differ from so many of the friends in whose behalf for the last ten years we deemed it at once a privilege and an honour to contend--did we believe that more than six hundred Protestant schools _could_ exist in Scotland without doing _much_ good. Of nothing, however, are we more convinced, than that the good which they have done has been accomplished by them in their character as _schools_, not in their character as _denominational_. We know a little regarding this matter; for in our journeyings of many thousand miles over