While, however, we can see no proper grounds for difference between Voluntaries and Free Churchmen, on even these details of school management, and see, further, that they never differ regarding the way in which the adventure schools of the country are conducted, we must remind the reader that all on which they have really to agree on this question, as Scotchmen and franchise-holders, is simply whether their country ought not, in the first place, to possess an efficient system of national schools, open to all the Christian denominations; whether, in the second, the parents ought not to be permitted to exercise, on their own responsibility, the natural right of determining what their children should be taught; and whether, in the third, the householders of a district ought not to be vested in the power, now possessed by the heritors and parish minister, of choosing the teacher. Agreement on these heads is really all that is necessary towards either the preliminary agitation of the question, or in order to secure its ultimate success. The minor points would all come to be settled, not on the legislative platform, but in the parishes, by the householders. Voluntaryism, wise and foolish, does not reckon up more than a third of the population of Scotland; and foolish, _i.e._ extreme Voluntaries--for the sensible ones would be all with us--would find themselves, when they came to record their votes, a very small minority indeed. And so, though their extreme views may now be represented as lions in the path, it would be found ultimately that, like the lions which affrighted Pilgrim in the avenue, and made the poor man run back, they are lions well chained up--_lions_, in short, in a _minority_, like the agricultural lion in _Punch_. Let us remark, further, that if some of our friends deem the scheme proposed for Scotland too little religious, it is as certain that the assertors of the scheme now proposed for England, and advocated in Parliament by Mr. Fox, very decidedly object to it on the opposite score. Like the grace said by the Rev. Reuben Butler, which was censured by the Captain of Knockdunder as too long, and by douce Davie Deans as too short, it is condemned for faults so decidedly antagonistic in their character, that they cannot co-exist together. One class of persons look exclusively at that lack of a statutory recognition of religion which the scheme involves, and denounce it as _infidel_; another, at the religious character of the people of Scotland, and at the consequent certainty, also involved in the scheme, that they will render their schools transcripts of themselves, and so they condemn it as _orthodox_. And hence the opposite views entertained by Mr. Combe of Edinburgh on the one hand, and Mr. Gibson of Glasgow on the other.{15} -----