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    jurious to ite own as to the public interest . Whatever may be the merits and demerits of the * Times / there can be no question of its being by far the most potent organ of the Movement ; which , at the same time , it does not blindly hurry on , but is incessantly pointing out to Ministers , and to the influential classes , the means by which , while yielding to the

    tide of change , they may rationally hope to temper its violence . The * Times' is without doubt one of the gTeat powers in the State . It would not be so , if either Ministers or Opposition had the energy , the strength of will , or the knowledge of the world , by which that journal has acquired the ascendancy naturally given by those qualities in an age which , without much of the exaggeration of a satirist , may be termed the age of cowards and fribbles .

    13 th May . Lord Brougham * * Defence of the Church EttablUhment . —The Lord Chancellor is curiously destitute of consistency . We do not mean by consistency , the Tory virtue of being always wrong because you have been once wrong ; we mean that quality of the intellect and of the moral perceptions , which prevents a person from holding two conflicting

    opinions at once . It was but the other day that L * ord Brougham declared himself against a National Education , because it would put an end to voluntary contributions . And now , without owning , any change of opinion , he maintains that voluntary contributions are good for nothing , and that the State must do all . 4 There were some wants which the

    animal instincts of nature left safely to encumber us , since they were sure of being provided for ; because hunger and thirst and other purely animal necessities , would of themselves compel us to take means to relieve ourselves of their pressure , and the more we felt them the more sure we were to endeavour to provide for them ; but it was not so with wants of a more refined , and he might say nobler kind , —it was not so

    with respect to education ; he did not mean religious , but common secular education . On the contrary , the more ignorant we were , the less we knew of the use of learning , and the less we should bestir ourselves and take means to ensure the advantages to be derived from its acquirement . This was to prove -that the State ought to provide an endowed ecclesiastical establishment : and of course , we presume , ought to fiirniih common secular education also .

    We subscribe to Lord Brougham ' s premises , and strongly recommend them to his own consideration . He shall hear of them again if he ever repeat his declaration against a national provision for elementary instruction . But adopting his principles , we differ altogether from the conclusion he draws from them , in favour of a Church Establishment , taking that term in its received meaning . What he said last year in favour of the voluntary principle , and what he says this year against the voluntary

    principle , are at complete variance , and we hold him to be most felicitously wrong in both . 4 $ Ve hold , with L . ord Brougham and all other rational persons , that the only objects fit to be undertaken by the State , which derives the principal part of its pecuniary resources from compulsory taxation , are . those which either cannot be accomplished at all . or not so well , by the voluntary principle . Instruction , meaning b y that term the systematic culture of the intellectual faculties , we hold to be one of these ; . and to be a most proper subject for a State provision ^ We < k > not flQBeept r « J *

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    Lord Brougham ' * Defence of the Church Establishment . 441

• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), June 2, 1834, page 441, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2634/page/59/