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A Question of Conscience: the Church and the ‘Conscience Clause’, 1860–70
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 March 2011
Extract
In one passage of his A Chapter of Autobiography (1868), Gladstone looked back thirty years to the time when he had published The State in its Relations with the Church. Then he had ‘believed that the Church of England, through the medium of a regenerated clergy and an intelligent and attached laity, would not only hold her ground, but would even in great part probably revive the love and allegiance both of the masses who were wholly falling away from religious observances, and of those large and powerful nonconforming bodies’. Yet, within a dozen years of 1838 ‘at least a moiety of the most gifted sons, whom Oxford had reared for the service of the Church of England, would be hurling at her head the hottest bolts of the Vatican; that, with their deviation on the one side, there would arise a not less convulsive rationalistic movement on the other. Since that time, the Church of England may be said to have bled in every pore; and at this hour it seems occasionally to quiver to its very base’.
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References
page 237 note 1 W. E. Gladstone, A Chapter of Autobiography, 1868, 54–5.
page 237 note 2 Recent investigations agree that this census can provide a reasonably accurate general view of religious life in the early 1850s: for instance, Inglis, K. S., ‘Patterns of Religious Worship in 1851’, in this Journal, xi (1960), 74–86Google Scholar; Thompson, David M., ‘The 1851 Religious Census: Problems and Possibilities’, Victorian Studies, xi (1967)Google Scholar; Pickering, W. S., ‘The 1851 religious census-a useless experiment?’, British Journal of Sociology, xviii (1967)Google Scholar. See also K. S. Inglis, Churches and the Working Classes in Victorian England, 1963.
page 238 note 1 Sketches of The Religious Denominations of The Present Day … And The Census Comprising The Number of Each Denomination, Abridged From The Official Report Made By Horace Mann, Esq., to George Graham, Esq., Registrar-General, 1854, 97.
page 238 note 2 The Journeyman Engineer, The Great Unwashed, 1868, 94.
page 238 note 3 Selected Speeches of the Earl of Beaconsfield, ed. T. E. Kebbel, 1882, ii. 54.
page 238 note 4 Essays by the Late Mark Pattison, Sometime Rector of Lincoln College, ed. Henry Nettleship, 1890, ii. 271.
page 238 note 5 The Spiritual Wants of The Metropolis and Its Suburbs. A Letter to the Laity of the Diocese of London by the Right Hon. and Right Rev, Archibald Campbell, Lord Bishop of London, 1 863, 4. Blomfield, bishop of London, following the examples of Glasgow and Manchester, had in 1836 inaugurated a fund to build new churches in the metropolis.
page 238 note 6 Op. cit., ii. 556.
page 238 note 7 Ibid., 577.
page 239 note 1 Working Men and Religious Institutions. A Paper Read At The Ruridecanal Meeting at Ospringe, Kent, On The 1st July, 1867, by the Rev. Charles E. Donne, 1867, 17 and 18.
page 239 note 2 The Church of England and Political Parties: a Letter to The Right Hon. Gathome Hardy, M.P., D.C.L., 1868, 13–14.
page 239 note 3 Wilberforce, Samuel, ‘The Church and her Curates’, Quarterly Review, cxxiii (1867), 244Google Scholar.
page 239 note 4 Ibid., 221.
page 239 note 5 Ibid., 244.
page 239 note 6 Ibid., 221.
page 239 note 7 George Anthony Denison, Notes of My Life, 1805–1878, 1878, 268. There is a good deal about Denison's attitude to education in B. R. Marshall's unpublished D.Phil, thesis, ‘The Theology of Church and State in relation to the concern for popular education in England 1840–1870’ (Oxford 1956).
page 240 note 1 Ibid., 182–3.
page 240 note 2 Annual Report of the National Society, 1812, 27.
page 240 note 3 General Committee Minute Book 6, and the forty-ninth to fifty-third annual reports.
page 240 note 4 Report of the Commissioners, i. 343–4.
page 240 note 5 Reminiscences of William Rogers, 2nd ed., 1888, 152, 153.
page 241 note 1 Fiftieth Annual Report of the National Society, 1861, xii. Arthur Garfit later criticized the Society for not being ‘quite straightforward’. ‘They will sanction a departure from the terms in practice without altering them in form’: The Conscience Clause, 1868, 11.
page 241 note 2 General Committee Minute Book 6, 211.
page 241 note 3 Letter dated 27 November 1866: Fifty Third Annual Report of the National Society, 1864, Appendix xi, p. xxxix.
page 241 note 4 Letter dated 4 January 1864: loc. cit.
page 241 note 5 Letters of 5 February, 8 February and 21 April, 1864: Ibid., xi.
page 241 note 6 Letter of 7 May, 1864: Ibid., xiii.
page 242 note 1 P.P. 1865, vi, {Report from the Select Committee on Education ), 87, Q..1553.
page 242 note 2 Remarks on the Discouragements to Religious Teaching, 1861, 15, 12.
page 242 note 3 Richard Seymour, The Conscience Clause: a letter in reply to the Rev. David Melville, 1865, 18, 19.
page 242 note 4 George Trevor, ‘The Conscience Clause’, in The Church and The World, ed. Orby Shipley, 1866, 312. Trevor maintained, erroneously, that a conscience clause would force a school ‘to educate Dissenters, and to educate them in their own views’.
page 242 note 5 Professor Plumptre, E. H., ‘The Conscience Clause’, in Contemporary Review, x (1866), 578Google Scholar.
page 242 note 6 Seventeen Reasons Why The Church of England May Have Nothing To Do With Any Manner of Conscience Clause, 1865. ‘Though the argumentative force of Archdeacon Denison's “Seventeen Reasons” has evaporated under Mr. Oakley's analysis’, wrote Connop Thirl wall, ‘they will always retain a certain value, as examples of a great variety of fallacies’: A Charge Delivered To The Clergy of The Diocese of St. David's … October 1866, 1867, 23n.
page 243 note 1 The ‘Conscience Clause’, Speech of The Archdeacon of Taunton In The Lower House of Convocation of Canterbury, February 6th, 1866, 1866; Notes of My Life, 328.
page 243 note 2 Notes of My Life, 328.
page 243 note 3 The ‘Conscience Clause’…, 1866, n, 13, 25.
page 243 note 4 ‘that to insist upon the insertion of the “Conscience Clause” in the Trust-deed of a Parish or other school of the Church of England, as a condition of assistance out of the Parliamentary grant, is not just; and that to accept the “Conscience Clause” on the part of such school is neither just as respects the future managers of the school, nor is it safe as respects the teaching of the Church’: Ibid., 2.
page 243 note 5 Ibid., 47.
page 243 note 6 John Gellibrand Hubbard and George Trevor, The Conscience Clause in 1866, Speeches delivered in the Chapter-House of York Minster on the 13th of October, 1866 …, 1866, 6; the words are those of Hubbard.
page 243 note 7 I. Gregory Smith, The Conscience Clause: Can It Be Justified?, (1866), 6.
page 243 note 8 Edward Bickersteth, The Conscience Clause: a Letter to His Grace the Duke of Marlborough, 1867, 9.
page 244 note 1 P.P. 1865, vi, ( Report from the Select Committee on Education ), 216, Q..3695.
page 244 note 2 Coleman Ivens, Compulsory Education and the Secular System: a Paper read at the Annual Dinner of the South Staffordshire Schoolmasters’ Association, October it, 1866; Archdeadon Moore in the Chair, 1867, 3.
page 244 note 3 Herbert Vaughan, Popular Education In England, 1868, 74ff.
page 244 note 4 Op. cit., 11.
page 244 note 5 Report of Church Congress at Norwich, 1865, quoted by Arthur Garfit, The Conscience Clause, 1868, 24.
page 244 note 6 The Church and the World, ed. Orby Shipley, 1866, 328.
page 245 note 1 D. Melville, The Conscience Clause: its Meaning, its Authority, its Use, 1865, 2.
page 245 note 2 The Times, 8 November 1866, 6.
page 245 note 3 Op. cit., 15.
page 245 note 4 J. Oakley, ‘The “Religious Difficulty” in Education’, in Transactions of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, Manchester Meeting, 1866, (1867), 363, 367.
page 245 note 5 John Oakley, The Conscience Clause Its History, Terms, Effect, and Principle: a Reply to Archdeacon Denison, 1866.
page 245 note 6 W. J. Kennedy, ‘The Conscience Clause’, in Transactions of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, Manchester Meeting, 1866 (1867), 359, 36a. Kennedy's paper was published as a separate pamphlet by the Social Science Association. A return of 1867 revealed that in 829 cases between January 1861 and March 1867, the committee of Council had not insisted on a conscience clause as a condition of a building grant for National or Church of England schools; in 68 further cases the promoters had agreed to insert a conscience clause in the trust deed, and in 42 more cases a building grant had not been made because the promoters refused to accept a conscience clause: P.P. 1867, lv, 17.
page 246 note 1 H. A. Bruce's Elementary Education Bill of 1868.
page 246 note 2 Arthur Garfit, The Conscience Clause, 7–8.
page 246 note 3 Fifty-Seventh Report of the National Society, 1868, 10–11.
page 247 note 1 Hansard, Third Series, cxci, 1655–6, (30 April 1868).
page 247 note 2 A leading Anglo-Catholic and editor of the second edition of the Directorium Anglicanum, according to the Ancient Uses of the Church of England, 1865.
page 247 note 3 Frederick George Lee, The Church of England and Political Parties: a Letter to the Right Hon. Gathome Hardy, 1868, 31.
page 247 note 4 Ibid., 15.
page 247 note 5 Quarterly Review, cxxvi (1869), 132Google Scholar.
page 247 note 6 Ibid., 130–1.
page 247 note 7 Ibid., 133.
page 247 note 8 Ibid., 130.
page 247 note 9 Wilberforce, Reginald G., Life of the Right Reverend Samuel Wilberforce, D.D. Lord Bishop of Oxford and afterwards of Winchester with Selections from his Diaries and Correspondence, iii. 161–3Google Scholar.
page 247 note 10 Ibid., 205–6, 109–10.
page 247 note 11 Ibid., 271: Diary, 11 December 1868.
page 248 note 1 Tait to his son, Craufurd Tait, 10 May 1868: Davidson, Randall Thomas and Benham, William, Life of Archibald Campbell Tait, Archbishop of Canterbury, ii (1891), 6Google Scholar. See also P. T. Marsh, The Victorian Church in Decline: Archbishop Tait and the Church of England 1868–1882, 1969.
page 248 note 2 Shaftesbury's Diary, quoted by Hodder, Edwin, The Life and Work of the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, iii, 1886, 237Google Scholar.
page 248 note 3 Robert Baxter, The Voice of the Country upon the Irish Church, (1869).
page 248 note 4 Viscount Cranborne succeded to this title on the death of his father in 1868.
page 248 note 5 Hansard, cxcvii. 85 (17 June 1869).
page 248 note 6 Ibid., 713–14 (29 June 1869).
page 248 note 7 Life of Wilberforce, iii. 279.
page 248 note 8 A Journal of Events during the Gladstone Ministry 1868–14, ed. Drus, Ethel, (Camden Miscellany xxi, 1958), 5Google Scholar.
page 248 note 9 Earl of Malmesbury, Memoirs of an Ex-Minister: an Autobiography (1895), 659. Wilberforce was afterwards translated to Winchester, and defended himself against the imputation that his ‘votes on the Irish Church Bill were influenced by a miserable desire to get the denuded See of Winchester’: Life of Wilberforce, iii. 291.
page 248 note 10 Wilberforce to archbishop Trench, 30 December 1868: Life of Wilberforce, iii. 279.
page 249 note 1 Notes of My Life, 1878, iv.
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