A very important Wesleyan deputation waited on Lord Salisbury on
Wednesday to impress upon him the wrongs which Wesleyan children suffer in the denominational schools of the Church of England, where they must either renounce all religions teaching, or accept that of Anglican teachers, who sometimes insist on teaching as Anglicanism what is really sectarian sacerdotalism, em- bodied in very narrow doctrine, and not embodied in the Church Catechism. Of course that is a wrong which the Church authorities ought to set to rights. We do not know why Mr. Gace's Catechism is allowed to supersede the Church Cate- chism in Church-schools. But that must be quite an anomalous case. The substantial difficulty is that, as Lord Salisbury said, the Wesleyans are not contented that Church-schools should really be Church-schools in the same sense in which Wesleyan schools are really Wesleyan schools : they want a truncated Anglicanism, or, as Lord Salisbury called it, a torso of the Anglican creed, to be substituted for the complete form, because it might suit Wesleyan children and perhaps Congre- gational children a little better; and yet they do not choose to avail themselves of the Conscience Clause, and keep their children away from the religious teaching altogether That does not seem to us a difficulty for which there is any adequate remedy. Anglican schools ought to have the religious teaching directed by really Anglican authorities, though no children who are not Anglicans should be forced to attend it.
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