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 L I B RARY 
 
 OF THE 
 
 U N IVERS ITY 
 
 or ILLI NOIS
 
 INAUGURAL ADDRESS 
 
 OP 
 
 THE BISHOP OF WINCHESTER, 
 
 AT THEIR FIRST CONGRESS, 
 
 HELD AT 
 
 KING'S COLLEGE, LONDON, 
 21st JUNE, 1873. 
 
 It is with unfeigned pleasure that I have responded 
 to the invitation sent to me to meet you in this theatre. I 
 was not able to be with those of you who assembled at 
 St. Paul's this morning, but I was with you in thought 
 if not in person. I rejoice to take any part whatever 
 in the inauguration of this Association of Church School 
 Managers and Teachers. I believe it to be a movement of 
 the very greatest importance, not only for those immediately 
 concerned in, and those professionally connected with, the 
 great office of a schoolmaster, but also for English society 
 generally, and especially for that great institution, the 
 Church of England. It would be altogether missing the 
 subject not at once to say that there are many difficulties, 
 many dangers, many perplexities before us at this moment
 
 as to the great subject of Church of England education — 
 difficulties, many of them, arising, not from what was the 
 case when I came first into life — the apathy of people 
 generally as to the teaching of the young — hut diffi- 
 culties rather which beset a quickened circulation and a 
 greater interest in the matter. The blood no longer 
 stagnates round the heart ; on the contrary, there is a 
 tendency to over -excitement which might lead to some 
 cerebral mischief, and to some organic damage. It seems 
 to me pre-eminently useful at this time that those who 
 are qualified to take the lead in their profession should 
 come together and consider calmly what the circumstances 
 of the case require ; what the real essence of their office 
 is ; how that office is to be brought most efficiently to bear 
 upon the mass of the English people ; how the school- 
 masters are to rise and to prove their own special 
 character ; how they are, not only as individuals so to rise, 
 but, how the office is to be cemented together and made to 
 set its mark upon the people. It is in some degree to 
 consider these matters that we are gathered together. I 
 would indicate some of the dangers to which I have 
 alluded. First of all it is impossible to separate the 
 consideration of Church of England training of our 
 young from that more indiscriminate and less theologically 
 defined training, which the nation in the form of un- 
 denominational education, as it is called, is able to provide 
 for the mass of the people — an education which, in some 
 respects, of course — as in its encouragements and its 
 temporal results for those who conduct it — it is difficult for 
 the Church of England to equal. To be in any way, even 
 in the humblest, upon the great state machine is to be 
 dragged on at a rate and with a display which does not 
 belong to anyone not connected with the gilded coach. 
 There is a great amount of noise and hubbub, of thronging 
 and blinding dust, of the clamour of people round 

 
 proclaiming their greatness, and other circumstances which 
 have a certain enticement. But when we look beyond and 
 see what these things are able to do, we must come to 
 the conclusion that the thing which is after all the highest 
 part of every pupil — -I mean that moral nature which 
 is one outcome of the spiritual nature within him — 
 as to that, it is but little that this great apparatus 
 can actually perform. The necessity, from the division 
 of opinion amongst us, (and I own it to be a necessity 
 where the taxation is levied from men of all religious 
 opinions) — the necessity of separating the direct instruction 
 given by the State from the religious question, involves 
 this terrible deficiency. You cannot teach morals except 
 through the spiritual being of the pupil. You might 
 teach him, for instance, not to steal ; you might teach him 
 even not to get drunk when he gets older ; you might teach 
 him those things which some people think are the whole 
 of morals, but when you have taught him all, it may be 
 you have done nothing for the moral nature of the man. 
 Probably, many of you have read the novel or life of 
 Eugene Aram, and will know what I mean by saying 
 that there may be what is intellectually a certain great 
 " moral development," in a man in whom the 
 true moral development has not even begun ; in whom 
 the sense of his own humanity, fallen and redeemed, and 
 the sense of humanity in each one of those with whom he 
 has to deal, has never awoke ; but who looks on those 
 around him and on his pupils as counters with which he 
 is to play with all the dexterity in his power — with, 
 perhaps, a certain honesty of purpose, but still dealing with 
 them as counters, and having no conception of the 
 intricacy and greatness of that spiritual life which is 
 within each of them. There seems to me no mode really 
 of giving that which I call a high moral training, except 
 through training first the spiritual nature and bringing the
 
 influence of that to bear upon the formation of mere 
 external habits. 
 
 Now, while a State education can teach the pupils the 
 disadvantages of a course of conduct which would lead to 
 disaster, such as intemperance and other great evils, I do 
 not think there is anything in that training which can 
 unite this external apparatus to that which is the governing 
 principle within the man. I will give you an illustration 
 which I dare say will make you smile as it did me when it 
 was told to me by a lady the other day. This lady was 
 connected with a Board School, and she said, '' What am 
 I to do ? A boy tells a great public lie. He tells it so 
 that it is impossible for me to speak to him about it 
 privately because every other boy in the school knows it. 
 I am bound to punish him for it, and therefore I administer 
 a certain flagellation and vapulation. That is all very 
 good, but then," she said, " I must not explain to the 
 boys why I did it until the hour of religious instruction 
 comes." Now that is a thing to make us laugh, but at 
 the same time there is a terrible principle in it. It is 
 a severance between the external habit — a certain outward 
 action — and the internal principle. This is one of the 
 many evils which, (just as an eruption upon the face comes 
 from the impurity of the blood), shows internal disorganiza- 
 tion of the national framework, brought about by our being 
 broken up into sects, instead of all being one. At such a 
 time as this we need be up and doing. Very considerable 
 rewards and objects of ambition are set before school- 
 masters under the new system, and the Church can ofter 
 less than a very clever man, at least in mere mundane 
 teaching, might attain to. But the question arises, " Is 
 there really nothing on the other side ?" I think there is, 
 and that the man who deliberately makes a sacrifice, and, 
 the two being off"ered him, chooses the Church school 
 rather than, the State school, will have his reward. The
 
 man who devotes himself, even though it may cost him 
 some worldly success, to that which I have already shown 
 to he the higher form of education — the only real form of 
 education — who devotes his talents and the weight of his 
 moral character to that which is after all the highest teach- 
 ing of the mass of the English people — that man is doing 
 a work for man and God which cannot be exaggerated. 
 Indeed, it seems to me very much like the choice of a 
 profession in the kindred science of healing the bodies of 
 men — of a man saying, " Well, I see in this vaunting age, 
 if I go puffing myself up as a doctor who is to cure 
 everything by giving pleasant medicines to everybody who 
 can come, I shall very soon get a great fortune, maintain 
 myself in great splendour, and perhaps found a family." 
 Another practitioner says, " Yes, but I have to deal with 
 mankind, to heal diseases, and not to deceive people by 
 making them think they are healed when they are not ; 
 and I would rather labour my life long and die a poor man, 
 having in my vocation done all that God enabled me, to 
 mitigate human suffering, and to heal human diseases, 
 than to live with a gilded name and a golden fortune, and 
 to look back on my death bed to having been a humbug." 
 And just as the mind, and the soul, and the inward moral 
 nature, are greater even than the highest bodily powers, 
 so is his claim to be higher and greater who devotes 
 himself to that noble work. 
 
 The first thing for you to do, if you wish to do what I 
 hope you have met here for, is to take calmly and 
 deliberately an estimate of what the greatness of your 
 profession is and what therefore are the issues which depend 
 upon discharging it aright. This I hold to be the very first 
 point of all in order that there may be a due feeling of 
 self-respect in the teachers, which will support you in times 
 of difficulty and depression, and will enable you in 
 respecting your profession to respect your brethren and
 
 yourselves, and so never condescend for any temporary 
 advantage to lose sight of the mightiness of your charge. 
 If you begin here, then the second thing I venture to 
 suggest is, that this is a time for mutual co-operation, a 
 time for your acting together, a time for your understanding 
 one another's views, a time in which the stronger should 
 be ever ready to help the weaker, and the leader to confirm 
 the led. I take this Association of Church Managers 
 and Teachers, and this Congress as being a sort of 
 engagement from those who have come together that 
 they will endeavour by co-operation and by unity with 
 all who are engaged in this great work, to stand as a 
 compact phalanx to meet the attack of the enemy. When 
 I say that, I include my own profession — that of the clergy 
 of the Church of England — as being essentially one with 
 that of the schoolmasters of the church. In my 
 judgment there is no more real difference between the 
 profession than there is between my accidental position of 
 a bishop and that of my brother clergymen who work 
 with me in the ministry. The office is really one — it is 
 the creation of Christianity — the office of a prophet, 
 evangelist, and teacher, as you read in Holy Writ through 
 the action of the same cTivine spirit in the body of Christ. 
 All are to rely upon the self-same strength — the power of 
 the Holy Ghost ; all are to aim at the self-same object — 
 the salvation of man ; all are to labour by the vei-y self- 
 same means, learning the secret of sympathy with others ; 
 suffering with them that we may rejoice with them ; 
 imparting ourselves to them that in anything God litis 
 raised us above them we may make them partakers of the 
 gift. And it seems to me the leading idea of the whole is 
 — if we apply the principles I have tried to work out — that 
 the clergy and the schoolmasters of the Church of England, 
 from the highest to the lowest, ought to act together as one 
 body engaged in this work. I know perfectly well, — in
 
 times past, I think fur more than in the present — the 
 school-masters have had a good deal to bear with and to 
 complain of with regard to some of the clergy. Some 
 have had to complain of the great carelessness of the clergy 
 as to teaching the young. Some clergymen seem to have 
 thought that the pulpit was their throne and the school 
 their abomination. If that is so, there can be no very 
 great heartiness of work and sympathy shown in the parish 
 where there is that unfortunate disruption between things 
 that are one. 
 
 But there have been other grounds of offence. There 
 have been clergymen who have done one of the worst 
 things they could do — worse even than neglecting the 
 school-master — and that is patronising him. Now, as 
 you all know, who are acquainted with Dr. Johnson's 
 works, to be a patron, is to be an extremely disagreeable 
 thing — it is a mean sort of way of sinking a better man 
 than ourselves when it comes to a rough-and-tumble 
 struggle ; — to stand aloof from him when he is in want of 
 assistance and to hug him round the neck when he begins 
 to succeed. What we want is, to have masters of 
 schools — men of independent mind and thought and action 
 — men who take a real and not an unwise estimate of their 
 own position — but who do not think that they raise 
 themselves by standing aloof and opposing the clergyman — 
 thus showing that they understand their position no better 
 than the clergyman understands his office in thinking 
 that he does well in patronising the schoolmaster. If 
 you are really anxious to do what the people want 
 from you and what God requires at your hands, jou must 
 each one acknowledge the true position of the other, and 
 act together heartily and lovingly in mutual Christian 
 honour. My firm belief is that the time has come when 
 in the great body of the clergy, and in the great body of 
 the schoolmasters too, there is a real intention to cultivate
 
 8 
 
 such reliitions, and to maintain such a connection. I 
 think that our meeting together at such times as these 
 may, under Grod's blessing, greatly help to carry out this 
 intention. An association which gives to the individual 
 schoolmaster the support of his fellows in something like 
 an organised body, and which leads to the mutual inter- 
 change of ideas, must tend to produce those results which 
 we are so anxious to see gained. If only you can in that 
 way trust one another, can in that way act together, can 
 together receive your common commission, for the object 
 for which you are labouring — that successful training 
 which is to cultivate in the rising generation of this country 
 true morals, and as far as may be, the development of the 
 intellect founded upon the true religious life — no doubt 
 you wdll have a power which no contrary force can resist, 
 and a reward that will reach on into eternity. 
 
 Printed by T. Brottoll .t Co. r,i, Kniiort Street, TTnynmrl-.et,— W.