THE ANGLICAN CHURCH AND EDUCATION.

Evening Star, Issue 7361, 5 November 1887, Page 2 (Supplement)

THE ANGLICAN CHURCH AND EDUCATION.

TO THE EDITOR.

Sir,—Your correspondent "Libertus" may find the facts upon which I based the statement he objects to in Thorold Rogers' 'British Cit'zeu,' London, 1885, a book in the Athenseum library. Mr Thorold Rogers is Professor of Political Economy at King's College, London He has made a special study of the history of prices, examining for the purposes of his subject a vast number of manuscripts belonging to all periods of English history. In the book referred to, under the head of "Education in Early Times," he says: " While reading an enormous number of papers written in the Middle Ages and after the Reformation, nothing has struck me more forcibly than the decline in general education which marks the latter ptripfl. A hold, plain, legible hand degenerates into an almost illegible scrawl; into very bad grammar, and worse spelling. The common handwriting of Elizabeth's reign is much harder to make out than that of Henry's; and in that of the Stuarts' it is even worse." Again: "I have found in searching among the relics of rre-Rtformation pipers bills for work done, written out by country arti-aiiH. smiths, oarpenters, masons, and the like, in which the spelling is better than it was three centuries later, and the charges are properly calculated." And again: " There is good reason to believe that before the Reformation what wo call primary education was much more widely afforded than people think, and there is equally good reason to believe that after the Reformation the quality and the amount of this education greatly deteriorated. I draw my inference from the bills sent in by workmen and artificers, thousands of which I have inspected at various periods of English history.' The reason of this falling away of primary education at and after the Reformation period is easily found. Before the Reformation the Church did the work, and did it well. At the Reformation the Church lost the greater part of her revenues; in particular, the great religious houses were suppressed, e.nd their estates were confiscated \o th,e Crown. I have not insinuated, that it was the religious changes hrought about at the Reformation that were inimical to education ; the decay of the paris-h schoo's is sufficiently explained by the fact that the Church had lost her revenues, and that the State, which, had appropriated them, did nothing for education. Two centuries of ecclesiastical confusion and impoverishment followed, and it was not till late in the seventeenth century (1698) that the Church found strength to renew her labois for the education of the people. In that year was founded the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, and before the middle of the next century that Society had planted 1,600 free primary schools in England, for which fact your correspondent may icfer to the 'Dictionary of English History,' London, 1884, article "Education in England," by Professor Oscar Browning. Permit me to add that in speaking of "the Church," I use the words, not as your correspondent suggests by his turned commas with invidious reference to modern religious denominations, but in the sense in which he will find them used in any English history. Before the Reformation there was only one Church in England; in 1(>98, and even to-day, "the Church" would still denote, for most English readers, the National and Historic Church of the country.—l am, etc., A. R. FrrcHETT. Dunedin, November 2.