By the mid-nineteenth century, due to the growing political influence of organized religious Nonconformity and the pressure this group exerted on the church-state connection, the established churches’ traditional monopoly over the educational provision for children in England, Scotland and Wales was waning.Footnote 1 The introduction in 1831 of a state-run multi-denominational system of national education in Ireland weakened the Church of Ireland's position in society, and effectively led to its partial disestablishment through the 1833 Irish Church Temporalities Act.Footnote 2 As S. J. Brown has argued, the creation of a national and pluralist education scheme and the reduction of the established church in Ireland spelled the end of the Protestant establishment as ‘a real force for the religious and moral instruction of the whole Irish people’ and appeared to indicate that the position of the United Kingdom's other established churches, under pressure from the growth of militant Dissent, was also vulnerable.Footnote 3 Despite a brief yet significant revival of church schools in the late 1830s, the Whig government's attempts at reform from 1839 and the spectacularly successful Nonconformist opposition to Sir James Graham's 1843 Factory Bill dealt a serious blow to the prospect of a church-directed national education system and ensured that the tide appeared to be turning towards Dissent.Footnote 4 In essence, the education question formed part of the broader battle between the established churches and Dissent in the mid-nineteenth century.Footnote 5 Increasingly, debates on the future of national education in Britain were viewed as a struggle between the established churches, which were seeking to retain their statutory supremacy over the country's schools, and an apparently unified Dissenting interest growing in confidence and aiming to challenge the national churches’ privileged position, both in education and in British society in general.Footnote 6
In Scotland, this Dissenting interest was broadly represented by the National Education Association of Scotland (NEA). Formed in April 1850, the NEA was dominated by members of Scotland's two largest Dissenting Presbyterian denominations, the Free Church of Scotland and the United Presbyterian Church. The Free Church had been formed in May 1843 following the Disruption, when four hundred and fifty ministers and almost half the laity seceded from the Church of Scotland in protest at the continued recognition of lay patronage and the state's perceived infringement of the Kirk's ‘spiritual independence’ and control over its own affairs. Founded in 1847, the United Presbyterian Church was an amalgamation of two older seceding groups, the United Secession and Relief Churches, which had split from the Kirk during the eighteenth century over the issue of patronage. These churches were represented in the NEA by leading figures such as the Free Church minister Thomas Guthrie, the Free Churchman and Liberal peer Fox Maule (later Lord Panmure) and John Brown, arguably the most influential minister in the United Presbyterian Church in this period.Footnote 7
Unlike the Dissenting groups in England, which favoured full educational voluntaryism and opposed any plans for state intervention, the NEA proposed the creation of a comprehensive, non-denominational national education system, funded and organized by the state, and based on the opening up and extension of the existing parish school structure then under the sole authority of the Church of Scotland.Footnote 8 Replacing the church's ministers and heritors (landowners responsible for the upkeep of the parish church), they advocated the creation of local boards consisting of, and elected by, parents, ministers and ratepayers, and including members of all denominations. These boards would manage the schools, appoint teachers, determine the curriculum and be supervised by a central national board.Footnote 9 The first phase of the national education debates in Parliament, between 1850 and 1862, coincided with a period of transition in Scottish Dissent and in the relationship between the Free and United Presbyterian Churches. Although they had previously been bitter rivals, especially during the prolonged dispute over the church-state connection during the 1830s known as the ‘voluntary controversy’, by 1863 they had begun negotiations for formal ecclesiastical union. As Guthrie remarked, cooperation between the Free and United Presbyterian Churches in the NEA represented an ‘auspicious omen’ for the future union of Scotland's evangelical Dissenting churches.Footnote 10
While Donald Withrington's excellent work on the divisions within the Free Church, and more recently John Stevenson's study on the Church of Scotland, have provided detailed insights into the key issues that underlay the debates, such as the contested role of religious instruction in schools, it is also important to place the education question in Scotland firmly within its religious context and to assess how the shifting mid-nineteenth-century Presbyterian landscape explicitly shaped the nature of the debates about education.Footnote 11 According to Stevenson, the Church of Scotland ‘jealously guarded’ both the historical link between the Kirk and Scottish education and its considerable powers over the supervision and inspection of the parish schools.Footnote 12 The impact of the Disruption, and the religious pluralism associated with Scottish society after 1843, heightened fears that the establishment would lose its privileged position with regard to parish schools and other public matters. This would especially prove the case after 1845, when the state took over administration of poor relief from the national church. The Poor Law Amendment Act removed yet another element of the established church's traditional control over Scottish society and fears that a similar change would occur in education resulted in a vigorous defence of the parish schools by the Kirk.Footnote 13 Drummond and Bulloch have argued that while Scotland remained overwhelmingly Presbyterian, the Disruption unleashed the same sectarian tensions that had gripped the education debates in England throughout the 1830s, with an increasingly powerful Dissenting group threatening the position of a debilitated and minority established church.Footnote 14 However, lingering divisions within Scottish Dissent, particularly between the Free and United Presbyterian churches, weakened attempts to create a unified movement against the parish schools and, as Stevenson has claimed, prevented educational reform in Scotland until 1872.Footnote 15 By placing the Scottish education debates within the context of shifting Presbyterian relations, this article assesses the extent to which they can be viewed as a struggle between the establishment and Dissent, and whether a unified Dissenting voice against the state church, seemingly apparent in the NEA, actually existed in this period.
The Disruption, Presbyterian Relations, and the Parish Schools
To the Dissenters in the NEA, overhaul of the old parochial system was necessary to reinvigorate Scotland's withering educational provision. By the mid-nineteenth century, the Church of Scotland-run parish schools, intrinsically linked by supporters of the Kirk with Scottish national identity, had become antiquated, lacking in quantity and quality, and ill-suited to cope with the rapid societal changes associated with industrialization.Footnote 16 In the eyes of Dissenting critics, the parochial system was a grotesque illustration of the established church's ‘supremacy’ over Scottish education and indeed society in general.Footnote 17 These criticisms were exacerbated by the Disruption, a cataclysmic event that effectively split in two the national kirk, already weakened by the significant eighteenth-century secessions, and completely reshaped the Scottish religious landscape.Footnote 18
The Disruption also effectively ended the Church of Scotland's claim to total control over education. As Callum Brown has argued, the parish school system traditionally formed an integral part of the Kirk's attempt to dominate all aspects of Scottish society. Whilst parish schools were open to all children regardless of denominational background, parochial teachers had to belong to the Church of Scotland and espouse its values.Footnote 19 However, despite the idealized vision of a ‘school in every parish’, the Church of Scotland was far from exercising complete supremacy over Scottish education. In 1834, just over a fifth of Scotland's schools were part of the parish system.Footnote 20 A vast network of charity schools was provided in the Highlands by the Scottish Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (which largely fell under the control of the Kirk) and the Edinburgh Society for the Support of Gaelic Schools, while by the 1850s nearly half of Scotland's schools were maintained by groups or private individuals with no formal attachment to any religious denomination.Footnote 21 Proliferation of Dissenting schools from the 1820s also led to increased denominational competition with the parish system, which would be intensified following the Privy Council Committee on Education's decision in 1846 to extend the system of grants to facilitate the building of schools by all Catholic and Protestant churches.
Nevertheless, it was the lingering perception of the educational supremacy of the established kirk, rather than the more complex reality, which fuelled Dissenting opposition to the parish system. The Reform Act of 1832 offered Scotland's Dissenters, mostly belonging to the urban middle class which benefited most from the extension of the franchise, a platform on which they could challenge the perceived hegemony of the religious and political establishment. Like the administration of poor relief, education was viewed within Scottish Dissent as another pillar of the old decaying order in which the established church exerted total dominance over Scottish society.Footnote 22 Constituting a minority of the Scottish population following the Disruption, the Church of Scotland's maintenance of its hitherto privileged position and control of the parish schools, compounded by its dismissal of over four hundred teachers who had sided with the Free Church, was condemned by its Dissenting opponents as ‘the reverse of national – narrow, exclusive, and sectarian’.Footnote 23 Unsurprisingly, members of the established church were often openly critical of the NEA's motives, and very few supported the national education movement. In the eyes of the Kirk, Scotland's Dissenters were using education to reopen hostilities.Footnote 24
The Disruption also had a significant impact on Dissenting relations in this period, as closer links were fostered between the Free Church and the United Presbyterian Church. Constituting roughly half the Scottish churchgoing population,Footnote 25 these two denominations forged a loose Dissenting alternative to the Church of Scotland through cooperation in the initial phases of the Evangelical Alliance (formed in 1846), territorial home mission work, and a highly successful electoral coalition based on shared opposition to the increased state endowment to the Roman Catholic seminary at Maynooth.Footnote 26 However, fundamental differences remained between the two churches, particularly regarding the church-state relationship. The United Presbyterians advocated the voluntary principle in religion and opposed the endowment of any religious denomination by the state. On the other hand, the Free Church, despite seceding from the established Church, retained the belief that the state should recognize and endow the national kirk, though without interfering in its internal affairs. The tension between the establishment and voluntary principles that had arisen during the ‘voluntary controversy’ of the 1830s occasionally plagued attempts at Dissenting cooperation after the Disruption. Nevertheless, the development of a Dissenting identity within the two churches after 1843 even stoked speculative attempts at union and the creation of a ‘National Free Church’ to rival and replace the state kirk. These attempts would lead to union negotiations from 1863 and culminated in the eventual creation of the United Free Church in 1900.Footnote 27 The emergence of the national education question after 1850 appeared to offer the two denominations another chance to work together under the umbrella of Dissent against the religious and political establishment. However, despite the movement's anti-establishment appeal, the alliance it created was very loose and exposed the limits and fragility of Dissenting unity in this period.
The debates and interests of this period must therefore be viewed in the context of Presbyterian relations after 1843, both between the establishment and Dissent, and within Dissent itself. While to some supporters the NEA represented an opportunity for Dissenting unity, for others denominational allegiances remained an integral part of the education debates. The Free Church minister and leading member of the NEA, Thomas Guthrie, argued that it was the ‘duty’ of Scottish Dissenters to cooperate to achieve reform. While the establishment's exclusive claim to the national schools presented an insurmountable ‘barrier’ to cooperation between all of Scotland's Presbyterians, Guthrie believed that the Free and United Presbyterian Churches were on a ‘common path’ regarding the future of Scottish education, and within the NEA could present a united front to the government.Footnote 28 However, this semblance of unity was dismissed within the Church of Scotland as hollow and a façade for underlying sectarian interests. According to one churchman, Scotland's Dissenters appeared to be ‘willing to sacrifice the welfare of millions of their countrymen’, so long as ‘a Free Church can annoy an Established Church, or a voluntary procure a momentary triumph of his crotchety principle’.Footnote 29
The first decade of the education debates in Scotland after 1850 needs to be viewed through the lens of these persisting sectarian tensions, perceived or otherwise, during the post-Disruption transition period. For instance, competing priorities and lingering divisions on principle within and between the Dissenting Presbyterian churches severely hampered any attempt at a unified national campaign for reform. Firstly, as the number of denominational schools grew considerably in this period, aided by the extended Privy Council grants from 1846, the demand for a national education system was not even universal within Scottish Dissent.Footnote 30 After 1843 a large group led by Thomas Chalmers's heir-apparent, Robert Candlish, pursued the creation of a separate Free Church educational scheme designed to cater for the teachers dismissed following the Disruption, to rival the establishment's parish schools, and to support the new body's much-heralded claim to be the true Church of Scotland, with the status and obligations of a national kirk. Although the education scheme proved a qualified success, with 513 teachers and more than 44,000 pupils by 1847, it was opposed by a small but influential faction within the Free Church, led by Guthrie, James Begg and William Gunn. This faction believed that only a national, non-denominational system of education could fully reach the whole population, and dismissed Candlish's scheme as perpetuating sectarian conflict.Footnote 31 These divisions came to a head in a heated debate between Begg and Candlish at the 1850 Free Church General Assembly, which led both Guthrie and Gunn to resign from their posts on the Free Church's education committee.Footnote 32 As Withrington acknowledges, these disputes ensured that, within a decade of the Disruption, the Free Church was a ‘house deeply, even irrevocably, divided against itself’.Footnote 33
The Need for Reform
However, the increasing fragmentation of Scottish schooling documented in the 1851 census resulted in the realization within the main Dissenting churches that some kind of overarching reform was necessary to reverse the government's apparent acceptance of the institutionalized sectarianism of the denominational system and the Privy Council grants.Footnote 34 With the growing influence of the national education movement and the ever-increasing prospect of success in Parliament, the Free Church could not sit idly on the fence as Scotland's Dissenters debated their own vision of reform. A year after his confrontation with Begg, an ever shrewd and opportunistic Candlish, by now arguably the most prominent and influential Free Church minister, outlined proposals to the Privy Council on Education for his own national plan.Footnote 35 However, he asserted that any attempt at a national bill would not be at the expense of the maintenance of the Free Church's own denominational scheme. This rather tentative approval of reform failed to win over the Guthrie camp and bring about reconciliation between the church's conflicting parties.Footnote 36 Despite the opportunism of Candlish's decision, it at least ensured that by the early 1850s the majority of Presbyterian Dissenters were at least nominally in favour of some kind of national education system.
Nevertheless, divisions remained as to the details of any potential reform, and these would intensify as education became a central feature of parliamentary debates throughout the 1850s. Most of the divisions within the NEA and its membership centred on the disputed role of religious instruction, and its place or otherwise in any potential bill. Whilst a minority within the United Presbyterian Church sided with the secularists for the active exclusion of religion from any bill, the three major Presbyterian churches generally favoured some kind of religious influence in the schools. The majority in the Free Church, alongside their opponents in the establishment, believed that Scotland's schools should have an overtly religious character based on the teaching of the Bible and the Shorter Catechism. Unsurprisingly, Candlish advocated placing the reformed national schools under the management of the three main Presbyterian denominations, essentially replacing the existing Church of Scotland system with a broader Presbyterian one.Footnote 37
The United Presbyterians and Guthrie's Free Church group, on the other hand, dismissed what they regarded as this outmoded connection between church, state and school, and argued that religious instruction, while an important element in the schools, should be separated from secular education. Concurring with the NEA's official stance, they proposed that while the state would solely administer secular education, the frequency and type of religious instruction should be decided by the popularly elected local boards and not by legislation. This proposal was aimed at finding common ground between Scotland's Presbyterians and was based on the assumption, scoffed at by Candlish, that the staunch Presbyterianism of the Scottish people would in any case safeguard the religious character of the school.Footnote 38 Advocating an even clearer distinction between religious and secular education, the United Presbyterians also called for separate stated hours for religious instruction, during which Dissenting or Roman Catholic parents could voluntarily withdraw their children, a proposal dismissed by the establishmentarian Free Churchman William Maxwell Hetherington as ‘anti-theocratic’.Footnote 39 For their part, Guthrie and Begg were labelled ‘atheists, deists, and infidels’ by one Church of Scotland commentator.Footnote 40 While obvious differences on religious instruction exacerbated the conflict between the establishment and Dissent, the internal disputes within Dissent continued to threaten cooperation within the NEA. When the education question was put to Parliament after 1850, the policy of forbearance deployed in other areas of Dissenting cooperation after 1843 was deemed necessary to secure the success of such an uneasy coalition.
The National Education Bills
Between 1850 and 1862, seven major Scottish education bills were introduced into Parliament, six of which aimed to implement the aims of the NEA for a comprehensive state-funded education system. Predictably, the chief areas of distinction between these bills concerned the constituency of the proposed central board and, most significantly, the role of religious instruction in the national scheme. Despite the often confrontational character associated with the education debates, attempts at cooperation, especially among the non-established Presbyterians, were a central feature of the efforts to achieve a national system.
The introduction of Lord Melgund's national education bills in 1850 and 1851 thrust this apparent desire for Dissenting cooperation into the spotlight. These bills, focusing purely on secular education and including no faith requirement for schoolmasters, left considerable power in the hands of the parish ministers and heritors. Despite this concession to the established church, the United Presbyterian Church expressed its ‘strenuous’ support for Melgund's proposals and called for unified Dissenting support.Footnote 41 The Free Church North British Review agreed and claimed that ‘a union on the part of the great dissenting bodies of Scotland’ was essential to the success of Melgund's bill. However, it also noted that the only difference between the Free and United Presbyterian Churches was the means by which this common object could be achieved, a view echoed by Melgund, who admitted that the issue of religious instruction presented the ‘only difficulty in the way of a complete union betwixt the United Presbyterian Church and the Free Church’ on education.Footnote 42 Despite the conciliatory stance offered by Begg and Gunn, the Caledonian Mercury claimed that Candlish's insistence on ‘a distinct and direct recognition of religious instruction by the state’ ensured that he and the Free Kirk majority were ‘rowing in the same boat’ as members of the established church, and ‘on a tack the very opposite to the United Presbyterian Synod’.Footnote 43 This suspicion as to Candlish's motives would ultimately prove correct, as the Free Church leader skilfully undermined the NEA throughout the debates and persuaded home secretary Lansdowne to oppose Melgund's ‘secular’ measure in favour of an overtly religious system.Footnote 44 One Dissenter lambasted Candlish's somewhat Machiavellian opposition to Melgund's proposals, accusing the Free Church of acting as the ‘self-elected patron and dictator of the education and religion of the youth of Scotland’.Footnote 45 The general hostility of the Free Church lobby, the obstinate attitude of the establishment and the lack of cohesion within the Dissenting churches in the NEA were an ‘embarrassment’ to Melgund and his supporters, and contributed to the narrow defeats of his bills in the House of Commons.Footnote 46 Guthrie condemned the continued partisanship of the debates, which he claimed saw the ‘best interests’ of the country and the churches, and the potential for a successful reform measure, ‘sacrificed to extreme Establishment views on the one hand, and extreme Voluntaryism on the other’.Footnote 47
The loss of momentum in the national education movement that coincided with Melgund's defeat did not last long. Within two years, the issue was taken up by the Lord Advocate and Free Churchman James Moncreiff, who would go on to introduce five education bills over the next decade. Moncreiff's zealous commitment to a national education system galvanized renewed calls for Dissenting cooperation, even from the most unlikely corners. At the Edinburgh Free Presbytery in late 1853, William Cunningham argued that ‘a national system of education, based on right principles, could bring together the different evangelical denominations in friendly co-operation, and without compromise of their principles’.Footnote 48 However, critics within the Church of Scotland dismissed Cunningham's apparent olive branch to the voluntaries as a mere façade for denominational interests. This claim was criticized by the Free Church-supporting Scottish Guardian as an ‘idle’ attempt to sow the ‘seeds of discord’ among Scottish Dissenters.Footnote 49 Nevertheless, the occasional confrontation over religious instruction within the NEA, such as that between Cunningham and the United Presbyterian minister John Cairns at the society's Edinburgh meeting in January 1854, offered further evidence for the establishment's belief that the Dissenting alliance was ‘an incongruous, dislocated mass’ simply aiming at attacking the parish schools.Footnote 50 Support for the movement within the Free and United Presbyterian Churches and its attempt to foster Dissenting union were also questioned by the establishment. One Church of Scotland commentator noted the ‘limited attendance’ of Free Churchmen at a meeting in Glasgow and claimed that the United Presbyterian ministers who called the two meetings represented ‘only a fraction’ of the denomination. Candlish's ‘careful’ decision to avoid the Edinburgh event also implied to the writer that ‘the clerical Pope of the Free Church’ did ‘not exactly agree’ with the movement.Footnote 51 The Church of Scotland minister John MacDuff argued that there was a growing disparity between the Free Church membership and its leaders such as Guthrie, who were deemed to be needlessly perpetuating schism between the Free and established churches, and harming any ‘dream’ of reunion between the two denominations.Footnote 52 To the establishment, the coalition of Dissenters in the NEA represented ‘no union’ on Protestant principles.Footnote 53
While differences certainly remained within the national education movement, the belief of the United Presbyterian minister John Harper that Scotland's Dissenters had a duty to set aside their smaller, seemingly surmountable differences for the common good of an improved education system was a common theme of NEA meetings in this period.Footnote 54 The perceived success of this reinvigorated Dissenting alliance was such that Guthrie viewed the Edinburgh meeting and the intended national system as a prelude both to Dissenting union and to Scotland attaining ‘in the true sense of the expression, a National Church’.Footnote 55 The introduction of Moncreiff's bill coincided with a series of private conferences organized by George Sinclair and John Brown, which appeared to be ‘preparing the way for union’ between the Free and United Presbyterian Churches.Footnote 56 While the education question and its various disputes appeared to many as an ‘obstruction’ to such attempts to unite Scotland's Dissenters, Moncreiff believed that it instead ‘prove[d] most forcibly the need for union’ as envisioned by Brown and Sinclair, and ‘demonstrate[d] the injury which the country and religion suffer from our divisions’.Footnote 57
This optimism and desire for union would ultimately prove hollow when Moncreiff brought forward his first national education bill to the House of Commons late in February 1854. Generally, the bill built upon Melgund's earlier proposals, including the abolition of the confessional test for teachers and the creation of a system of local and national boards to replace the management and control of the establishment. However, as the English radical politician Richard Cobden noted in a letter to the Scottish lawyer George Combe, Moncreiff's desire to appease the various churches led to a disjointed and inconsistent bill that pleased no one.Footnote 58 Most significantly, his determination to secure the place of religious instruction in the national school curriculum hardened sectarian attitudes within the United Presbyterian Church, and led to a division within the NEA.Footnote 59 While the run-up to the bill had witnessed Scotland's evangelical Dissenters meeting on a united platform, an exclusive meeting of United Presbyterians was held in its aftermath to defend and reassert the church's denominational interests in the face of what they regarded as an unpalatable blueprint for national education. According to James Peddie and John Brown, clause twenty-seven of Moncreiff's bill, which stipulated that the state should legislate and pay for religious teaching in the schools, did ‘violence to the religious convictions’ of their fellow United Presbyterians and was ‘at variance with the voluntary principle’. The United Presbyterian minister George Johnston also criticized Free Churchmen such as Candlish, Buchanan and Cunningham for infiltrating the NEA platform to ‘advocate an opposite system’ and thereby diluting and harming the influence and principles of the association and the United Presbyterian Church.Footnote 60
This meeting provided the first indication that even those within the NEA most favourable towards united action were beginning to turn inwards and defend their own sectarian interests, neglecting the Dissenting label increasingly associated with the Free and United Presbyterian Churches after 1843. At a tense meeting of the NEA in Edinburgh two weeks later, the voluntary opposition to Moncreiff's bill was criticized by Fox Maule, who stressed the need for compromise to achieve reform.Footnote 61 The lack of cooperation associated with the bill was condemned by Moncreiff himself in a letter to Guthrie in the wake of the United Presbyterian meeting. He wrote that he was ‘thoroughly disgusted and sickened with the violence of the Established Church on the one hand, and of the extreme section of the voluntaries on the other’. Moncreiff also warned the United Presbyterians that unless they presented voluntaryism in a less offensive light it would ‘put an end to all hope of union’.Footnote 62 The need for mutual forbearance was emphasized once again by Guthrie, who urged the supporters of national education to lay aside their denominational principles temporarily in favour of the national interest.Footnote 63 Despite Guthrie's best efforts, the open hostility within Presbyterian Dissent, combined with the surprisingly optimistic returns of the 1851 census on Scottish schooling and the opposition of English Tory MPs to any encroachment on the established schools in England or Scotland, ensured that Moncreiff's bill was defeated by nine votes in the House of Commons.Footnote 64
The failure of two subsequent bills in 1855 and 1856 cemented the renewed sectarianism of the Dissenting churches and effectively killed off the anti-Maynooth electoral coalition that had dominated Scottish politics for over a decade.Footnote 65 The Scottish Guardian blamed the voluntaries, ‘who have done nothing themselves for the education of the people’, for persisting in ‘obtruding their preposterous crotchets’ in the way of a government ‘desirous of supplying their deficiencies’. The demise of Moncreiff's national project saw a swift return to pre-existing denominational interests, with the Guardian calling on fellow Free Churchmen to fall back on their own education scheme with ‘fresh ardour and success’.Footnote 66 This was echoed by Candlish, who urged them to renew their commitment to the Free Church scheme, which he felt had been held back for ‘far too long’ by the ‘distraction’ of national education.Footnote 67
The increasing gulf between Scotland's Dissenters was exacerbated by the prospect, emanating from the Church of Scotland, of closer links between the Free and established churches, based on a common stance on education, and in particular the role of religion in the schools. At a Glasgow meeting in 1859, the established churchman and Conservative politician Archibald Orr-Ewing argued that while the Free Church appeared willing to work with the national kirk, the United Presbyterians presented the ‘great difficulty’ to Presbyterian cooperation. This claim was refuted by the United Presbyterian minister James Taylor, who maintained that it was the Church of Scotland's opposition to Moncreiff's proposals which prevented the passing of any national reform bill.Footnote 68 Despite some optimistic attempts to foster cooperation within the Presbyterian churches, such as the rather unrealistic 1857 public resolutions for Dissenting union by George Sinclair, by the early 1860s it had become clear to Moncreiff that educational reform could only be achieved ‘bit-by-bit’.Footnote 69 The subsequent success of his 1861 proposal to simply abolish the religious tests for teachers in the parochial and burgh schools paid dividends for this more piecemeal plan, although the failure of a more extensive measure a year later proved that sectarian animosities remained a significant barrier to a fully national system.Footnote 70
It is clear, then, that the first decade of the Scottish education debates after 1850 cannot be viewed as a simple conflict between the establishment and Dissent. While the Church of Scotland's continued claim to the national schools offered those outside the establishment a common platform on which to unite, the shifting and complicated nature of Dissenting relations ultimately scuppered the optimism and cooperation originally associated with the NEA. The Free Church's reluctance to support plans for a national system owed much to the belief that it represented the true Church of Scotland, with all the privileges such a position entailed. The insistence by Candlish and his supporters on the central role of religion in the proposed national schools, based on the Free Church's commitment to the church-state connection, was at odds with United Presbyterian voluntaryism. This difference in principle would impact on all Dissenting cooperation and would prove a significant barrier to union between the two churches for over half a century. The education debates also reignited hostilities between the major Presbyterian churches, proving a threat to Dissenting cooperation in other areas such as politics, while helping to cement the sectarian divisions associated with the Disruption era. The fundamental failure of the NEA in this period was its inability to reconcile these differences and offer a ‘common path’ for Scotland's Dissenters on which they, like fellow Nonconformists in Ireland, could adjust their relationships among themselves and with the evolving state to meet the changing circumstances of a society in which the churches appeared to have an increasingly loose hold.Footnote 71 Lingering denominational jealousies and the lack of a clear, united Presbyterian voice would ensure that no single church in Scotland had control of the education debates as they entered their second, conclusive decade.Footnote 72
