er, he held strongly that,
subject to local consent, the master who gave the secular teaching should
be allowed to give religious teaching also at other times, even within the
school-house.(189)

(M92) What Mr. Gladstone cared for was the integrity of religious
instruction. What he disliked or dreaded was, in his own language, the
invasion of that integrity "under cover of protecting exceptional
consciences." The advance of his ideas is rather interesting. So far back
as 1843,(190) in considering the education clauses of the Factory bill of
that year, he explained to Lord Lyttelton that he was not prepared to
limit church teaching in the schools in the exposition of scripture. Ten
years later, he wrote to his close friend, Bishop Hamilton of Salisbury:--

I am not friendly to the idea of constraining by law either the
total or the partial suppression of conscientious differences in
religion, with a view to fusion of different sects whether in
church or school. I believe that the free development of
conviction is upon the whole the system most in favour both of
truth and of charity. Consequently you may well believe that I
contemplate with satisfaction the state of feeling that prevails
in England, and that has led all governments to adopt the system
of separate and independent subsidies to the various religious
denominations.

As for the government bill of that year (1853), he entirely repudiated the
construction put upon some of its clauses, namely, "that people having the
charge of schools would be obliged to admit children of all religious
creeds, as well as that having admitted them, they would be put under
control as to the instruction to be given." Ten years later still, we find
him saying, "I deeply regret the aversion to 'conscience clauses,' which I
am convinced it would be most wise for the church to adopt. As far back as
1838 I laboured hard to get the National Society to act upon this
principle permissively; and if I remember right, it was with the approval
of the then Bishop of London." In 1865 he harps on the same string in a
letter to Lord Granville:--

... Suppose the schoolmaster is reading with his boys the third
chapter of St. John, and he explains the passage relating to
baptism in the sense of the prayer book and articles--the
dissenters would say this is instruction in the doctrine of the
church of England. Now it is utterly impo