timony
and example of our more than four hundred ministers throughout the
Province. No religious community in Upper Canada has, therefore,
given so direct and effective support to the National School system
as the Wesleyan community, but we have ever maintained, and we
submit, that the same interests of general education for all
classes which require the maintenance of the elementary school
system require a reform in our University system in order to place
it on a foundation equally comprehensive and impartial, and not to
be the patron and mouthpiece of one college alone; and the same
consideration of fitness, economy and patriotism which justify the
state in co-operating with each school municipality to support a
day school, require it to co-operate with each religious
persuasion, according to its own educational works, to support a
college. The experience of all Protestant countries shows that it
is, and has been, as much the province of a religious persuasion to
establish a college as it is for a school municipality to establish
a day school; and the same experience shows that, while pastoral
and parental care can be exercised for the religious instruction of
children residing at home and attending a day school, that care
cannot be exercised over youth residing away from home and pursuing
their higher education except in a college where the pastoral and
parental care can be daily combined. We hold that the highest
interests of the country, as of an individual, are its religious
and moral interests; and we believe there can be no heavier blow
dealt out against those religious and moral interests, than for the
youth of a country destined to receive the best literary education,
to be placed, during the most eventful years of that educational
course, without the pale of daily parental and pastoral instruction
and oversight. The results of such a system must, sooner or later,
sap the religious and moral foundations of society. For such is
the tendency of our nature, that with all the appliances of
religious instruction and ceaseless care by the parent and pastor;
they are not always successful in counteracting evil propensities
and temptations; and therefore, from a system which involves the
withdrawal or absence of all such influence for years at a pe