buildings. In its original form the Bill went even further than this, for it provided that the State should undertake the repair of twelve of the most important of these churches. But even in its present form it provides that the State shall continue to the Church of Ireland,' not only all its parish churches and chapels, but the grand old historic edifices of the Irish people— St. Patrick's, and Christ Church, at Dublin, and the primatial Church of Armagh, teeming with recollections or traditions of the Apostle of Ireland-the Cathedral of Down, which possesses his grave-the venerable sanctuaries of St. Canice at Kilkenny, of St. Flannan at Killaloe, of St. Jarlath, with its unrivalled porch, at Tuam-the Cathedral of St. Mary at Limerick, on the shores of the sacred Shannon--the Cathedral of Derry, alike famous as on the site of St. Columba's earliest ministrations and for the heroic deeds of its memorable siege.

Again, although the several corporations of which the Church of Ireland has hitherto consisted are to be dissolved, Nor entirely the Act creates afresh one vast new corporation in dissolved. their place, which will or may absorb them all. The change from many corporations to one is doubtless considerable, yet it has some obvious conveniences; and, after all, it is a merely technical process, which might, if the political world had been so minded, have been called a scheme of Church Reform as well as a scheme of Church disestablishment. Were the Ecclesiastical Commissioners of England to be made the one corporation capable of receiving property for the Church, it would make an important difference to lawyers and chapterclerks, but to the people and to the clergy at large the change would be almost imperceptible.

Again, with regard to legal privileges. There are two, indeed, which the Act destroys, of which we do not dissemble the significance. One is the place of its Bishops in the House of Lords, the other is its separate ecclesiastical courts. But the Act leaves others quite as important. It leaves, so far as appears, the rank and precedence of the Irish Protestant, as of the Irish Catholic, clergy untouched. It leaves, so far as Nor entirely appears, the territorial arrangements of the parishes and dioceses. It leaves the Act of the Supremacy nised. of the Crown for Ireland, expressed in more forcible and impressive terms than that for England, unrepealed. It leaves the Crown free, if so desired, to nominate the Bishops of the Irish Church. It leaves the 'Church of 4 2 Eliz. c. 1 (Ireland.)

unrecog

I

In the House of Commons Sir Stafford Northcote put this question to the

Attorney-General for Ireland :-'Is there 'anything in the Bill to prevent the Crown nominating the Bishops of the

'Ireland' free to declare itself part of the Church of England, claiming the protection of its laws, demanding the nomination of its prelates by the Crown, claiming the advice and judicial wisdom of its legal tribunals, having a share in its preferments, following the course of its doctrine, its discipline, and its worship.

We have called attention to these aspects of the Irish Church Act for various reasons.

The effect

promise.

In the first place, it is the duty of every reasonable man not to exaggerate the effect of changes, which in themselves he may see cause to lament, but which are made far of the Com- worse by representing them in gloomier colours than the case warrants. One of the most alarming features of the Irish Church Bill has been the impetus which it appeared to give to the enemies of endowed and established Churches everywhere. By this impetus, in great part, the Bill was carried; and, from the hopes thus excited, it still derives, in the eyes of the more fanatical and destructive Nonconformists, its chief interest. It may be useful, therefore, thus far to have shown that the history of the Irish Church Act, so far from proving that the principle of establishments is doomed, proves how deeply rooted and almost incapable of extinction it really is. Whatever may be the meaning of the word 'establishment' or 'disestablishment,' the recent course of events has indicated that the thing denoted by it is of too stubborn a growth to be overturned by any single measure however revolutionary. Revolutionary, in one sense, the Irish Church Act may have been; but in another sense, it is the very reverse of revolutionary. Revolutionary it was in one sense; for it destroyed what it has destroyed, for the mere sake of destruction, and in this respect it may be said to have gone beyond the widest changes of the Reformation or of the Civil Wars, which never subverted without at least an attempt at construction and compensation. But in another sense it was conservative, for, unlike those changes, it has preserved, in the midst of destruction, what in a more barbarous age would have been swept away entirely. If 'disestablishment' be what this Bill has effected, then it is consolatory to remember that 'disestablishment,' whatever that much disputed word means, does not mean total abolition of the institution, nor yet the removal of all legal privileges, nor yet entire separation from the State, nor absolute

freedom of clerical self-government, nor entire dissolution of ecclesiastical corporations, nor total withdrawal of their revenues. It means, in this Bill, as regards the Irish Church, though only in a completer form, that which every Church has undergone in every country in Europe-reduction of its endowments, reduction of its privileges, partial disendowment, and partial disestablishment; or, as the Attorney-General described the measure before it actually appeared, 'disendowment and 'disestablishment to a certain extent.'

It may be remembered that the mover of the Bill, in his celebrated speech of March 1, compared the Irish Church to Gloucester, in 'King Lear.' The change to be effected, he said, was imagined to be a 'leap over a precipice "ten masts high," but was really only the fall of a few feet.' There are senses, indeed, in which the leap of the Church of Ireland has been to the full as dangerous as Gloucester supposed. The loss of so large a part of its endowments, the sudden reduction of its clergy from affluent independence (if so be) to poverty or mendicancy, is doubtless a tremendous descent. The possible change in its ecclesiastical position may also be, not only a leap in the dark, but a leap into absolute chaos. But both of these results may be, or might have been to a considerable extent, arrested by Irish Churchmen themselves. And as regards the principle of the Bill-as regards the necessary operation of its clauses-the fall may be, as its mover presumed, almost imperceptible. Even as regards'ascendency,' no one who heard Sir Roundell Palmer's speech on the rejection of the Lords' amendments can forget the force with which he pointed out that the Irish Church Act, passed as it was, without a shred of benefit to the Irish Catholics and with important benefits still left to the Irish Protestants, was, and would continue to be, a striking monument of that very Protestant ascendency which it professed to destroy, being, as it was, in its most characteristic feature, the direct result of the exclusiveness of English and Scottish prejudice. The fact is that establishment,' like ' endowment,' is a question of degree; and though the amount of one or the other may be so much diminished that their benefits may be almost frustrated, yet the principle may so far remain as to be always capable of revival. The Knights of St. John, when they quitted Rhodes for Malta, left a powder magazine in the vaults of the citadel, which continued unperceived for three centuries. Some twelve years ago it was ignited by a flash of lightning in a thunder-storm; an explosion took place which blew up the Turkish governor and Turkish

mosque, and thus three hundred years after their suppression the departing order was avenged. Such may be the results of the inflammable materials left in Ireland, in the roots of the old Establishment, the seeds of the old ascendency. Let us hope that, unlike the powder magazine at Rhodes, they may, by a happier Providence, be still destined to scatter, not destruction and devastation, but life and prosperity over Ireland.

Re-endow

As regards the re-endowment of the Irish Church, it would be alike impertinent and useless to suggest any details by which this can be effected. We content ourselves ment. with urging that the main object to be sought is the continuance of the present free and independent position of the Irish clergy. In proportion as they are left at the mercy of the mere voluntary and casual contributions of the individual landlords or the local peasantry, they will be degraded to the position which it is the duty and policy of every enlightened statesman to avert. The ecclesiastical history of the British Empire abounds with warnings of what they have to shun. The tame Levites' of the Scottish and English Nonjurors—the dependence of Nonconformists on their congregations, so often lamented by themselves-the miserable bargaining for the performance of sacred rites, the necessity of yielding to the passions and superstitions of their flocks, on the part of the Irish Roman Catholic Priests-are all so many beacons to indicate the opposite path prescribed by the higher destiny of the Church of Ireland. If an adequate central endowment be secured, if the independence of the clergy be made the first object, then one of the main characteristics of an Establishment -that which a well-known Nonconformist orator described as 'the unholy and accursed thing'-that which Dr. Chalmers regarded as the most valuable part of the ancient ecclesiastical system both of England and Scotland-will still be preserved. Endowments, as the Archbishop of Canterbury pointed out in the manly and dignified speech with which he summed up the conclusion of the whole matter on the last night of the debate, are valuable not in themselves, but for the special characteristics, moral and spiritual, of an endowed clergy, of which they are the symbols, and towards which they contribute. No doubt, there are also special virtues fostered by dependence, by poverty, by mendicancy. These ought always to be recognised by those who advocate the retention of an opposite system. They have been manifested in the hermits of the Thebaid, in the begging Friars of the Middle Ages, in many of the English

Dissenters, and of the Scottish Free Churchmen and United Presbyterians. But there are moral and spiritual advantages of another order, flowing from independence, from general cultivation, from national comprehensiveness. It is these which have been hitherto specially connected with the thought of ancient endowment; and if the endowments of the Irish Church should, by the present effort, be raised to the same point, or anything like the same point, which they reached before, the whole result of the Bill, in this particular, will be the exact reverse of what was anticipated. So far from its having been a triumph, it then will have been a heavy blow and discouragement to the voluntary principle, the essence of which is the daily dependence of ministers on the casual contributions of their flocks. The only effect of the measure would in that case have been that in the stead of former endowments will have risen up new endowments, resembling those which they have replaced in their principle, in their origin, and in their consequences.

What is true of the possibility, however remote, of a reendowment, is still more true of the possibility—we hardly venture to say the probability-of a wise re-establishment' of the Irish Church.

Its re-esta

The Act, as we have seen, so far from taking this power from the members of the Church of Ireland, actually places it within their reach. They have only to remain as blishment. they are, the Irish branch of the English Church, and they will retain most of the advantages which are possessed by the Church in the dependencies of the Empire, and many of those possessed by the Established Church in England itself. The second clause of the Act which dissolves the Union between the two Churches is expressly limited to 'the 'Union created by Act of Parliament,' that is, by the Act of Union, and accordingly the Church of Ireland, as far as this is concerned, merely returns to the relations to the Church of England in which it was before the Union; that is to say, it remains one with it in all respects, except that whilst its supreme head was then, as it still is, the Queen, its legislative Government was then the Irish Parliament, which now having ceased to exist can no longer regulate its proceedings.

Take, for example, what is probably the extremest form of the connexion, the appointment of Bishops by the Crown, which, as we have seen, the Act unquestionably allows. We can well understand the reluctance of Irish Protestants to receive their Bishops from the hands

Appointment of Bishops.