What should be our Irish Policy.

23

Britain; that that Parliament is greatly divided in opinion on many Irish subjects; that possibly a majority in it would not approve of many measures which the more enlightened of our statesmen consider necessary to the well-being of the country; and that, accordingly, the whole Irish Question is one of extraordinary difficulty to deal with under any system of constitutional government. The Imperial Parliament, we must admit, is not, perhaps, the ideal we should choose to direct the affairs of a divided nation, politically identified with Great Britain, indeed, but distinct from it in many respects, and for ages despised and ill-treated by it.

The future policy of our statesmen towards Ireland should, however, we think be tolerably apparent. Her political and sectarian ills continue; they will not yield to material reforms; they require political and moral remedies. The principal of these complicated ills-that which most deeply affects societyis the repugnance of the Catholics of Ireland to the religious organisation of the country, and the opposition of the Romish priesthood to the Government in its relations to them. And if we reflect that this sentiment is that of five-sixths of the nation, and of those whom they most deeply reverence, and that, though not always visible, it is not the less deep-rooted and certain, we shall comprehend what a general cause of widespread alienation it is, and how perilous it is to the Empire. What then is the main cause of this sentiment, and why is it so steady and inveterate? We answer, it is the stubborn maintenance in legal but iniquitous ascendancy of a State Church, which embodies the principles of conquest, confiscation, and proscription, to the minds of the Catholics in Ireland, and which, for the benefit of a small minority who form a distinct and hostile sect, appropriates the ecclesiastical revenues of the people. This is, and must be, the great cause of just complaint and general ill-will, assuming that the Catholics of Ireland retain the ordinary feelings of humanity. If a state insists on supporting a church for a sect against the will of a nation, that church moreover being rightly considered as a standard of past misgovernment and oppression, and endowed unrighteously with the property of the people, disunion between the government and the governed, and mutual antipathy must be the consequence. The ecclesiastical settlement of Ireland, in fact, is the prolongation by mere force of sectarian wrong against the popular will, thus outraging the conscience and exasperating the feelings of the great majority of the Irish nation.

Nothing shows more distinctly the injury inflicted on Ireland by the Church Establishment, and the extreme impolicy of

keeping it up, than the arguments of those who venture to defend it. No person, as Macaulay observes, would pretend, in the existing state of Ireland, to force such an institution on the people. It is admitted that any measure of the kind would be as monstrous as the attempts to compel the Scotch to submit to prelacy, or to coerce the Huguenots of France into conformity to the faith of the persecuting Bourbon. It is admitted, that any British minister who would dream of imposing on a considerable part of the community who form the British people a church from which they not only dissent, but which they had special cause to dislike, would be fitted only for a cell in Bedlam. Nor is it pretended that this Establishment does not provoke a great deal of discontent, that it does not tend to perpetuate the sense of past wrong and present injustice. Setting aside a few impracticable persons, will any one say that the Irish State Church does not shock the vast majority of the people, is not viewed by them and their priesthood as a grievance, and is borne by them for any other reason than because they are compelled to submit to it? It is obvious moreover-for on this point statistics are an infallible test-that, looked at as a proselytising church, as the means of converting the Catholics of Ireland, the Establishment is a complete failure; that it has never got beyond the narrow limits of the pale to which it was originally confined; and that, after the lapse of more than three centuries, notwithstanding every kind of support from state injustice and state domination, it remains the mere appurtenance of a sect, and not the church of a faithful people. That pompous array of bishops and archdeacons, of deans and chapters, of prebends and rectors, compared with the number of their flocks, are a mass of officers without a real army, the satellites of a deserted temple into which worshippers will not enter. In short, it is a conceded fact that the Irish Establishment is an evil in the abstract, that it is thought a wrong by the mass of Irishmen, and that it has most signally failed to accomplish its intended mission.

These being the indisputable facts, they decide the question in our opinion. The arguments, on the other side, are historical fallacies or irrelevant sophisms. First, it is said, that the Irish State Church is essentially the same as that existing in Ireland at the time of the Conquest; that the Romish Church is an innovation, and therefore that prescription and law concur in favour of the Establishment. The answer is, first, that although the Church which Henry II. found settled in Ireland was not Romish in the strict sense, it was assuredly not the Tudor Establishment, and that for many centuries, at least five-sixths of the nation have been Roman Catholics; and, secondly, that even if

The Case of the Establishment.

25

the fact were so, it has nothing whatever to do with the matter, because, since the sixteenth century the Irish State Church has only obtained the support of a sectarian minority. Then it is said, that because the Irish bishops, or rather a majority among them, assented to the ecclesiastical revolution of the Tudors in Ireland at the Reformation, that assent binds the whole nation for ever, as if in the first place the mass of the people have not kept aloof from the Protestant movement, and as if in the second any act of the kind could be a permanent settlement of the question. It is argued, thirdly, that the Irish Establishment is especially guarded by the Union, and that to touch the one is to assail the other; to this we reply, that the Act of Union does not contain a single provision to guarantee the revenues of that Church, that since the Union a positive statute has curtailed these revenues by one-fourth, that Parliament, in another essential point, the number of the representatives of Ireland, has interfered with the settlement of the Union, and that, in any case, no statute whatever, however fundamental or important, can necessarily control the action of the legislature. As for the arguments that the revenues of the Establishment are principally paid by the Protestant proprietary, and that accordingly they are legitimately applicable to the religious uses of Anglican Protestantism, or that, after all, the Church affords an excellent supply of country gentlemen to a country injured by absenteeism; we say, of the first, that it is a new doctrine, that because the weight of a national charge falls principally on a single class, that class possesses a right to distribute it in such a manner as it thinks fit; and, as to the second, that it is a mere pretence that savours not a little of simony. As regards those who clamour about the sanctity of the property of the Establishment, we refer them to the palpable distinction between individual and corporate rights, and to the precedent of the Reformation; and as for the notion that the Anglican Church in Ireland and England is so essentially one, that the fall of the one means that of the other, we would leave that question, with much confidence, to any sensible bishop or clergyman of the Church of England in this country.

The time therefore, we think, has come to deal with the Irish State Church in the interest of Ireland and the Empire. That Church, we repeat is, at once, an influence opposed to equal government and justice, a perpetual incentive of discontent, and tn absolute and ignominious failure viewed as a means to promote Protestantism. We may add, that it has been condemned in principle by every thinker and statesman of the age, and thaa it is not defended by any person who has not a positive interest

in it. Should its temporalities be abolished, vested rights being of course respected, we believe such a measure would do more to diffuse a feeling throughout Ireland that the domination of sect had passed away, and that the legislature had ventured to treat Ireland with real equity, and, consequently, to extinguish national discontent, than any other conceivable reform. Nor do we think the result impossible, provided the attack were at first confined to the extinction of the revenues of the Church, and did not embrace the larger question of the manner in which they should be distributed. It is on this point that so much difficulty exists in fact, and is always suggested by those who wish to evade the matter; and we think, therefore, that it should be avoided in any attempt to deal with the question in the first instance by the imperial legislature. On the broad issue that the Irish State Church is a mischief to Ireland, and should be abolished in its present state and legal position, we hope that the time is not distant when the House of Commons will affirm the proposition. The other questions which lie behind, the appropriation of the revenues of the Church, and the relation in which the Roman Catholic clergy of Ireland should stand hereafter to the State, important and interesting as they are, should, we think, be postponed to the main question, which alone opens the whole subject. It is well known, that on these latter points less chance of a majority in the House of Commons exists than on the principle at least of the former.

Our own views and principles in relation to national establishments are well known; and nowhere do they find more abundant justification than in Ireland. In England and Scotland, the essential injustice of an Established Church is veiled by the greater equality and congruity of the established and the principal unestablished creeds; and the consciousness of it is not, as in Ireland, aggravated and envenomed by differences of blood, and vivid remembrances of civil and social oppression: but it is none the less unrighteous, and impolitic, and opposed to the broader and deeper views of national life which are so rapidly winning the recognition of statesmen, and so powerfully influencing their legislation. During the last half century, every Act of Parliament affecting ecclesiastical matters, has been the abolition of some prerogative, the redressing of some social wrong, the loosening of some of the various and complicate ligatures which bind Church and State together, and grievously hamper both; an advance towards that absolute religious and ecclesiastical equality in the sight of the civil law, to which every church and every individual has an indefeasible right. It would, therefore, be a glaring retrogression in the progress of just legislation, and an egregious blunder in policy, as well as a fundamental wrong

Objections to Endowment of the Catholic Church.

27

in principle, were the attempt made to redress the inequalities of ecclesiastical legislation in Ireland, by the endowment of the Catholic Church. It would no doubt be an approach to religious equality, but it would be an approach only; for if the Catholic Church, why not the Presbyterian, Congregational, and Methodist Churches? There are only two principles upon which the national endowment of a church can proceed; the principle that the endowed church is the true and the only true church; a principle which it is impossible to determine, inasmuch as it can be affirmed only by the church itself: and the principle of impartiality, viz., that all churches in the state shall receive equal favour from the state; a principle which it is impossible to apply: for, in a free country, where the rights of the religious conscience are recognised, every individual man, as well as every society of men, stands before the law on the ground of perfect equality. It is so in all civil legislation; it is the great glory of English law, that it extends its provisions to the very meanest of its individual subjects; that the civil rights of the pauper are as sacred as those of the noble. No civil legislation would be tolerated, that inflicted the injustice which establishments now inflict; or that provided only the rough and approximate equality which the endowment of all churches would provide. Hence there is and must be essential injustice in all state endowments of religion; the property which belongs to all citizens is appropriated to a class in virtue of a religious creed, which other classes do not profess. Any endowment of Romanism, for instance, would be as great a wrong to many Protestant consciences, as the endowment of Protestantism now is to Roman Catholic consciences. Nor would this be relieved by their own equal endowment; and there would still be great numbers in the nation, who from various causes could have no endowment at all.

It seems, therefore, a very blind policy to attempt to redress one anomaly by a method which would leave other anomalies unredressed; which could have no constant application, but would be ever fluctuating with the fluctuating fortunes of different churches; and which would be an inevitable and prolific source of perpetual embarrassments to government. We do not think that any such attempt would be successful. We cannot imagine a proposal that would more effectually combine various and incongruous elements of opposition. The Episcopalians of England would oppose it on the ground of strong Protestant feeling as well as on that of prerogative. The Free Churches of England would be united almost to a man, on the ground of their nonestablishment principles. The intense antipathy to popery in Scotland, as well as the great extension of non-established principles there; and the like antipathy to popery among the Pro