IRELAND’S CHURCH PROPERTY, 
 
 AND 
 
 THE RIGHT USE OF IT. 
 
 BY 
 
 AUBREY DE YERE. 
 
 LONDON: 
 
 LONGMANS, GREEN, READER, AND DYER. 
 
 DUBLIN: DUFFY. 
 1867. 
 
3 ^^ 
 "D4 Qi 
 
 ADVEKTISEMENT. 
 
 Early last year I published in two of the chief Irish 
 newspapers some letters on the rival schemes for the at- 
 tainment of u Keligious Equality in Ireland ” — one of these 
 schemes being the just Distribution of the Irish Church 
 Property, and the other its Secularization. The substance 
 of those letters will be found, with considerable additions, 
 in the last three chapters of the present Pamphlet. To 
 them I have prefixed an introductory chapter in further 
 illustration of the Church Question. 
 
 A. de V. 
 
 ^ 55380 
 
 J 
 
3 ^ £ 
 
 -D49l 
 
 IRELAND’S CHURCH PROPERTY, 
 
 AND THE RIGHT USE OF IT. 
 
 I. 
 
 INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 Once more we hear of Ireland’s Church Question, and there- 
 fore there is hope for Ireland. The periods alike of servile 
 sloth and of bootless strivings draw to an end. That question 
 made itself often heard from the enactment of Catholic Eman- 
 cipation to those heady days when youthful politicians talked 
 about “Physical Force,” and proclaimed that “If the altar 
 stood in the way of Liberty, the altar must go down.” Their 
 enthusiasm, and the famine years (for folly and fate are ever 
 confederate), threw the cause of Ireland back a quarter of a 
 century; and the voices which, in England, had witnessed to 
 justice during the debates on the far-famed “ Appropriation 
 Clause,” were heard no more. Till then the cause of Religious 
 Equality had made steady progress ; and if, like that of Eman- 
 cipation, it had been elevated to its proper place, it too must 
 have triumphed. Liberal statesmen, recluse thinkers, grave 
 divines, had asserted with ever increasing energy, that peace 
 under the Church Settlement of Ireland was a chimera ; that it 
 was a thing against reason and against nature ; nay, that they 
 would despise the Irish if they could rest contented under a 
 yoke which Englishmen would not endure for a day, and 
 against which Scotchmen had wielded the claymore.* Then, as 
 now, there was the superficial retort — “ the most agitated classes 
 in Ireland think more of other matters than of the Church Ques- 
 tion.” But the answer was also made — “ A people feel when 
 
 * The most important of their statements were published some time since by 
 me in a Pamphlet, the Preface of which alone is my own. “ The Church 
 Establishment in Ireland, illustrated exclusively by Protestant authorities.” 
 
 —(Warren, Dublin.) 
 
 B 
 
2 
 
 they are amiss, but do not always know where the true remedy 
 lies.” It might have been added, “ They are not bound to 
 know it. Feeling is not done by proxy ; but it is for the Legis- 
 lature, and the classes that have leisure, to think for the nation. 
 If they force it to do its own thinking, their proper office is 
 gone ; and the thinking may be done but indifferently. It is for 
 them to interpret the cry that comes from a nation’s heart, and 
 rightly to apply those moral principles which are often more 
 profoundly appreciated by the conscience of a nation than by 
 the schools.” 
 
 Again we hear of Ireland’s Church Question. In England 
 not a few have proclaimed that Ireland is entitled to Religious 
 Equality. Upon that matter Irish Catholics are agreed ; and 
 the question for them to consider is, whether Religious Equality 
 should be reached by the secularization of the Church property, or 
 by its fair distribution between the Catholics and Protestants. 
 The alternative is all important. It is when things wear a good 
 promise that prudence is most needful ; and the ship that has 
 braved all the terrors of the voyage sometimes strikes a rock at 
 the harbour’s mouth. I cannot doubt that some at least among 
 those who prefer secularization, perhaps as the plan more imme- 
 diately practicable, have flung themselves on it without a due 
 consideration of all that is at stake. What Ireland needs on this 
 great subject now approaching its solution is a clear insight, a 
 calm temper, and a resolute prudence. Prudence is a virtue 
 seldom exercised, even when possessed, except by those who can 
 count on results. We are thus brought, before discussing the 
 point at issue, to the question, “ Is a result to be looked for? 
 Are not even the friends of Religious Equality often deluded by 
 the cavils of its enemies ? Can we rely on such friends ? Is it 
 not better to trust some chance alliance, and crisis of parties ?” 
 Before proceeding to the main question, I will endeavour to 
 reply to such misgivings by indicating the weakness of some 
 of the cavils referred to. 
 
 What then is the objection we hear most of just now? 
 It is the old retort in a new dress. Men say — “ The Fenians 
 do not demand Religious Equality.” Is it then for the 
 Fenians to determine our legislation? England will not 
 long believe this. The Fenians are our Americo-Irish So- 
 cialists — one section of a conspiracy which works its unholy 
 catacombs beneath the civilization of the world. In every 
 nation every wrong will add to their numbers, stimulate their 
 energies, and arm them with instruments; but in none have 
 they yet been ostensibly called into the seat of counsel, or 
 invested even with a negative voice. The Fenians professedly 
 
3 
 
 aim at Revolution : — why then should they seek Reform, and 
 thus remove the abuse that supplies a fulcrum to their lever ? 
 Were this allegation more than specious it would prove that 
 Ireland is in a perfect state ; for it is not with any detail of 
 British Government that the Fenians quarrel : — the existence of 
 that Government is with them the unforgivable sin. What 
 can the objection mean? Fenianism comes to us from Ame- 
 rica. It is simply Irish discontent recast in the mould of a 
 nation that has not, like Ireland, inherited for twenty centuries 
 monarchical or aristocratic traditions, but makes its boast of 
 — what alone seems left to a new nation — Democracy. How 
 could this foreign intervention occupy itself with constitutional 
 reforms ? But, it will be said, there is the Irish as well as the 
 American Fenianism — the Fenianism that responds, but does 
 not initiate. Doubtless there is ; but in what relation does it 
 stand to Ireland ? The nation is agitated by a permanent dis- 
 content, produced by a whole system of social relations sophis- 
 ticated or false, of which an ecclesiastical anomaly is at once the 
 type, the original cause, and the sustaining principle. Fe- 
 nianism is a resultant from that general social disorganization, 
 but does not on that account stand in direct connection with 
 that anomaly which yet is its ultimate cause. The relations 
 of these two extreme terms are indirect, though certain, and they 
 are separated by many removes. Let us trace the connection. The 
 ecclesiastical anomaly sets classes at variance: — variance pro- 
 duces insecurity : insecurity paralyses industry : — the absence 
 of productive industry perpetuates poverty : — and out of that 
 poverty, which intensifies the discontent that gave it birth, 
 rises a bewildered, weltering sea of disturbance, over which 
 Fenianism races at this moment. Fenianism of course does not 
 give us the complete measure of that of which it is but a chance 
 growth. Who could take it for such? Is Ireland the only 
 country in which some evil, deep-seated and but too real, has 
 produced an eruption of superficial follies ? If French Jacobins 
 talked nonsense instead of' proposing solid reforms, is that a 
 proof that in France, before the first Revolution, there were 
 no abuses to be corrected ? When Mazzinianism was the chief 
 form of protest against such misgovernment as prevailed in 
 Naples, did it follow that there were no real wrongs, the re- 
 dress of which would have been the interpretation of the blind 
 want, and the cure of the wild desire ? In England, before the 
 Reform Bill of 1832, burning ricks had become a mistaken 
 exponent of a discontent that was no mistake ; — and the Anti- 
 Reformers probably reversed the lesson which they would not 
 learn. Let us not judge by appearance, but judge righteous 
 
4 
 
 judgment. Fenianism is but a symptom ; and symptoms of the 
 most opposite sort represent, or misrepresent, the same malady. 
 We must not mistake for the ground-swell the foam that crests 
 the wave. Foam and froth fly whatever way the wind blows : 
 the tide that lifts the wave more often moves in an opposite 
 direction. 
 
 From Fenianism, indeed, there are lessons to be learned; 
 but not by those who make oracles of its follies. One of these 
 we may glean from a hint thrown out by Mr. Alexander Knox, 
 who wrote to Lord Castlereagh just after the Rebellion of 
 1798. The insurgents of that time, like the Fenians of our 
 day, had not been the party to make reasonable demands, though 
 such had been made abundantly by others; but men of sagacity 
 did not, therefore, conclude that no abuses existed. Mr. Knox 
 knew that the triumph over rebellion is not the end, but the 
 beginning of a great task, and he aimed at the real pacification 
 of Ireland. Referring to some wrongs which the Presbyterians of 
 Ulster had suffered in the eighteenth century, he wrote : “ Their 
 situation in Ireland, no doubt, encouraged emigration to Ame- 
 rica. Certain it is that they carried thither much of that spirit 
 which excited and supported the Revolution there, and which, 
 of course, has no little contributed to the events which have 
 revolutionized so much of the continent of Europe'' If a handful 
 of fugitives proved so dangerous, what is to be expected from a 
 fugitive nation ? 
 
 Let us glance at another lesson that may be learned from 
 Fenianism. Twice an outbreak, either intended or simulated, 
 has been driven back — or driven in ; — and with which side lies the 
 success so far? Fenianism chooses its time, and visits Ireland 
 when it pleases ; and if it should but keep her in that insecurity 
 which means poverty and turbulence, it will thus most effectually 
 win the battle which it never fought. To say that the disloyal in Ire- 
 land are the few, is to say nothing. The real question is a different 
 one. What of the many who are not disloyal? Are they loyal — and 
 in what sense of the word ? They are scattered and without 
 organization : — are they proof against intimidation ? How many 
 are those who desire to have no quarrel, whether with the 
 Government or the enemies of the Government ? What of the 
 “Broad School” in Irish Politics? These Latitudinarians are 
 very dangerous in the political sphere, where principles, and the 
 absence of principles, alike are brought to a practical issue. It 
 is a bad war when the victor has to exclaim with the King of 
 Epirus, “ A few more such victories and I am a ruined man,” 
 and a bad peace when neither content nor prosperity remains as 
 its fruit. This new danger from foreign sympathisers is not 
 
5 
 
 peculiar to England : it is what the Pope — a great reforming 
 Pope while he was free from it — has had to deal with. Fenianism 
 can keep the Empire ill at ease, and that at a very moderate 
 cost to itself, as long as it pleases ; and we cannot depend upon 
 our being always without other foes. This is not a lesson likely 
 to be lost upon England. 
 
 Another objection is sometimes made. Let us consider it. 
 The demand for Religious Equality offends the political 
 Quietists. But in modern politics the Lotos Isle is dangerously 
 near the Volcanic Isle. Let its children ask themselves 
 whether they would not have been equally troubled fifteen 
 years ago if a resolute but constitutional demand for complete 
 Religious Equality had been made in Ireland, and whether they 
 would not now give much that the demand had been made by 
 all Ireland, and the question settled. The demand does not 
 mean war, it means peace. In our days there are two con- 
 ditions that preclude peace. It cannot exist so long as a nation 
 demands the impossible, or so long as it fails to demand and to win 
 its rights. In the days of the 44 Monster Meetings ” how often 
 men said, 44 Could Ireland but rest for five years from agitation, 
 what progress would she not make !” For three times that 
 number of years there has been comparatively little of organized 
 agitation — less than that which caused the triumph of Free 
 Trade in England — but the stopping of the sore has apparently 
 but envenomed the blood. Once more, how many said, “The 
 idle must always be dangerous, and Ireland has 2,000,000 of 
 inhabitants idle from necessity.”* The population has dimi- 
 nished, not by two millions, but by more than three : but the 
 discontent of the poor, and the alarm of the rich, has increased. 
 The remedy lies otherwhere. In Swift’s time a population of 
 but 1,500,000 was in rags. Stagnation under wrong may be 
 called peace ; but it means only that a burning heart is left to 
 brood in silence over its sorrow till a witless brain has conceived 
 that 44 Portent- Birth” — the fell purpose of revenge. Matters 
 must not be left in this state. In Ireland it is known that of 
 the political question a religious question is the soul. It is 
 
 * We need not here discuss the question whether this statement was a correct 
 one, or whether it was an exaggeration based upon two assumptions, the first 
 that Ireland was not to have manufactures, the second that, while manufactures 
 were establishing. themselves, an unusually large rural population could not have 
 been employed upon bringing up the arrears of Irish agriculture, and producing 
 that state of things which dispenses with a large expenditure of manual labour 
 in England and Scotland. Except upon those two assumptions, emigration might, 
 in Ireland, as in all other countries, have remained within the limits of what 
 can reasonably be called voluntary, and it need not have been an emigration 
 of the discontented. 
 
6 
 
 not wonderful, therefore, if the grave and responsible have 
 resolved to seek a remedy for wrong, as Englishmen do, i.e., 
 by means at once determined and constitutional, including 
 neither violence nor the threat of violence. This resolve is 
 full of loyalty at once to the Sovereign and the country. 
 To demand what is reasonable, and to demand no more, 
 is to do a statesman the greatest of services — it gives 
 him the opportunity of settling dangerous questions on 
 honorable terms. 
 
 The objectors are ignorant that those whom they fancy to be 
 enemies of peace demand their country’s rights, not from con- 
 tentiousness, but by a moral compulsion. They can see this 
 in the case of remote countries, and why not in their own ? 
 Our rights are the rights of others ; and to abandon them, 
 though by no means necessarily a loss to self (for to contract 
 for a separate peace may be profitable, as well as grateful to 
 sloth), is perfidy to those whose representatives we are. It is 
 treachery also to the objectors themselves, and beguiles them 
 into perpetuating an injustice against which their conscience 
 might otherwise have revolted, and which sooner or later they 
 will have to expiate. But, above all, by such illicit consent, we 
 enter into complicity with that of which the material evil is but 
 the smallest part. If inj ustice only pauperised a nation it might be 
 forgiven ; but the great argument in favour of Bight is — that 
 Wrong demoralizes it, especially when constitutional rights have 
 been in part conferred, and when corresponding duties in part 
 exist. Men seem passive under unequal laws : but are they at 
 rest? No! Do they condone the past? No! Do they 
 make the engagements or contract the habits that pre- suppose a 
 peaceful future? No! Do they recognise their position as 
 citizens dwelling within the fold of the Constitution ? They 
 never professed anything of the sort, nor thought that it was 
 seriously expected from them. They regard themselves as a 
 native tribe, encamped outside the settlement of the military 
 colonists, now trafficking with them on friendly terms, and now 
 carrying on the old feud. A less picturesque condition is needed 
 for several of the moral virtues, especially for industry, frank- 
 ness, and the forgiveness of injuries ; though none is better 
 fitted to sustain the barbaric. Injustice w^ages war against the 
 soul of a nation, not only by stimulating vices (which it has 
 afterwards to punish), but also by giving a misdirection to its 
 virtues ; — it is for this cause that the wrath it kindles burns in 
 the heart of the grave and religious with a solid heat. It is no 
 wonder if those who are responsible for the national morals have 
 grappled with the wrong. 
 
On the whole we may safely believe that statesmen who with 
 any considerable clearness recognise the justice of conceding to 
 Ireland Religious Equality, will not be shaken by such objec- 
 tions, or such misgivings, as we have been discussing. Another 
 objection, indeed, is sometimes made — the opposite of the one 
 last considered. It is this. “ The wrong is plain enough and 
 deep enough, as Englishmen see and feel such things ; but Ire- 
 land seems to have a different scale of justice or point of honour, 
 and has often seemed less hurt at her religion being degraded 
 than the Protestant minority would be if theirs were reduced to 
 merely equal rights.” To this objection a sufficient answer will 
 doubtless ere long be given by Ireland. But, apart from all 
 such objections, it will be said, a before we decide on our 
 method of action, we should understand the motives of those we 
 shall have to address.” To know men’s opinions is nothing unless 
 we know out of what they spring. Is the present improved 
 condition of the public mind, relatively to the Church Question, 
 connected with a merely transient state of things. — Has it a 
 root in itself? Will it last ? 
 
 I answer — yes ; for it is in harmony at once with justice 
 and expediency — yes ; because it results not from theory, but 
 from the teaching of time. The changes made by the whole 
 course of modern history have altered the nature of the problems 
 that remain to be solved. A progress has also taken place in 
 the mind of man — not only as regards political matters, 
 but others above or outside the sphere of politics — which 
 renders it impossible that the Ascendency should last ; and, 
 therefore, the real question is not what may be the most 
 ‘ ‘ thorough” mode of overthrowing it, but what is the wisest 
 mode of replacing it. The improved condition of the public 
 mind may be. connected with mixed motives, as is common in 
 politics ; but we need build on the nobler only. To this sub- 
 ject we will now turn our attention ; and having thus noted 
 the intellectual conditions of the time, and glanced at some 
 moral considerations connected with the point at issue — we 
 shall be better qualified, passing from this preliminary matter, 
 to discuss, in the last three chapters, the momentous question — 
 whether, judged according to the interests of Ireland, her 
 Church property should be secularized, or redeemed from abuse 
 and rightly distributed. 
 
 1. We must not do injustice to those from whom we differ. 
 The virtues by a full appreciation of which we shall gain most 
 are those of our opponents ; and the faults which we can criticise 
 with the best advantage are our own. The Church Settlement 
 
8 
 
 of Ireland has long sat heavy upon the conscience of England ; 
 and it has been sustained in part for the same reason that un- 
 just laws have often been sustained in Catholic countries, viz., 
 because it is difficult to get rid of what has existed long. Till 
 the moment comes for suppressing an evil, even those who dis- 
 like it do not allow themselves to see it wholly as it is. The 
 few see it full-faced. The many stand obliquely to it — wishing 
 that they had not to deal with the matter — and see “ the utmost 
 part thereof .” At last events give them leave to see. W e can- 
 not then but observe that in many lands those colossal wrongs 
 have been cancelled which made wrong on a smaller scale 
 seem respectable. In .Russia serfdom is abolished, and in America 
 slavery. Throughout half Europe violent revolutions have 
 taken place of which equal rights were either the sanction or 
 the pretext, and England has sympathised with them : yet 
 before these changes Lord Macaulay, and men like him, had de- 
 clared that the existing Ascendency in Ireland was a wrong and 
 an absurdity without precedent in Europe, Asia, America, or 
 any known part of Africa. It may be answered that Lord 
 Macaulay was an orator. Take then the words of a sagacious 
 man who withheld himself from party strifes. “ That Church 
 (the Irish Establishment) and its history present a melancholy 
 subject of contemplation. Founded in proscription and violence, 
 it has not only imperfectly fulfilled the duties and accomplished 
 the objects of a Christian Church, but it has been, from first to 
 last, the source of an incalculable amount of moral and political 
 evil : utterly failing to draw within its fold the great body 
 of the Christian flock, it has itself been made an object of 
 spoliation, and the instrument of an insulting domination.” * 
 And again — “ To the internal state of that country (Ireland) 
 no parallel can be found ; nor was there ever any other, in which 
 for 500 years no interval of peace occurred, except, perhaps, in 
 Spain, from the invasion of the Arabs to the conquest of 
 Granada.”! “ A cloud of witnesses” have testified against the 
 scandal, and the moral sense of England cannot in any case 
 long remain proof against the appeal. It is brought home 
 to her by facts. England is always more accessible to the 
 teaching of facts than to refined reasoning. Much dialectic 
 skill has been used to vindicate a plain violation of the moral 
 law : — but the facts of Ireland confute it with the Prophet’s 
 demand — “ What meaneth then this bleating of sheep in mine 
 ears ?” 
 
 2. The common sense of England speaks even more plainly 
 
 * Past and Present Policy , d’c. p. 335. t Ibid. p. 352. 
 
9 
 
 than her moral sense. Had the Irish question been settled in 
 Mr. Pitt’s time, what should we be doing now ? Pay- 
 ing off our debts, as America is paying off hers. People have 
 lived under such absurd misconceptions about both Pitt and 
 Burke — worshipping the legendary Divinities they had set up 
 under those august names, and traducing the men themselves — 
 that the imposture has with some become an inveterate delusion. 
 Thus they appeal to Mr. Pitt’s “ Act of Union” as though it 
 guaranteed the endowments of the Irish Establishment. It did 
 nothing of the sort. It guaranteed the number of the Bishops — 
 and that guarantee has not been adhered to — but it did not 
 guarantee the temporalities. Mr. Pitt expressly refused to do 
 this. He regarded the future settlement of the Church Question 
 as essential to the Act of Union ; and he, therefore, left himself 
 perfectly free. This was pointed out in 1835 by the highest of 
 all authorities on such a subject, Lord Chancellor Plunkett, a 
 zealous defender of the Irish Establishment, but an approver 
 not less of the “ Appropriation Clause.” “ By the Act of 
 Union the Churches of England and Ireland were consolidated. 
 By the fifth article of that Act they were identified in doctrine, 
 worship, and discipline ; but was there anything in that article 
 which identified the temporal possessions of the Church of 
 Ireland with those of the Church of England? There was 
 nothing of the kind. The Irish temporalities were altogether 
 distinct from those of the Church of England. If they were 
 not so, they had been violating the articles of Union ever since 
 they were passed.” The statements of Lord Holland, Sir H. 
 Ward, Earl Grey, Earl Bussell, and Lord Macaulay, have long 
 since cleared up the mystification, not only about the eccle- 
 siastical relations involved in the Union (which were already dis- 
 posed of by the fact that England and Scotland, though united, 
 have not the same Church Settlement) but also about the fabulous 
 Guarantee.* Where, then, should we have been now, if a real settle- 
 ment had been made in 1800? The prosperity of Ireland must have 
 bounded forward with an elasticity proportioned to the artificial 
 restraints by which it had been kept back. Capital would have 
 been fearlessly invested : wastes would have been reclaimed : the 
 water, not the population, would have been drained from the 
 morass : new sources of industry would have been opened out 
 by which the land would have been relieved while the value of 
 its produce would have been doubled. In wealth, Ireland, with 
 its fertile soil, abundant water-power, countless harbours, and 
 cheap labour, must have become a second England. Hate 
 
 * The Church Establishment in Ireland, &-c.— pp. 24, 30, 34, 52, 58, G8. 
 
10 
 
 would not, year after year, have sown the giant’s teeth ; and 
 blind struggles would not have responded to wrong or to neglect. 
 The interminable stream of beggars would not have passed by 
 the “ ungiving door,” and frozen the charity even of the most 
 humane, as they gazed upon a misery too vast to be relieved. 
 Outrages and secret societies — then, as now, appealed to as a 
 proof that the discontented had no real grievance since they sought 
 an unwise remedy — would not have followed each other in spite 
 of the thunders of the Church, until the great Bishop Doyle, 
 addressing the crowd from the summit of a hill, with the mitre 
 on his head and the crozier in his hand, uttered that last appeal 
 - — 46 My people, you have broken your Bishop’s heart !” The 
 declamations of the Orange Lodge would have ceased to excite ; 
 the election riot would not so often have been quelled by the 
 fire of musketry ; freeholders afflicted with the franchise would 
 not have had to choose between their country and their land- 
 lord ; and parents invited to send their children to a proselytis- 
 ing school, would not have had to weigh the faith of those 
 children against their bread. How many a misconception 
 would have been removed ! How often would the man de- 
 nounced as a tyrant have known how to carry out his benefi- 
 cent intentions wisely, and been blest as a protector? How 
 many a hill-side, now barren, would have waved with the 
 golden harvest : how many a cottage, now roofless, would have 
 been radiant with children ? Ireland’s social state would not 
 then have been a chronicle of recurrent famines, chronic discon- 
 tent, and an intermittent Habeas Corpus Act. The tithe- war 
 would not then have dragged its ensanguined track along fields 
 besprinkled with a niggard and morose crop, but populous 
 with hovels and ruins ; nor would those heroic soldiers who 
 conquered on earth’s remotest shores have complained that they 
 had returned to storm the pauper’s potato patch, and capture 
 the widow’s pig. The antagonism of races would have died 
 away like that of religions : the wars about education and the 
 land-tenure would never have been serious things : the opposite 
 qualities and capabilities of England and Ireland would have 
 proved but supplemental to each other ; and between the two 
 countries no more animosity would have existed than between 
 the Protestant part of Prussia and the Catholic Bhine-land. 
 The misrule which prevented all this — the bigotry that took Ire~ 
 land out of Mr. Pitt’s hands — the prejudice, mistaken for piety, 
 which refused Emancipation — the slow, painful reform which 
 would submit to no amputation of abuses, except at an inch 
 each time, — the weakness, more fatal than cruelty, which fevered 
 a nation by half concessions, or fretted it by half constraints, 
 
11 
 
 the good intentions, and irresolute action, and policy without a 
 principle — all these have been dearly expiated. Considered only 
 financially, it would be too little to say that the error has been, 
 and is, paid for by an annual fine of many millions, not counting 
 the military establishments of Ireland. To see these things is 
 but to see in detail that industry comes from peace, and peace 
 from justice. The men whose eyes are open recognise this truth, 
 and no longer resemble the half-blind, who see “ men like trees 
 walking.” A truth, however great and luminous, tarries beneath 
 the horizon for many a weary watch ; but when it rises, though 
 the splendour may wound weak eyes, no necromancy can remand 
 it to the shades. 
 
 3. Were it possible for England to forget what it has learned 
 from failures, it would be reminded of the lesson by its 
 triumphs. That lesson is taught not only by prosperous 
 colonies, but by dependencies barbarous no more. It is but 
 seventeen years since we have possessed the Punjaub, and 
 already those who look on its roads, railways, and canals, would 
 suppose it had belonged to civilization for a century. Military 
 hordes have changed into an industrious peasantry — ships push 
 their way up rivers newly made navigable, and on the banks of 
 which are found the mart and the school. Nor is this alk 
 Though formidable no more, we have not allowed it to lose its 
 military population. This fiercest of our foes had been but eight 
 years subjected, when, under the just and wise administration of 
 Sir J. Lawrence, it saved our Indian Empire. Compare this 
 triumph of English wisdom and justice, not clogged by English 
 prejudices, with the hopeless stalemate of the Eastern Despotisms! 
 Turkey stands to her Greek subjects as she stood when the last em- 
 peror fell, and the sons of the prophet pulled down the great cross 
 of St. Sophia. She may for the twentieth time put down the 
 revolt of an island : she may, as often as she pleases, beat the 
 ploughshare into the sword : — but the husbandry of the sword is 
 barren. The Punjaub is separated from England by half a 
 world : the Greek race has been in the clutch of Turkey for 
 four centuries ; yet they remain separated as though by infinite 
 space. Thus fares it with nations when the policy that first 
 rose out of the ardours of religious hate has petrified into a tra- 
 dition. A commercial company that could do no better than 
 this would be bankrupt in six months. These things are under- 
 stood at last: — therefore, it is worthwhile for Ireland to act 
 with prudence. 
 
 4. Time has destroyed the instrumentality by which, as well 
 as the purpose for which the Ascendency was created. That 
 instrumentality was a proprietor- class, which used to be called 
 
12 
 
 the English garrison in Ireland. But the juster laws of later 
 times have ? in many cases with the consent of that garrison, 
 disarmed that garrison. It lives a higher life ; and so far as the 
 old life remains, it is now but a “ posthumous life.” The gen- 
 tlemen of Ireland, who are inferior to none in spirit, ability, or 
 kindly affections, could not again be made to believe that they 
 had an interest in the degradation of their country. To their 
 order belonged Grattan and Charlemont. From their ranks 
 came many who joined in the great battle for Catholic Emanci- 
 pation. It was proved long since that no tyrannical legislation 
 could be relied on for keeping the Protestant sons of Ireland 
 banded against the Catholic. In the worst times, wherever 
 genius or patriotism existed, they revolted against the wrong. 
 Wherever there was a generous heart it felt that “ from the 
 poor all things come and depraved laws often remained 
 futile because the brave man refused to execute them. The 
 peasantry that kept the birth-day feast of the young heir, and 
 brought home the bride, had claims that fanaticism might spurn, 
 but which the kindly and the true respected. Our difficulties 
 are but those of an intermediate position : we must go forward 
 or go back ; and there is no class in Ireland which would prefer 
 the rule of force to that of justice. Nor would any govern- 
 ment now think of ruling Ireland by corruption. Patronage, 
 moreover, is no longer confined to class or sect ; and indirect 
 agencies are restricted to a narrow scope. 
 
 5. Time has shewn that Religious Inequality is not available to 
 keep down the religion it was intended to depress. The needful 
 organization of the Irish Catholic Church has made more pro- 
 gress, despite a reduced population, and sufferings witnessed in 
 but one European land, than it did before the famine. Thus 
 in the Arch-diocese of Dublin, since the year 1852, the paro- 
 chial clergy have increased from 160 to 210; and an Eccle- 
 siastical Seminary has been created, besides numberless other 
 institutions, religious, charitable, reformatory, and educational. 
 A similar progress has been made in other dioceses — certainly 
 in those of Limerick and Kerry, with which I am best acquainted. 
 In the latter £60,000 has been spent on the building of churches 
 within the last ten years. All over the country, cathedrals and 
 churches worthy of the name are rising up ; — that of Armagh 
 has been erected at the cost of £60,000. Such an advance is a 
 cause for gratitude to Almighty God, and a pledge of suc- 
 cess to conscientious efforts. Men who thus succeed never 
 want for allies. There was a time when statesmen would have 
 looked with jealousy on those signs of improvement. The more 
 thoughtful, as well as the more generous would now probably 
 
13 
 
 be above such a weakness. They have learned that among 
 Catholics the true Catholic is likely to be the true man, and are 
 daily less the prey of such Catholics as once asseverated that it 
 was ungrateful, after the favours already bestowed, to seek emanci- 
 pation — perhaps that the lack of it had no connection with Irish 
 discontent. The religious progress referred to, has, indeed, ren- 
 dered this class more rare than in those old days. The Penal 
 Laws were then recent ; and the iron had entered into their 
 souls. The same persons would now probably respect their own 
 dignity, and in doing so they could hardly forget that respect 
 for others — their rights, and their true interests — is ever the 
 correlative of a genuine self-respect. 
 
 6. Time has proved the absurdity of the allegation that full 
 justice would fall to make Catholics loyal. Canada was a 
 Catholic and a conquered country; but its Church was respected; 
 and the Catholics have been the most loyal part of the popula- 
 tion. How is this to be accounted for? Will anyone say that 
 they have had a “ watered-down Catholicism,” and a secularized 
 Education? On the contrary, their Education is eminently 
 religious, and among them a Catholic University has lately been 
 established and endowed. Will it be said that though Catholic 
 they were anti-Papal, and hated Roman influences? The 
 contrary would seem to have been the case at the turning 
 point of Canadian history, and the cause of loyalty benefited 
 by the circumstance. “ When the Rebellion broke out in 
 Canada, we requested the Pope to exert his authority with 
 the Roman Catholic Priests to induce them to assist us in 
 quelling the insurrection ; and his Holiness addressed a Pastoral 
 Letter to them for that purpose, which was attended by the 
 best effects.”* Such a fact as this will outlive many 
 declamations. 
 
 7. An order of things new and unknown lies before Europe, 
 and England is not going either to renounce the world and live 
 in dowager dignity, or to run in the race of nations with the 
 trammels of past errors hanging loose about her feet. Those 
 who regret that the old oppression flourishes no longer as a whole, 
 must yet perceive that — the mast having been blown over — the 
 ship will not right itself till the wreck is cut away. England 
 is strong in prejudices, as in much beside, for a tenacious nature 
 finds it difficult to vary its point of view : but she is less 
 attached to them than to her interests and her good name; 
 and she does not wish to be taunted for ever by foreigners, 
 whether rightly or wrongly, with having either a Poland or a 
 
 Past and Present Policy of England to Ireland. — (p. 326.) 
 
14 
 
 Lombardy on her hands. Permanent discontent is regarded 
 in but one way all over the world, the Government affected 
 by it dissenting alone from the conclusion ; and the mal- 
 content country is a “damnosa hereditas” to the empire in 
 which it is included. To that empire the country that cannot 
 be dispensed with, and that cannot dispense with its unloved 
 mate, must ever be, so far as political power is concerned, the 
 addition of a minus quantity. The present state of things 
 cannot last long in Ireland — except through some blunder of 
 her own. 
 
 8. The events of later times have proved too strong a solvent 
 not only for the passions, but for the theories, that once sanc- 
 tioned persecution. When the Irish Church was pro- 
 scribed, and its property alienated, the British crown 
 was not extending toleration to Brahmins and Bud- 
 dhists, much less protecting their endowments. To use 
 the language now which was used of old would be hypocrisy, 
 not mistaken piety. Neither is there now the temptation to 
 identify loyalty with the old Anglican theory of the Royal 
 Supremacy. The law now acknowledges and endows, in Eng- 
 land and Scotland, two Churches, at variance with each other 
 both as to Doctrine and Discipline, one of which does not 
 confess the Royal Supremacy. Even in the Church of England 
 the Sovereign is not now regarded as a mystical person, the 
 representative of the Hebrew monarchy. This theory received 
 its death-wound from the Revolution. The change has been 
 gradual but complete. Ecclesiastical powers, once exercised by 
 the King, fell by degrees into the hands of the minister ; an- 
 other change made that minister mainly the elect of the House 
 of Commons ; another made that House cease to be a church -of- 
 England assembly; and another has thrown it open to Jews. 
 Thus it is that Time affects Thought : thus a moral problem 
 becomes insensibly metamorphosed, like the clay model which 
 sometimes shrinks, the change being unobserved only by the 
 sculptor whose eye is ever on it. Bramhall and Taylor may in 
 their day have consistently imagined that the Irish were dis- 
 loyal because they refused to acknowledge in spirituals that 
 Sovereign for whom in temporals they drew the last sword. But 
 how different would have been the feelings of those high-souled 
 men, if they had lived under present circumstances ! They 
 must have either changed their opinions and religious position 
 relatively to Ireland, or else have changed their fundamental 
 principles. Had they continued to disbelieve in the Organic 
 Unity of the Christian Church (although sincerely believing in its 
 Apostolic character and claims), they must yet have longed for the 
 
15 
 
 protecting shield of some Patriarch or permanent council ; they 
 must yet have valued any bond of union with Christendom at 
 large, which would have prevented the national tie from meaning 
 but the subjection of the spiritual to the civil power. They would 
 not have branded as disloyalty the allegiance which gave to 
 Ireland that spiritual independence which they must have in- 
 sisted upon sharing, though, perhaps, in some modified form, as 
 essential to Gospel liberty, and the witness of the Church. 
 The theological war might have continued ; but they would 
 have conducted it like scholars and churchmen ; and their 
 sympathies would not have been more with sectaries than 
 with what they deemed a branch of Christ’s Church. Such 
 considerations are not foreign to the subject. In Ireland these 
 eminent men left no school to represent them, and their sojourn 
 there, barren as it proved of result, affords thus the most con- 
 clusive proof that in that country the Ascendency can never mean 
 more than the reproduction and establishment of Puritanism ; but 
 in England they have successors whose numbers daily increase, 
 and who, in proportion as the mist clears, will be drawn more and 
 more, alike by religious sympathies, by manly thought, and by 
 ecclesiastical interests, to respect the spiritual rights of Ireland. 
 But will they respect these if informed that the Irish, who, 
 under the shadow of old ruins, so long suffered persecution for 
 the ancient Faith, have, on a matter so penetrated by religious 
 associations, swung round to a modern philosophy ? W ill they 
 not say — “ We were beginning to think that your old opponents 
 might have been the innovators you called them ; but what 
 change in the relations of Church and State can be greater than 
 your own change ? The true Hebrew mother preferred that 
 her child should be lost to her than that he should be slain ; — 
 you, if you can only snatch the Church property of Ireland 
 from a rival’s hand, care not that it perishes by your own. In 
 this case to divide would be to preserve ; but you insist on de- 
 stroying.” 
 
 9. The settlement needed is one the more likely to be made, 
 because it would but follow the precedent of England. The 
 English and Irish Establishments have of course a nominal 
 resemblance, and have also technical points of difference ; but 
 essentially and practically they are not diverse but opposite in 
 character. The Irish Establishment is the most un-Irish thing 
 in Ireland. In one sense the Church of England, indeed, might 
 also be called an un-English thing ; for England is a straight- 
 forward country, and yet its Church formularies are — not 
 “ broad ’ ’ — but ambiguous. They were intended to include the chief 
 religious schools in England when they were drawn up. There 
 
16 
 
 existed at that time no Latitudinarian School ; the opposed 
 schools were all alike Dogmatic, and “ broad” formularies would 
 but have offended all. But there is another side to this matter. 
 Practically considered, the English Establishment is a thoroughly 
 English thing, because it is a compromise for practical purposes. 
 It is not necessary here to discuss any claims connected with 
 Supernatural Privileges or Powers, for we are regarding it simply 
 in a national capacity. If we were to take the statue apart from 
 its lofty pedestal — the nation on which it rests — a criticism as to 
 its character, expression, and material would be a theological 
 dissertation, and with theology we have here no concern. What 
 is that Institution when considered but in its relations with the 
 nation ? The one on which the others rest. It binds together 
 the different classes of society ; it gives to worship the sanction 
 of law ; it sustains the standard of a morality based on Reve- 
 lation ; it is zealous in educational matters, and tolerant to 
 Dissenters ; it asserts a dogmatic and diffuses a generalized 
 Christianity ; it has associated itself with many a page of 
 modern English history, falling when the monarchy fell, re- 
 stored with it, and sharing the fortunes of the country ; it has 
 ever attracted to itself much of the highest intellect, purest 
 virtue, and most thoughtful patriotism in England ; it has pro- 
 duced the best as well as the earliest products of English philo- 
 sophy and English eloquence ; it has taken a great part in Eng- 
 lish literature, sacred or secular, and has elevated the nation by 
 a corporate as well as individual confession that the nations do 
 not exist for this worl dalone ; — in short, it has represented, for 
 evil and for good, the total English mind, with all its main 
 schools of native or adopted thought ; and in this sense it will 
 continue to be a national Institute so long as its formularies 
 remain unchanged. 
 
 How different a thing has the Irish Establishment ever been ! 
 It is the most un-Irish thing in Ireland, and that in the 
 most practical sense. It is the great bar of separation, not only 
 between the two countries, but between the upper and lower 
 nation in Ireland. The Irish Church ! A Church consists of 
 clergy and laity ; — which of these two has represented Ireland ? 
 Few have fancied that the laity conformed at the Reformation ; 
 and it has been now finally proved by the accurate researches 
 of Dr. Moran, Dr. Maziere Brady, and Mr. Froude, that of 
 the Bishops ruling the Irish fold at Elizabeth’s accession, 
 only one can be shewn to have conformed, and that he was 
 an Englishman, whose orders, however authentic, were de- 
 rived from Dr. Bonner of London ! A reaping hook has been 
 said to retain its identity though it has changed first its 
 
IT 
 
 handle, and then its blade. The implement which still reaps 
 the Irish harvest, when it lost the former appendage, failed to 
 keep the latter. Lord Lytton called the “Irish Church” an 
 Irish Bull. It certainly is a misnomer. Men have learned this, 
 and will soon learn that what is an injury to Ireland is an 
 injury to Irish Protestants. “ Men in their places are the men 
 that stand.” To put a small minority in a position of Ascen- 
 dency is to develop all its worst qualities, and to suppress many 
 of its best. That Ascendency was a foreign importation ; and 
 it has lasted its time. It would be a folly on the part of 
 Catholics now to fear its strength : it would not be unworthy 
 of them to respect its weakness — though not in the sense of 
 condoning its usurpation. 
 
 If aught were needed to prove that that Ascendency approaches 
 its term it would be the form its defence has recently taken. 
 Should the arguments once used be reiterated, I shall perhaps 
 endeavour to reply to them ; but statesmen seem to have left 
 the case in the hands that undertake desperate cases — those of 
 the polemical lawyer and the political clergyman. What 
 is the plea of the former ? It is a string of wonderful 
 statements, made with wonderful confidence, and not, we must 
 hope, without a remembrance that the exuberances of an ad- 
 vocate, like an attorney’s bill of costs, are “taxed,” as a 
 matter of course. Mr. Whiteside’s defensio ecclesice last ses- 
 sion was claimed as a success, and may, therefore, become the 
 type of such defences in future. What, then, says the polemical 
 lawyer ? 
 
 He boldly denies that Ireland is a Roman * Catholic country. 
 He defends the Ascendency by affirming that the Protestants 
 are “ industrious, producing something ’’-—and ignores the laws 
 which kept the Catholics behind in the race of prosperity by 
 forbidding them industry, property, trades, professions, and 
 education. He asserts that Irish discontent has been produced 
 by the concessions of the Liberals, and that the Conservatives 
 alone can hold it in check. He accuses the Catholic body of 
 perfidy for demanding Religious Equality, on the ground that 
 fifty years ago several Catholics (they spoke doubtless sincerely) 
 said that if their demand for Emancipation were conceded then 
 — which it was not — they would ask for no more. He affirms 
 that “ the abbey lands were the only distinct portions of pro- 
 perty which belonged to the Roman Catholic Church at all 
 that the creed of the ancient Irish Church was that of the pre- 
 sent Establishment; and that Bishop Doyle is reported to 
 have died a Protestant ! He says that by the Act of Settlement, 
 in Charles the Second’s time, the property of Catholics was 
 
 * c 
 
18 
 
 secured to them ; and that the reason why the Fenians “ do not 
 take the property of the Church is because, as they say, the 
 Church is the only body in the kingdom that has dealt fairly 
 and equitably with tenants--” He demands, “ was there ever a 
 nobler or grander policy” than that of the Plantation of Ulster? 
 and vindicates the confiscation as well as depopulation of a pro- 
 vince, by asserting that Tyrone had written a letter to Charles 
 the Ninth of France — who had been dead for thirty -four years — 
 promising, if 5,000 Frenchmen landed, “ to cut the throats of 
 every man, woman, and child in Ireland !” Finally, he soars 
 into the regions of poetry and prophecy. He states that the 
 Spirits of the gentlemen who made the “Ulster Plantation” 
 are looking down from heaven on the scene of their earthly 
 labours, and would be vexed if the ecclesiastical fruits of them 
 were compromised. He says that 100,000 Protestant 
 emigrants are looking back from Canada on their native shores, 
 and that their feelings about the old Ascendency ought to be 
 respected. He affirms that if the Ascendant Establishment 
 falls, it will be “by the vote of a recreant Senate and an 
 apostate Nation.” It is for that Senate and that Nation to 
 decide whether it likes to have a prophet’s rod whisked about 
 their ears in this shillelagh-like fashion. 
 
 Such a speech teaches several useful lessons. Many excellent 
 persons say — “ If Ireland is to have a Future she must forget 
 her sad Past.” It brings home to all such that the existing 
 Protestant Ascendency is itself the Past still present, dominant 
 and militant. For the Tories it has a special significance. It 
 is virtually a vindication of the penal laws ; for it raises again 
 the cry of a “ foreign allegiance,” which either means nothing, 
 or means that Catholics, as the Pope is their Spiritual Head, 
 are traitors biding their time. When the penal laws were im- 
 posed, Tories, non-jurors, and Roman Catholics, were all alike 
 out of favour. There was a war of dynasties, and panic engen- 
 dered persecution. Those times happily have passed away, and 
 it is now nearly a century since the later Whigs repudiated 
 the principles that proscribed conscience. In Ulster those 
 principles have taken sanctuary. As the Irish beggars have 
 been said to inherit the cast-off rags of the English beggars, 
 so the Orange Tories of Ireland have pushed themselves into 
 the cast-off clothes of the Revolution Whigs. There exists in 
 England a great and highly respectable party, which sometimes 
 calls itself the “country party,” and boasts that it represents 
 the Cavaliers and Loyalists of old times who bled for the 
 altar and the throne. The leader of that party not long ago 
 assured the Catholics that they ought to consider themselves 
 
19 
 
 as its “ natural allies.” He will do that party a service if he 
 repudiates its unnatural allies. 
 
 Such a speech is the pecca fortiter of sectarian politics, and 
 carries an animation about it. Others deal in palliations. 
 These arguments of the cushion and bandbox order are so tire- 
 some that we should be grateful to one who brings us back 
 to the hardware of parliamentary polemics. He puts on the 
 whole armour of unrighteousness ; — but in the modern tourna- 
 ment the lance is sawn half-way through. He cuts capers in 
 tin apparel ; — but he has mistaken his century. His speech is a 
 confession that what he defends asks only a long day.* 
 
 It is not necessary to analyse the argument of the political 
 clergyman. The worst advocacy is sometimes, indeed, the best 
 — lying too completely outside the pale of logic to be refuted by 
 logic, and being of a substance too volatile to be weighed in the 
 ordinary scales of judgment and reason. Appeals of this sort 
 in former times often magnetized by their fervour those whom 
 they could not have affected through the understanding. There is 
 one argument of which I can never speak with disrespect — viz., 
 that the Truth is above all, no matter how few may hold it. 
 Of this argument it suffices to say that the Irish people, who for 
 centuries witnessed to their faith in suffering, deem it an argu- 
 ment at their side ; and that the statesman who endows many 
 forms of religion does not accept it as available for either side. 
 The rest of the plea includes every topic, from the texts about 
 Antichrist to the allegation that Ireland needs stipendiary 
 country gentlemen. It is the plea of heated men — often eloquent 
 men — who plead both for cherished prejudices and pro domo 
 sud , and who mistake the domination of a sect for the triumph 
 of religion. The answer of the statesman to such task-masters 
 will daily grow more civilly cold. Should it not be such, it 
 will, at a later day, be something like this: — “ Is it for you to 
 give counsel ? It was you, and your sort that brought us where 
 we stand. You never yet set yourself to any good work or 
 way, or desisted from any officious meddling, or found pastime 
 in aught that did not embroil nations, or permitted peace to 
 your own community or a chance to its creed. You began by 
 undertaking the impossible, and thought it a sin to see that you 
 had failed. Your glebes increased as your country’s disasters 
 favoured you. The Ulster plantation opened a Canaan to you ; 
 and Cromwell was among your nursing fathers. You added 
 field to field, and house to house, till the beam cried out of the 
 wall against you ; — but it was in vain. Of the people, as of the 
 
 * These remarks were originally published soon after the speech referred to 
 was delivered. 
 
20 
 
 harvest, you got but the tithe ; and of that human tithe nine- 
 tenths were an importation. The face of the nation is set against 
 you, and against us for your sake. W e ask what is to make the 
 empire one ; and you answer that your theology is that of St. 
 Patrick, and that your orders come from St. Lawrence O’Toole. 
 You began by decrying a Visible Church, and you end by 
 denouncing all that discover a bar sinister in your coat of arms. 
 You have kept the State long in leading strings ; but it was not 
 obsequious to you because it believed in the gules of your 
 celestial heraldry. You have had allies in men stronger than 
 yourselves and as blind, who persuaded us that because they 
 believed in nothing but industrialism, Ireland did not grudge to 
 see her Church in the dirt. Your joint reign is over. Are the 
 destinies of the empire in days like these to be shaped by a 
 generation of materialists ruled by a generation of mystics ? If 
 a French fleet were in Bantry Bay, and an American one in 
 Galway Harbour, your talk would be about the Prophet Daniel 
 and Ministers’ money, and your materialist allies would propose 
 to embank the Wash ! There must be an end of this. Ireland 
 was a fit plaything for you when it was small : it is now dilated 
 to the size of America. Poverty sent her children there ; and 
 your Ascendency-policy produced that poverty. It built a city, 
 and decreed that a whole people should dwell in the jungle out- 
 side. It maintained barbarism artificially as though it had been 
 an exotic. The Union was passed ; and the portent you made 
 stands in the centre of the empire. Open your eyes ! There is 
 a panther in the fold, and a lion in the hall !” 
 
 Let but statesmen act in time, and they will not need thus to 
 address even the noisiest camp-followers of the Ascendency. 
 If altered circumstances have delivered (as we have seen 
 that they have), the graver, the more learned, the more loyal- 
 hearted, and the more patriotic churchmen of the Establishment 
 from the chains of old maxims, much more are politicians set 
 free. Who now would contend for Protection to prove his con- 
 sistency ? Time has dispelled the illusion. Who in late years 
 would have urged that because England had forced upon Ame- 
 rica “ taxation without representation,” she was bound in 
 honour to oppress her later colonies, and lose them in turn ? 
 Facts and beliefs have changed, and a policy unchanged would no 
 longer mean what it once meant. No one called the Duke of 
 W ellington inconsistent because he accepted the Reform Bill as 
 a fact : — (happy would it have been if Emancipation had been 
 thus accepted !) and the most conservative of our statesmen 
 need not deem themselves bound to risk an empire for the sake 
 of a politico-religious unity, no longer enforced by Catholic 
 
21 
 
 Austria, France, or Belgium. As for liberal statesmen they 
 are pledged by every good measure they have helped to pass. 
 They are nailed to the cause of justice by a single syllogism. 
 Modern civilization is its major premiss ; the condition of Ire- 
 land is its minor ; and the conclusion follows by necessity. 
 
 Reasonably may we believe that such statesmen, if supported by 
 demands from Ireland, resolute, but rational, will not long 
 delay to carry into effect the principles they have often pro- 
 fessed. They sometimes say “if we try to set this matter straight, 
 all the fools and fanatics will combine against us.” Then the 
 wise men and good had better combine too. The real statesmen 
 of both the great parties should agree to pull together on this 
 one question, which is vital, and strike work if not allowed to 
 do what is needful. The task may prove easier than it seems ; 
 for dubious seasons yield golden opportunities ; and when the 
 time is come, and a great measure has to be passed, its opponents, 
 by a sort of instinct, shift their ground, and their opposition 
 melts into mist. That statesmen see what lies before them, even 
 their apologies indicate. When they say — “ There is a wrong ; 
 but it is trivial,” we cannot doubt that the political casuist is 
 as well aware as the religious that the doctrine of “ venial sins” 
 would be pressed to an immoral extreme if made to sanction 
 deliberate sins, even of omission. When they pleasantly remark 
 that if the Protestant clergy possess the National Church 
 Property, the clergy of the nation may boast, on the 
 other hand, the healthy independence of those old days, 
 “ when wild in woods the noble savage ran,” they cannot 
 suppose the question to be thus concluded. However fortunate 
 it may be that the bark of the State should ride at double 
 anchor while the breakers roar — however felicitous the State- 
 craft which thus originally combined the “useful” with the 
 exhilarating — it will naturally be asked whether, supposing this 
 dualism to last, the gain might not be enhanced if the rival 
 religious communities were occasionally to alternate the two 
 forms of advantage. Thus to speak is, of course, but to 
 “ put the question by” till some more opportune moment, 
 supposed to be near, has arrived. 
 
 Why need they hesitate? What is at issue? A' whole 
 people is excluded from its place in the Constitution. Who 
 closes its doors against them ? Visionaries who cannot see, 
 and pedants who mistake the dust of mouldering pews for 
 antiquity. They, too, talk of the Constitution; but their 
 Constitution was but a modern gloss on that which we associate 
 with Magna Charta and with Alfred. Let them be satisfied. 
 They cannot reanimate the skeleton. Injustice still sits at the 
 
22 
 
 feast of unreason ; but its royal robes have long been plucked 
 off; its very flesh has wasted away; and it sits there “in its 
 bones.” All that could be done to hold those bones together has 
 been done. Why plagiarise from the olc^ elegy ? Why weep 
 again Lord Eldon’s tears ? The Constitution which these 
 dreamers are ever brooding over died in 1829 — at the window 
 of the old Parliament House, on a July evening, the Orange 
 Banshee shrieked its last shriek. The Orange wake has been 
 dutifully kept up to the last drop of usquebaugh, and the last 
 pinch of snuff. But the old Constitution lives on, and, seated 
 within it, Reason and Religion resume their temperate reign. 
 
 A few words more and I have done. In dealing with this 
 Church Question, Ireland must remember that she has before 
 her two questions and two interests. One of these questions 
 relates to her political dignity and her social peace, and is the 
 nearer one : the other relates to the perfection of Religion, and 
 involves considerations more remote, but more sacred. There is 
 no need to sacrifice either of these to the other ; but to sacrifice 
 the spiritual to the temporal would be worse than an error. 
 We have to adjust the claims of the present and the future. 
 The Ascendency is an injury to Ireland, and an insult per- 
 petrated in no other land : — as for Ireland’s Church, deep as the 
 wrong is, it leaves her future uncompromised. We must 
 not compromise it. To her it matters little whether we 
 advance fast or slowly, provided we advance on the right 
 road. Politicians may be in a hurry ; but the Church sees 
 far, and does not share the temptation of those who play 
 “the short game,” because their time is short. The chief 
 triumphs of Religion have indeed been ever won by a conquer- 
 ing Endurance ; but she bestows her benediction upon Action 
 also, on condition that that action be prudent, and just, and 
 magnanimous. 
 
 The action of Ireland must be prudent. Her sons must 
 remember that though the exercise of that virtue involves great 
 self-sacrifice, the neglect of it is, and has ever been, nothing less 
 than the betrayal of Ireland. They must remember that Time 
 fights for their country, and that when Time is at our side the 
 wisest action alone is as fruitful as a “ masterly inaction.” They 
 must understand the needs of that country in their fulness, and 
 not exaggerate the importance of parts. They must appreciate 
 also the situation of those opposed to them — the errors that were 
 inherited — the ill-will that was misconception — the misconcep- 
 tion that rose inevitably, by the law of moral perspective, from 
 a false position. They have to deal with angry men whose 
 
23 
 
 weapons of war have lost their edge, and with good men whose 
 hostility is sometimes an erring form of loyalty. They must bind 
 no foe to his rash statements, and break down no bridge of retreat, 
 much less make concession impossible by saying, “ you can 
 satisfy us only by throwing over your old allies in Ireland, and 
 dooming to destruction your most valued Institutions in England.” 
 They must remember that in true politics no step recommended 
 by its adroitness chiefly is solidly wise ; and that the faults and 
 follies which seldomest escape punishment in this world, and 
 which undergo the severest expiation, are those of the men 
 who stand upon the right side. They must not assume that 
 the Irish Establishment can more easily be deprived of its whole 
 property than of a part ; — or forget that an alliance with one 
 political party may be but another name for the renewed or 
 intensified opposition of two. 
 
 Her action must be just. Hitherto we have regarded the 
 question exclusively with reference to Catholic interests ; but 
 Ireland has Protestant sons also, and he is at heart but sectarian 
 who imagines that in their interests their country has no part. 
 If among those who advocate “ the voluntary principle for all ” 
 there exist any who are flattered by the thought of that 
 retribution which it would inflict, I will ask them to reflect 
 whether this thought is worthy of a Catholic. However great 
 the wrong of the sixteenth century, none are now responsible 
 for it except those who will listen to no terms of reasonable 
 accord. Ireland demands justice and protection, not revenge. 
 There are wrongs too great for revenge. Such was the wrong 
 inflicted by the Tudor policy on Ireland ; and if it were otherwise 
 just to visit on the living the crimes of the dead, that crime 
 would leave place for one revenge only — the Christian revenge. 
 But we live in the nineteenth century. To leave men without 
 any religious endowments because they are not entitled to a 
 religious Ascendency would be to imitate the injustice we 
 denounce. They not only are in actual possession of endow- 
 ments, but have possessed them for several centuries, and in 
 many cases they, or their forefathers, doubtless bought their 
 property on the understanding that religious ministrations 
 should be continued to them. Were they to find themselves 
 deprived of all such aids, the moral loss to them would be in 
 many respects greater than it could ever be to Catholics ; 
 and the heart-burnings left behind by this wrong to them, would 
 would be a gain to none, could not but forbid that peace to 
 Ireland which Keligious Equality effected by just means would 
 secure. “ Why then not leave them all they have got?” some 
 will ask. Because this would be to perpetuate the chief of wronqs. 
 
24 
 
 and to cheat Ireland of her primary right. In practical morals 
 contending duties have to be reconciled. 
 
 The course that is unjust is also impolitic. The lack of due 
 religious ministrations would probably throw a large part of the 
 higher classes into the ranks either of Dissent on the one hand, 
 or of Unbelief on the other — a plague from which Ireland has 
 hitherto been exempt. In either case Ireland would be a loser. 
 Men who are sincerely religious, however prejudiced, inevitably 
 do much good if they do evil also — good that they had not 
 intended, and do not understand : but benevolence itself, if it 
 has no higher than earthly aims, depresses the moral standard, 
 and materializes those whom it aids. Again, those who have 
 even the shadow of a Church, and the shadow of an affection for it, 
 possess a key to that which has for centuries been the noblest 
 characteristic of Ireland — viz., her devotion to her Church : while 
 the change would render the history and character of Ireland 
 unintelligible to her higher classes, and proportionately diminish 
 their power of serving her. The Ascendency has also separated 
 them from their country. Let us remove it : — but let us not 
 mistake the reverse of wrong for right, or imagine that we shall 
 benefit Ireland by depriving her proprietor class of what to them 
 means spiritual culture. Who among their ranks have hitherto 
 been the best friends of Ireland ? Not the petty men with petty 
 minds and large prejudices ; but those whose education has been 
 most elevated, and whose piety has smacked least of the conven- 
 ticle. Ours is too great cause for jealousies, and we must rise 
 to its greatness. It is worse to inflict wrong than to suffer wrong : — 
 let not the day that ends the latter inaugurate the former. 
 
 An objection of an opposite character remains to be noticed. 
 It is this — “ As the Irish Catholic Church has never recognized 
 the unjust alienation of her property, except legally, she could 
 not, supposing the law to be altered, recognize a prescriptive 
 right, however limited, which was based upon that wrong.” 
 But from this objection, supposing it both valid and in point, 
 what would be the inference ? If the Church could not 
 sanction the partial alienation of that property from those 
 who had the earlier claim to it, much less could she sanction 
 its total alienation from the ends for which it was primarily 
 intended : — much less could she sanction those ‘ ‘ purposes 
 of general utility,” which would impart a share in it to 
 all , on condition that a change in its nature had first rendered it 
 illusory to each ! The question of prescriptive right need not 
 here be discussed, as the claim of our Protestant fellow-country- 
 men to a just and generous consideration, exists in entire 
 independence of it. Had we a tabula rasa to deal with, a 
 
25 
 
 minority such as we are now treating of, possesses its pro- 
 portionate rights as well as a majority. Assuming then the in- 
 alienability of Church property in the sense of the objector, 
 what follows ? If no prescription can constitute a claim against 
 the Church which has suffered wrong, does it therefore constitute 
 none against the State which has done wrong ? To meet two 
 claims both of which are imperative, the objector ought to 
 demand, on religious grounds, the restoration of Ireland’s church 
 property (so far as it still exists) to Catholic purposes, and also 
 to admit, upon grounds of justice, that for Protestants the State 
 should make adequate provision from other sources. Such a 
 plan I can well understand though I do not propose it.* 
 
 Lastly, the action of Ireland must be magnanimous. Magna- 
 nimity does not claim its “pound of flesh.” It does not 
 strain the clearest rights to the utmost ; but securing them so 
 far as duty requires that right should be secured, it leaves a 
 place also for that charity which “ seeketh not her own.” It 
 does not wring opportunity dry, nor forget that retaliation must 
 ever prove but a single link in an endless chain. It remembers 
 that if it be but a beggarly policy to “ treat every friend as one 
 who may one day be an enemy,” it is a noble one to treat every 
 man who chooses to call himself an enemy as though he might 
 one day be a friend. It remembers that although the just cause 
 remains the just cause after centuries of battle, no contest has 
 ever lasted long without enough of incidental wrong arising 
 upon both sides to inflame even the kindly, and to perplex the 
 clear-sighted. It has no sympathy of course with that compromise 
 which is craft ; but so that the essential ends of justice be gained, 
 it likes best the triumph which inflicts no humiliation on others, 
 and prefers the eventual content of a whole nation to that of 
 even its larger part. 
 
 Such is the action that best becomes that people which, 
 during three early centuries was the most glorious missionary of 
 the Christian Faith, and for three late centuries its most faithful 
 confessor. The Irish people kept their faith, and that faith 
 kept them a people. What God has joined no man can sunder. 
 
 * In “ The Church Settlement of Ireland ” I have remarked that a second Tithe 
 Rentcharge is a 'possible thing, as well as a divided one ; and also, that the State 
 might , if it chose, meet the present exigency either by restoring portions of Irish 
 Church property alienated since 1833 (after due compensations), or by replacing 
 them. I have myself suggested a different plan, because it seems unlikely that 
 Church property could now be largely increased, either at the cost of the Irish 
 proprietor, or of the English tax-payer. Such alternative schemes, however, 
 remain for the consideration of those who will not hear of the “just distribution” 
 plan ; and, at least, they would not involve the measureless evils of “ pensions,” 
 or of the “ voluntary system for all.” 
 
26 
 
 It remains that that faith should put away its reproach, and 
 that that people should recover its right. It remains that 
 what the hand of lawless power snatched from Ireland should 
 be restored to Ireland — not that the ancient Church Polity of 
 Ireland should be reformed after the colonial type. Ireland is 
 an ancient country, and its future must be in harmony with its 
 past. It is not for her to sacrifice her Traditions, or to walk 
 in the footsteps of foreign Revolutionists. The Faith of Ire- 
 land is her Cause ; and if aught that belongs to her Church 
 ever takes in her estimation but a secondary place, or remodels 
 itself to suit some exigency of the hour, the Ireland of history is at 
 an end. Again, as in the days of her noblest and most successful 
 struggle — that for Catholic Emancipation — she seeks her right, 
 and she seeks the right of her Church, and again she finds them 
 united. Her cause is a holy cause, not by choice only but by 
 necessity, and a divine decree ; and as the High Priest of old, 
 when he entered into the Holy of Holies, bore upon his breast 
 those twelve jewels which witnessed to the twelve Tribes of 
 Israel, so now, with a converse fitness and an equal duty, a 
 religious and just people, advancing towards the gates of its 
 new and higher destinies, must bear upon its breast that cause 
 which is the cause of God. May it bear that cause to victory. 
 
 II. 
 
 Public opinion in England is rapidly arriving at the convic- 
 tion that a just settlement of the Church question in Ireland is 
 the necessary pre-condition of peace, and, therefore, of progress 
 in that country. In a recent pamphlet I have endeavoured to 
 confirm that conviction. Nothing solid, however, can be effected 
 until the public opinion of Ireland concurs with that of Eng- 
 land in the adoption of some specific plan of Church Reform 
 which shall approve itself to both countries alike as honorable, 
 reasonable, and practicable. Such a plan would be the fair dis* 
 tribution of Ireland’s Church property between her Catholic 
 and her Protestant children ; the Catholic portion being admin- 
 istered, for defined religious purposes, by a Catholic Board, and 
 the Protestant portion by a Protestant Board, so that no place 
 could remain for jealousies relative to Governmental influence. 
 Many persons in Ireland prefer the secularization of the Church 
 
27 
 
 property. It is to the consideration of that alternative that the 
 following remarks are chiefly addressed. 
 
 The secularization of that property seems to me demonstrably 
 its destruction. It would be the voluntary relinquishment, at the 
 close of a long and heroic struggle, of that high consummation 
 which centuries of religious fidelity have merited for Ireland. I 
 cannot see why a people should finally lose its church property 
 because it has clung to its church. I cannot doubt that, in 
 many cases, the preference for that course is founded on mis- 
 conception. The just distribution of Ireland’s church property, 
 simple as the proposal may seem, is one which in late years has 
 been little heard of ; and, as a consequence, any scheme that 
 does not exclude all endowment is often confounded with one 
 which would confer state pensions on the Catholic clergy. In 
 opposition to pensions all Irish Catholics are agreed. They 
 unanimously affirm that Ireland requires Religious Equality, 
 and that pensions for her clergy would not be Religious Equal- 
 ity. For many years I have asserted these two propositions, 
 and urged that the church question, which has too long 
 been neglected, should be vindicated, for till it is settled 
 Ireland will never have peace. Religious endowments form 
 a part of that question. Those who do not thoroughly know 
 Ireland, although they entirely desire her welfare, often con- 
 found the different sorts of possible endowments, and recommend 
 the plan of pensions out of the general revenue, in the wish to 
 avoid Irish jealousies, and to place the burthen mainly on the 
 wealthier country. Once rightly informed respecting our needs 
 and our wishes, they cannot but be far better contented to fix upon 
 the ancient and national resources of Ireland the maintenance 
 of her clergy. This course was zealously recommended in 
 preference to pensions by many* eminent English statesmen dur- 
 ing the debates on the celebrated “ Appropriation Clause,” and 
 on other occasions, between 1832 and 1845, though at earlier 
 periods pensions were spoken of. To refuse such a course now 
 would be to confess that the object now aimed at was, not jus- 
 tice to the religion of Ireland, but the corruption of her clergy. 
 Of this there can be no thought. Craft is not now mistaken for 
 wisdom ; and men of sense know that the loss falls upon all 
 when the pastors of a people lose their moral influence. Let us 
 impute no unworthy motives, for a suspicious habit is as mis- 
 chievous as credulity, and commonly alternates with it, but 
 show all true friends of justice that more excellent way by which 
 they can serve her. 
 
 * See “ The Church Establishment of Ireland &c. 
 
28 
 
 Are we, then, to seek Religious Equality by the alienation of 
 all church property from church purposes, or by a just apportion- 
 ment of that property between Catholics and Protestants ? I 
 maintain the latter proposition. Before entering on this ques- 
 tion there are two things to be premised in order to avoid mis- 
 conception. 
 
 1st. — To prefer the just apportionment of church property to 
 its alienation from religious uses by no means implies that the 
 question of endowments is the first question to be settled. 
 Till we have peace on the education question we should 
 probably not meet this other one with the right temper on 
 either side. It is obvious, too, that the Catholic Church 
 could not approach it while her hands are still bound by 
 laws, whether enforced or not, which prohibit her normal con- 
 stitution. But to see our way aright, we must, from the 
 beginning, know at what end we have to aim. We have also 
 a public opinion to form. 
 
 2nd.— -Those who demand that the Irish Church should cease 
 to be disinherited maintain no narrow dogmatism with regard to 
 the religious uses to which the restored property should be ap- 
 plied. Past events have left us burthened with many needs, and 
 our share of the church property would probably not suffice for 
 them all. It might, for some years at least, be applied mainly 
 to assistance, given proportionately to local efforts, in the build- 
 ing of churches and presbyteries, reformatories, penitentiaries, 
 ecclesiastical seminaries, the maintenance of cathedrals, or- 
 phanages, and other charitable asylums, under distinctly religious 
 superintendence, as well as to the purchase of glebes — unless 
 another provision should be made for that purpose. A vast re- 
 serve fund has for some thirty years been thus used for the 
 general wants of the Established Church. The Ecclesiastical 
 Commissioners report that, in twenty-eight years, from 1834 to 
 1862, they received £3,310,999, or on an average £118,250 per 
 annum, and spent it upon Protestant purposes analogous to those 
 I have named. By the time our more urgent needs were sup- 
 plied it would become a question whether the Church property 
 restored to Catholics should or should not be made the support 
 of their clergy, and in what proportions. 
 
 It is, perhaps, for want of attention to this distinction that 
 the authority of several eminent prelates has been confidently 
 claimed for or against some proposition which was not, in fact, 
 discussed by them. It is hardly respectful to those venerable 
 persons to stretch any statement of theirs beyond what is included 
 strictly within it. T hey have said that the Catholic clergy will 
 never become the stipendiaries of the State, no matter how fair 
 
29 
 
 may be the intentions of an existing government, or how strong it 
 may seem to sustain its good intentions despite the vicissitudes 
 of public opinion, and such luckless misconceptions as have been 
 witnessed within the last twenty years. Such statements coming 
 from such high and responsible authorities, will have a grave sig- 
 nificance with thoughtful persons. They are practically conclusive 
 as regards “ the voluntary principle for all,” when that principle 
 stands contrasted either with the present ecclesiastical settlement, 
 or with pensions. They do not, however, justify us in assuming 
 that the opinions of those eminent prelates must be the same as 
 our own upon matters on which they have expressed none, much 
 less in attributing to them a desire of so legislating, as regards 
 Church property, during a crisis full of anomalies, as to tie up 
 the hands of their successors for ever. It is enough that the six- 
 teenth century should blindfold and fetter the nineteenth : — let 
 not the nineteenth fetter the twentieth. If we keep strictly to 
 the real point at issue, we may find that we differ less than we 
 think. 
 
 Now to the question. Those who affirm that we should aim 
 at 44 the voluntary principle for all” would apply the Church pro- 
 perty to purposes of “ general utility.” I think this an illusion. 
 W hat are those purposes ? It is commonly answered — The 
 relief of the poor and the education of the people. Let us think 
 twice. At present the poor are relieved by the poor rate. The 
 landlord pays one half of that rate directly, and, on the long run, 
 he pays the other half of it indirectly, A known charge on the 
 land must be taken into account by the tenants who compete for 
 the land. The rent they can actually pay (whatever they may 
 promise to pay) is the sum that remains over to them after pro- 
 viding labour, supporting their families, replacing capital and 
 meeting certain charges on the land, such as poor rates and 
 county rates. Reduce those charges and you eventually benefit 
 the landlord, just as if you had relieved his estate of its super- 
 fluous water. Extreme competition may induce tenants to offer 
 too high rents ; but the same competition would raise rents 
 higher still, if reduced charges on the land enabled the tenants 
 to pay more, without more exertion or more sacrifice. It is not, 
 then, the poor who would gain by the proposed gift. Eventually 
 they would lose grievously by it. Suppose a fund, equal to our 
 present average poor rate, called into existence by a benevolent 
 magician, for the relief of the poor. It would, of course, be 
 drawn on before a rate was raised. For a moment, the landlord 
 and occupier would be relieved , the poor getting their usual relief 
 from the new source. But the new fund for the poor, having no 
 relation either with that land from which, or that industry hy 
 
30 
 
 which the poor live, would prove but a snare. To keep down 
 rates would no longer be among the motives for employing the 
 poor in that remunerative labour, which adds to the produce of 
 the land. High rents might be found compatible with a low but 
 cheap form of culture ; but with a diminished labour and pro- 
 duce, the land would be less and less able to support a happy, 
 numerous, and industrious poor. Nor is this all. The new re- 
 lief fund, including no salutary restraints as regards the adminis- 
 tration of it, would be jobbed away, or would be still worse 
 spent, not in the relief of the poor, but in the creation of pauper- 
 ism. That fund exhausted, we should have to build up once 
 more our present poor law system ; but we should have first 
 destroyed its moral foundation. A transference of property is 
 always really but insensibly going on between class andclass, to 
 the common good of all. Those who with an arbitrary bene- 
 volence would take that transfer into their own hands, and con- 
 stitute themselves a nation’s providence, soon find themselves in 
 collision with social laws which will no more be trifled with than 
 the laws of nature. On a notable suggestion made to meet a 
 time of distress in England, Mr. Burke remarked thus : — ' “ The 
 squires of Norfolk had dined when they gave it as their opinion 
 that the rate of wages ought to rise or fall with the market of 
 provisions.” The poor may or may not be adequately relieved 
 at present, but the source from which their relief is drawn 
 does not lack depth, and is the only source from which legal 
 alms could be drawn without doing great mischief, moral and 
 social. 
 
 So again with national education. How is it supported at 
 present? By general taxation. But England, as the richer 
 country, pays about ten times as much of that taxation as Ire- 
 land — in other words, pays nine- tenths of what our national edu- 
 cation costs — while we pay a small portion of what hers costs. 
 Therefore, here also the proposed gain would be illusory. Let 
 us open our eyes. The State took away the ecclesiastical endow- 
 ments of Ireland from the nation at large some three centuries 
 ago — merged a large portion of it in the mass of individual pro- 
 prietorship — and appropriates what remains to the religious mini- 
 strations of a small, but comparatively wealthy minority, 
 including the proprietor class. Ireland consults as to the remedy. 
 She is advised to demand that the remaining portion of her 
 national Church property- —for it is hers — should be divided 
 between the landlords and England ! 
 
 “ But,” it said, “ we need other things, such as middle -class 
 schools, University endowments, &c.” No doubt : — but our 
 Protestant fellow-countrymen possess these things over and 
 
31 
 
 above their ecclesiastical endowments ; and a complete civil 
 equality, to go no further than this, would require that we 
 should possess them no less. The University of Dublin has some 
 200,000 acres, unfortunately let at an utterly inadequate rent ; 
 while the endowed and other schools are said to hold possessions 
 worth £70,000 per annum, much of which is also not realised. 
 If this property cannot, without wrong to testators, or to the pre- 
 sent possessors, be rendered available in an equal degree for 
 Catholic and Protestant education, the State is bound to do what 
 is needful for a majority as completely as she does it for a 
 minority. 
 
 It is now many years since Sir Thomas Wyse first affirmed, 
 both in his speeches and writings, that justice would not be 
 satisfied, as regards University Education, until the State had 
 adopted one of two courses, i.e., had either thrown open the 
 Dublin University on exactly equal terms to Catholics and 
 Protestants ; or else had founded , chartered , and endowed a 
 second University for Catholics, in which they should hold a 
 position as advantageous, in all respects, as Protestants hold in 
 the Dublin University. This conviction, as he stated to me at 
 Athens, a week or two before his death, he never ceased to hold. 
 To exonerate the State from such duties, by substituting the 
 present religious for the present educational endowments of 
 Ireland, would obviously be but an indirect way of destroying 
 the former. This truth once established, and this loss guarded 
 against, there is another truth, subordinate but important, to 
 which we should also attend. Education includes a religious as 
 well as a secular element. Supposing the educational system of 
 Ireland to be completed, that system might be one founded on a 
 principle of perfect equality, and providing for the middle and 
 higher classes as well as for the lower ; and yet it might, by 
 necessity, fail to meet various religious needs. To supply such 
 religious deficiencies, and to supplement such Educational Insti- 
 tutes, the funds at the disposal of the Catholic and Protestant 
 Boards would be available. Parliament would thus be spared 
 its annual Maynooth debate; and the education both of the 
 clergy and the laity, would receive aid wherever aid was wanted. 
 But though religion should be the animating principle of education, 
 yet the main process of education is secular ; consequently the 
 main fund for its support should be one existing over and above 
 the church property. Such it is in England ; and such it 
 should be in Ireland. 
 
 Once more — it has been said that the church property might 
 be turned into a loan fund for the subsidizing of industrial en- 
 terprises. For agricultural improvements the State already 
 
32 
 
 lends money on the easiest terms; and it is obviously her interest 
 to give aid wherever she reasonably can. From other sources 
 funds can usually be procured for seasonable undertakings, when 
 the wisdom and the co-operation needful for such undertakings 
 exist : and an artificial stimulus, half arbitrary, half charitable, 
 wholly unbusiness-like, and lacking the usual motives of pru- 
 dence, would be more likely to lead industry astray than to do 
 it a solid good. In short, there is no escaping the dilemma. 
 There exists, and can exist, no purpose of “ general utility” to 
 which the church property could be applied, except in appear- 
 ance. Take from God’s altar what was given to the altar, and 
 whoever may snatch the spoil it will be torn from the Pauperes 
 Christi. 
 
 “ Purposes of general utility!” The phrase is familiar, and 
 modern history tells us what it means. It has commonly been 
 most heard when national piety was waning, sciolism waxing, 
 and bankruptcy impending. What is new is that Catholics 
 should join the cry. Was it for this that we condemned certain 
 modern Italian statesmen, and the infidel sages that heralded the 
 first French revolution ? Was the wisdom of Catholic times — 
 was the precedent of the Ancient Law a dream ; and was the 
 Church to learn first from the “ new light” which has dawned 
 upon the modern academies and the manufacturing districts, the 
 sound, philosophic, and religious way of sustaining her sacred 
 ministrations ? I know that, of old, Irish church property in- 
 cluded, beside its primary purposes, the relief of the poor and 
 education. This is true in Dr. Doyle’s sense, but it is relevant 
 no longer. Observe the distinction. Dr. Doyle found tithes so 
 appropriated as to be useless to the Irish people, and so levied as 
 to produce misery and crime ; but his eyes looked round in vain 
 and found, though long searching, no provision for the poor, and 
 none for education. Since he wrote, church lands, for which no 
 one could then find a use, have been in part “got rid of;” and 
 church property to the value of nearly half what remains has 
 been alienated from religious purposes by a well-meant but 
 patch-work legislation, which rested on no principle. But since 
 he wrote, better things than these have also been done. What 
 remains of Irish Church property is a fragment ; but that mighty 
 and beneficent law of compensation which heals the wounds of 
 nations, compelled the State to replace with one hand a part of 
 what she had snatched away in past times with the other. 
 Therefore it is that we have now a fund for the relief of the 
 poor, and one for education, the latter of which the State ought to 
 increase, and will increase. What ! is she to be informed that 
 she may shirk all such duties by alienating the remainder of 
 
33 
 
 Church property from its primary, and applying it to secondary 
 and secular purposes ? Is this the counsel of Catholics to the 
 State ? Are we to burn our paternal mansion because the goods 
 of a rival are stored in it ? 
 
 Far from the large heart and clear intelligence of Dr. Doyle 
 would have been any such counsel in times like these. Fidelity 
 to great men (and he was great) means fidelity to the spirit in 
 which, and the principles according to which they acted, not the 
 clumsy homage of an obsequiousness, servile and unreasoning — 
 such as has so often changed great names into great evils. 
 “ The letter killeth.” In the application of great principles, 
 men have to take changed circumstance into account — to adapt 
 and to transpose. Reasons have always abounded since the 
 sixteenth century for that confiscation of Church property, which 
 in the nineteenth shields itself under the Christian name of 
 Secularization. The same end is reached whether we use the 
 language of men or that of the gods, and commonly the same 
 motives lead to it. The State Esurient hungers for Church 
 spoil. Prodigality and ruin have been the statesman’s general 
 incentives to Church spoliation ; but it so happens that the State 
 has never been the richer lor its prey. A cry is raised on these 
 occasions that too much land is in the hands of a corporation : 
 yet no one adds, “ restore, therefore, by sale, a part of this land 
 to general circulation, but apply its value to the uses originally 
 intended.” Church property may easily be too vast ; but what 
 Ireland retains is but a remnant. We need not discuss 
 the abstract question of right ; for those who insist most 
 strongly on the rights of the State must admit that it may 
 do a wrong even while acting in the sphere of its rights. It 
 has been the custom of the Church to endure that wrong 
 patiently, but not to court it. It would ill become Irish 
 Catholics to establish a new precedent in this matter — nay, to 
 force confiscation upon a Protestant State which is wholly indis- 
 posed to such violence. God’s Providence can of course change, 
 and has often changed, loss to gain ; — but then the loss must have 
 been honestly come by. 
 
 There is a wisdom which befits modern sects and parties, but 
 is not ours; and we should do ill to plagiarise from them. 
 “ Voluntaryism,” as it is called, was not adopted by us 
 as a principle ; it was our necessity ; and though, as in the case 
 of persecution itself, a people that had suffered, not done, the 
 wrong extracted good out of evil, it would be enthusiasm to 
 proclaim that such good is the highest good or the only good. 
 Our past denies this, and the whole genius of our faith confutes 
 it. It was a noble thought, and worthy of Catholic times, when a 
 
34 
 
 nation devoted a property to God. God kept that property for 
 the nation ! Great hearts could trust great hearts ; and each 
 generation knew that the next would ratify the gift and par- 
 take the merit. The policy was tender — it provided a spring 
 for every thirsty lip, and willed that the ministrations of grace 
 should surround us like nature’s light and air. It was mag- 
 nanimous — it gave much that it might receive much ; and it 
 could pardon somewhat. It was profound — it provided for the 
 clergy a support in one sense fixed — and thereby it secured their 
 independence — in another sense fluctuating, and thereby it 
 bound up both their sympathies and their interests with those of 
 the people. It was impartial — it neither placed the pastors in 
 dependence on the Government, nor assumed that the normal 
 relation between the Church and State must be one of hate and 
 war. It had this one fault — that it tended to enrich a church 
 too much in the course of ages, thereby enfeebling her within. 
 From us the chance of this solitary evil is removed by the 
 devastations of past times. Above all, the ancient system 
 was provident. It took thought for intervals of famine 
 and war, of bewildered fancy, or political confusion. It pro- 
 vided even for what it did not foresee — the condition of a 
 Christian country which has lost unity of faith. Some of the 
 modern State-scholastics assure us that a State may not divide 
 religious endowments because it has a conscience ! It is because 
 it preserves a conscience, even when it has lost unity of faith, 
 that it may and must do this. A State knows just as much about 
 Revealed Truth as the Nation which it impersonates knows, and 
 no more. If it confesses a unity of faith which is desirable, but 
 non-existent, it confesses a falsehood. If it confesses that a 
 Nation which has lost unity of faith still retains Christianity, and 
 honours it so far as it may, it confesses the truth. There 
 is a higher truth which it aspires to confess at some future day ; 
 and for this remoter duty the principle of endowments preserved, 
 but justly apportioned, makes the only possible provision. Let 
 me explain. I know that what I say may be perverted, but it 
 will not be perverted by men of sense and honour. Most per- 
 sons hope that truth will one day prevail by its own inherent 
 strength, and prevail the sooner in proportion as passions allayed 
 leave it a clear field. Thus, our Protestant friends think that 
 what they deem truth will one day prevail all over Ireland. If 
 it does, the religious endowments, though divided, will be wholly 
 Protestant again, and that without injury to any man, but with 
 the applause of all. Have Catholics no corresponding hope ? 
 If they have, and if it should be realized, no matter at how 
 distant a day, is the Church to be told at that day that not a 
 
35 
 
 fragment of her own may be her own, because what a past form 
 of religion had respected, even while misappropriating it, 
 that the hands of her own sons had destroyed completely and 
 for ever ? There is a voice more potent than mine which pro- 
 tests against the wrong. It is the voice that comes from ruined 
 abbeys and desecrated shrines, and that demands whether the 
 work of ruin has not gone far enough, and whether the passions 
 have not had their day. 
 
 III. 
 
 It has been so commonly assumed that if the Irish Ecclesias- 
 tical Settlement be reformed, the alternative must lie between 
 “ pensions for the Catholic clergy,” or “the voluntary system 
 for all,” that the real remedy, viz., a right distribution of Church 
 property, has hardly been considered. That measure is by some 
 regarded as analogous to pensions even if not identical with them. 
 But nothing can be more erroneous than this view. To receive 
 back a portion of our own property is generally accounted a thing 
 wholly different from seeing a rival dispossessed of it ; and in this 
 case, the restoration of our own, so far as the religious and social 
 needs of our fellow-countrymen permit, is the opposite of receiv- 
 ing pensions, both in principle and tendency. It may be our 
 best protection against them. I have heard it said, whether with 
 truth I know not, that if pensions had been placed uncondi- 
 tionally at the disposition of the clergy during the famine years, 
 they would have been obliged in some parts of the country to 
 accept them for the sake of their starving flocks. Let the Irish 
 Church have her share of the Irish Church property, and no 
 future calamity can ever expose her to the trial of so difficult a 
 choice. I have endeavoured to dispel the misconception which 
 assumes that if a just proportion of the Church property be re- 
 stored to us, it must, therefore, be applied in such a manner as 
 to weaken the ties that bind together the clergy and the 
 people. We are in a transition state ; what would be in- 
 j urious now may be useful at a future time ; and what would 
 be noxious under ordinary, may prove serviceable under 
 extraordinary circumstances. In the meantime, a church pro- 
 perty is not by necessity a clerical fund, and there exist other 
 most important purposes which would be carried into effect 
 by the aid of our national church property, applied, not as a 
 
36 
 
 substitute for individual munificence, which has already produced 
 such wonderful results, but in proportion to local contributions. 
 But, above all, I have endeavoured to remove the illusion that 
 Ireland’s Church property could be separated from religious 
 uses, and yet retained for the Irish people. Before leaving this 
 subject I may illustrate it once more by the authority of a 
 statesman and of a prelate — the one English, the other Irish, but 
 both on this matter agreed. Lord Bussell expressed himself 
 thus in 1844: — “In Ireland about half a million of money 
 will arise from accumulations of the Perpetuity Fund, available 
 at any time for Ecclesiastical purposes. There are also the Acts 
 passed some years ago for the abolition of the Vestry Cess, and 
 for regulating the purchase of Church leases ; if you add to 
 these the deduction of 25 per cent, on tithes, you will find that 
 the Church has lost £300,000 per annum since 1830. Now, 
 how has this money been applied ? Has it been given for the 
 spiritual instruction or general education of the people ? No ! 
 It has all gone, in fact , if not in form , into the pocket of the 
 Protestant landlords.” Dr. Ryan, the late venerable Bishop of 
 Limerick, wrote thus to a friend in 1848 : — “ Any new appro- 
 priation of Church property to any but Ecclesiastical purposes , 
 would be liable to the objection that such arrangement would be, 
 in some shape, in favour of interests that had no right to derive 
 benefit from such sources. The only new distribution of this 
 property, therefore, that would be likely to give anything like 
 general and permanent satisfaction would be a fair allocation of 
 it between the different religious denominations in this country.” 
 The Bishop then proceeded to remark that no statesman, desi- 
 rous of carrying into effect this great scheme of justice and 
 peace, could ever propose any interference of the Government 
 with the discipline of the Catholic Church, except at the cost of 
 creating bitter opposition to the measure, and that without the 
 slightest chance of advantage to the State. 
 
 But objections are made to our receiving back our own. Some 
 relate to Ireland ; some to the supposed state of English parties. 
 Let us begin with .the former class. 
 
 It is objected, first, that what we should have is — glebes. Of 
 course glebes differ essentially from pensions. They differ from 
 my proposition also, and in this respect, that they are included 
 in it, and that their value could probably amount to no more 
 than a tenth part of what justice awards us. Let us have our 
 rights, or let the wrong remain as it is — plain and unvarnished. 
 “ Religious Equality” would be a final, because a just, settle- 
 ment ; and for less than this it is not worth while to disturb the 
 country. Against large farms in the hands of the clergy the 
 
37 
 
 Synod of Thurles and their own good sense has pronounced. 
 Residences for them adjoining their churches would be, indeed, 
 a most important benefit ; but these we could even now create 
 for ourselves with a slight extension of that law which enables 
 proprietors to give sites for churches and schoolhouses. Glebes 
 would, as a matter of course, be a part of any real settlement of 
 the Church question. “ Religious Equality” includes a just 
 distribution of all Church property. The tithe rentcharge is 
 much the largest part of it ; and if to Catholics there should be 
 assigned more than their proper share of that portion, and less 
 than their proper share of other portions (as might be found 
 convenient), in that case we should probably apply a part of the 
 property thus made ours to the purchase of glebes and building 
 of presbyteries. Should we, on the other hand, receive our 
 proper share of the tithe rentcharge, it would be the duty of the 
 State to provide glebes for Catholics, as it has provided them for 
 Protestants. Till then, let us leave this well-meant evasion of 
 the difficulty to others. The plan of glebes has sometimes been 
 recommended by Protestant proprietors — 1 have no doubt upright 
 advisers — who acknowledged that it was a monstrous anomaly, 
 and a crying injustice, that the clergy of the great majority of 
 the people should be without legally secured property, but who 
 insisted that the church property must not be meddled with, 
 while they admitted also that the Catholic clergy would not 
 accept a stipend from the State. Glebes — and thus the debt 
 would be paid ! The clergy of Catholic Ireland would receive 
 a provision equal to a small fractional part of what is now 
 appropriated by the clergy of little more than a ninth of the total 
 population ! In these “ benevolences’ ’ one recognises the arith- 
 metic of the Ascendency. 
 
 It is alleged that if the Irish Church had endowments it 
 would be at the cost of a diminished liberty. Here again we 
 meet the confusion between pensions and the ancient national 
 Church property. The former are not to be thought of ; but 
 the ablest English statesmen who have wished for Catholic 
 endowment in either form have seen and denounced the folly of 
 making such endowments for the sake of an unworthy quid 
 pro quo. It is but the prejudiced among them who fail to 
 know that among good Catholics loyalty to the Sovereign is a 
 natural growth, but that they owe to the Church also a loyalty 
 which forbids them to subject it to Government. Thus an 
 eminent writer remarks — ‘ 4 The Catholics, it is said, have no right 
 to claim any public endowment, because they will submit to no 
 control on the part of the Government which bestows it. They 
 have, in the first place, acknowledged that the State has a right 
 
38 
 
 to require ample security for the loyalty and good conduct of all 
 who eat its bread ; and more than that it would be unnecessary, 
 as well as imprudent for the State to demand.” 
 
 “ Innumerable jealousies and difficulties would grow out of any 
 interference of ours ; and if we set about the accomplishment of 
 a great measure of peace and improvement, it would be the 
 height of folly not to do it in the manner most likely to produce 
 a satisfactory and effectual result. With what consistency 
 could a Protestant Government insist upon any right of 
 patronage, or mix itself up in any way with purely ecclesias- 
 tical Catholic concerns?”* In Catholic Belgium the State leaves 
 the Church free ; in our Colonies the Anglican communities 
 advance towards freedom : and every day it becomes more 
 recognised in free countries that the sole true service the State 
 can receive from a church, is that highest service which a free 
 church alone can render, viz., the creation of those religious and 
 moral convictions which supply a basis to political order. The 
 time of State control passes away with that of persecuted sects, 
 and arbitrary Ascendencies ; and men learn daily that the State 
 which dishonors religion is guilty of felo de se. 
 
 Again, there are persons who say that it is unworthy of the 
 Irish Catholic Church to “ receive endowments from the State.” 
 If this objection means that the Irish Church is never to receive 
 back again, with the sanction of law, any part of that property of 
 which law deprived her — in other words, that she is bound in 
 honour to remain for ever disinherited — it is difficult to confute 
 what is so fantastic. The assertion is sometimes enforced by reasons 
 worse than fantastic. If — no question being raised as to the special 
 religious application of the restored property — we are informed 
 that neither now nor at any future time, could the people of 
 Ireland trust the clergy of Ireland with any portion of the 
 church property of Ireland, I demand against whom is the 
 scandalous aspersion hurled ? — against the clergy or against the 
 people ? Does the charge come from Exeter Hall, or from the 
 Fenian Conventicle, or whence? If I must examine what I 
 shrink from touching, let me ask a question. Assuming church 
 property to be dangerous, pensions, of course, must be ten 
 times as dangerous. Supposing all endowment a snare, even to 
 mature priests labouring in a land the annals of w r hich are a part 
 of Church history, the snare must plainly be most fatal in the 
 case of students whose minds are still plastic, and of professors 
 who shape the theological science of Ireland. What, then, of 
 Maynooth ? It has endowments, and its endowments consist of 
 
 “ Past and Present Policy of England towards Irel a nd," p. 303. 
 
39 
 
 pensions. Logically Mr. Spooner was right ; and he will always 
 have successors. How can the State disinherit the clergy of a 
 nation, except on the principle that it is sinful to endow error ? 
 In that case, how can it endow the very fountain and source of 
 erroneous teaching ? Maynooth may be a small thing ; and we 
 have heard of the fair but frail defendant who urged, in answer 
 to the indignant justices, the plea, that her child was a remark- 
 ably small child. I do not know that orthodox statesmen 
 have any better plea to urge, while their conscience forces 
 them to disinherit a nation, and a stern necessity compels 
 them to endow that small but formidable thing, its Eccle- 
 siastical Seminary. But logic is impartial and implacable — it 
 turns as keen an edge upon us as upon them. Catholics who 
 do not object to Maynooth must not denounce all religious 
 endowments. 
 
 Once more. Some persons imagined, and very naturally, that 
 when the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill passed, the Maynooth Grant 
 would be repudiated by Catholics. It had ever been provi- 
 sional ; and it seemed inconsistent with a new penal law. But 
 our prelates, doubtless, foresaw that a State, acting under mis- 
 conception, would return to that royal road of justice and 
 wisdom along which it had been advancing for a quarter of a 
 century. The Maynooth Grant has not been repudiated ; but, 
 on the contrary, since then, as well as before, we have sought 
 and gained endowments, nay, even in the form of pensions, 
 for other classes of our clergy. We have workhouse chaplains, 
 dependent on the guardians ; and prison chaplains, dependent 
 on Government ; we have chaplains in the army ; we have navy 
 chaplains in harbours, and we ought to have them in ships. 
 How is this justified ? On the ground, perhaps, that these 
 chaplains incidentally do service to the State as well as to the 
 flocks ? What ! Are we, then, prepared to admit that no 
 service is incidentally rendered to the State by a parochial 
 clergy, whose moral influence alone maintains the order of 
 society? I, at least, can make no such admission. In a 
 book, published before I was a Catholic, I spoke of the Ca- 
 tholic clergy as “the chief barrier which exists between us 
 and anarchy,” and I have never changed that opinion. But, 
 perhaps, it will be said, that these chaplaincies are exceptional ? 
 No doubt they are ; and no one wants to assimilate to them the 
 condition of the parochial clergy, for pensions are out of the 
 question. A further enquiry however remains — “are there no 
 other exceptions?” What of those vast parishes in the West, in 
 w'hich a single priest starves, and the flock suffers with the shep- 
 herd ? There are limits to the exertions of the most devoted 
 
40 
 
 clergy; and there are consequences from the lack of needful 
 ministrations. On these depend, not merely a high moral and reli- 
 gious standard, but the very foundations of virtue, and a know- 
 ledge of those “things necessary to be known by all Christians.” 
 A mode of support which in our rich plains and large cities, is 
 “ voluntary,” may in the moorlands be both involuntary and 
 insufficient. There are districts where even a wealthy estab- 
 lishment procures aid from the Church Commissioners, and 
 also from numberless societies, English and Irish, most of them 
 bent on proselytising enterprize, and, in all, possessing, as is 
 stated, funds amounting to £80,000 per annum. When the 
 outcasts of our wastes look up to us for succour in their ex- 
 tremity, are we to answer them that a noble property was set 
 apart for their spiritual needs by the nation, but that not a frag- 
 ment of it may now be so applied, whether for the building of 
 churches, or schools, or parochial residences, or for the most 
 occasional aid in adding to the number of their curates, because 
 that property was alienated centuries ago, by a disloyal State, 
 and because it is complimented away, or talked away, now by 
 patriotic rhetoricians, who declare that, though Ireland will not 
 longer endure the existence of Protestant endowments, she is 
 herself too exalted to desire “ a penny of Church property !” 
 Was there ever such barren and unpractical declamation? 
 What we do not want is to injure our neighbour. W hat we do want 
 is to vindicate once more for the people of Ireland that sacred 
 reserve dedicated to religion and civilization, and to devote it to 
 its ancient and reasonable purposes. If we shrink from this duty, 
 we are responsible for the consequences of spiritual destitution. 
 
 When wandering among the wildernesses of the West I have 
 often wondered how any Protestant clergyman, resident there, 
 who remembers the “ Four Last Things,” can find rest in his 
 bed and reflect on the condition of the population around him, 
 bearing in mind also that all Connaught contains but some 
 40,000 members of the Established Church. He looks round 
 upon his children, and forecasts their destinies. It is well ; 
 but let him remember that there is not a hair on their heads 
 which does not derive its nourishment from the labour of 
 those stalwart arms that dig his glebe and house his corn — 
 and that the poor have children as well as the rich. Nor have 
 I marvelled less, how any gentleman, and, especially, any 
 Catholic gentleman, can deem it compatible with the truth and 
 gentleness which belong to his order, to look upon these things 
 and be silent. Have they, or have they not, consequences that 
 affect our national happiness and honour — nay, consequences 
 that reach through eternity? Our clergy have lately told us 
 
41 
 
 something about the prisons, and quays of Liverpool. The for- 
 lornest of those who tread the latter trod once the fair and 
 spotless fields of Ireland. Not even to meet such cases do I re- 
 commend pensions. But if we should reject our share in that 
 religious property which does not belong exclusively to wealthy 
 Protestants, who can read religious books before their fires, and 
 who speak with scant respect of ecclesiastical ministrations, but 
 which is the forfeited inheritance of the Irish people, and pre- 
 eminently of those outcasts, I think that a voice from lonely 
 wastes where they were born, from desolated villages whence they 
 fled for their lives, from regions acquainted with many famines, 
 where churches are occasional and temptation is universal, and 
 lastly from streets where sin not “ voluntary” results from 
 inevitable ignorance and despair, will ask us why. 
 
 Let me now assign a few reasons for seeking the just distribu - 
 tion, not the destruction, of Church property. 
 
 I. It is necessary. If Religious Equality is a sacred prin- 
 ciple, it is also a principle that we are not to substitute illusions 
 for realities, or wantonly to injure existing interests. But 
 it has been shown that to secularise Church property — who- 
 ever might snatch the wreckers’ spoil — would give the nation 
 nothing but what it either possessed already, or must soon 
 gain, since the Protestant part of the nation possesses it over 
 and above its Church property. It is necessary, therefore, 
 either to abandon the principle of “ Religious Equality,” or to 
 realize it in the only way compatible with other principles not 
 less sacred. 
 
 II. It is common sense. We have all along complained of a 
 
 grievance, and this course would remove it. That grievance 
 was the alienation of the church property. It never consisted 
 in that arrangement which has been changed — the arrangement 
 which imposed the payment of tithe especially on the tenant . 
 That was, indeed, the most vexatious way in which tithe could 
 be collected, and being unsuited to modern times, no one would 
 restore it ; but, as Protestants assured us in old times, it is the 
 land that really pays the tithe, whether the landlord or the 
 tenant acts instrumentally as the agent in this transaction. 
 Thus, the present Lord Grey said, in 1835 — “ It was idle to 
 conceal from themselves what was the real grievance of the Irish 
 Church. It was not that tithes were collected ; it could not, 
 therefore, be gotten rid of by a transference of payment of 
 tithes from the tenant to the landlord. * * * The people of 
 
 Ireland were groaning under this grievance — namely, that pro- 
 perty intended for the most important and useful purposes for 
 the benefit of all , was now applied in a manner useful to none, 
 
42 
 
 but injurious.” When a statesman has asked me, “ Is there 
 any one thing remaining which we could do for the Irish people 
 and which we have not done ?” I have sometimes answered, 
 “ If you could only, without inconvenience, take your hand out 
 of their pocket !” To keep from a man his own, and thus force 
 upon him a large expenditure otherwise not necessary, is to 
 plunder him. Common sense requires, and indeed common 
 justice no less, that we should seek a remedy for wrong, through 
 the reversal of that wrong, not through a course which per- 
 petuates the injury, while extending it to others. Distribute 
 church property aright, and you cancel the wrong. The 
 present, which so much puzzles statesmen in dealing with Ire- 
 land, would thus shake off the “Original Sin” of the past. We are 
 told it is our duty to forget past wrong. W e know that to do so is 
 not more our duty than our interest; but how can we forget a Past 
 which stands before our eyes, colossal and domineering in the 
 largest institution of the Present? When the wrong is removed, 
 the past will in Ireland, as in Scotland, either be forgotten, or be 
 remembered without bitterness as part of a nation’s historical lore. 
 Till then it is the interpreter of our daily life, and part of our 
 cause. We remember the Past that we may have a Future. 
 
 III. It is the religious course. It restores to the glory 
 of God and the good of His poor that which was diverted 
 from both, sacrilegiously and iniquitously, by that disastrous 
 intelligence of which the seat is in the passions. It can- 
 cels the bond between patriotism and revenge, and elevates 
 religion to her native seats unvext by the tempest. It 
 brings the “daily bread” of sacred ministrations and spi- 
 ritual instruction to the outcast and the wayfarer ; and it for- 
 tifies the emigrant, or the exile, with that matured and 
 thoughtful personal piety which can alone guard him against the 
 temptations of far lands in which truth is not a tradition, nor 
 virtue a social usage, and in which neighbours are not “ our out- 
 ward consciences.” It roots among us that charity without 
 which faith is dead. Unlike “the voluntary system for all,” it 
 knits together, by a common weal, those different classes and 
 interests in Ireland which have been too long at war, and which 
 never will be frozen together (whatever revolutionists may 
 vainly hope) by the common woe of a loss sustained in equality. 
 It gives us social peace ; and , till a basis is laid for peace, who 
 can tell what calamity may not be in store for us ? Some 
 people flatter themselves that in the event of a great catastrophe 
 it is not Ireland that would suffer most. Catastrophes are 
 
 * “The Church Establishment in Ireland, illustrated exclusively by Protestant 
 Authorities .” Warren, Dublin. 
 
43 
 
 possible from which, if England lost most because she had 
 most to lose, Ireland would lose most because she would lose 
 her all. If to inflame popular passions be a thing unworthy, im- 
 moral, and irreligious, heis guilty not less of an omission unworthy, 
 immoral, and against religion, who is deterred by sloth, or 
 by a timidity mistaken for prudence, from reforming by prac- 
 ticable means, and in time, that state of things which must 
 otherwise remain the chronic cause of national discontent. 
 
 IV, It is our duty to the poor. The Church property set 
 apart for the nation belongs primarily to the poor, and to the 
 poorest of the poor — to those who, with the will, have not the 
 means of providing religious ministrations, or have never 
 learned their worth. It is a common mistake to think that 
 Church property belongs only to the clergy ; or rather, this has 
 been the specious assumption of revolutionary statesmen, who 
 wished to deprive of protection a property which they intended 
 to confiscate. It belongs to the clergy ^viewing the question 
 from its political and ethical side) per accidens , but it belongs 
 essentially to the poor. The people must always need religious 
 ministrations, and, whether in one way or another, their clergy 
 must always be supported, for the “labourer is worthy of his 
 hire : ” but to the poor it is all-important that they should not 
 be forced, unaided, to provide at once for every religious need. 
 This consideration must come home especially to our clergy. 
 By their enemies it is conveniently assumed that because they 
 would not accept pensions they would reject, on behalf of the 
 Catholic body, a share in the national Church property. Reject it ! 
 The expression has no meaning. It belongs to the nation as well as 
 to that nation’s Church ; and the nation uses it, through her 
 clergy, for the joint good of all. It is “ the children’s bread.” 
 
 V. It is the Catholic course. The Catholic Church is, 
 indeed, not tied to any particular system as regards a provision 
 for religious purposes. She will always suffer less from the 
 voluntary system than other communities, even those that have 
 freely chosen it, because her clergy, whether rich or poor, must 
 be profoundly respected by their flocks on account of their sacer- 
 dotal character. That character is the root of the reverence paid 
 them ; and the extent of that reverence will ever be proportioned, 
 not to their wealth, but to the fidelity with which they discharge 
 the duties that belong to that character, and the dignity with 
 which they sustain its sacred claims. But it is not less certain 
 that, whereas the voluntary system has been forced on the 
 Church, it has been the choice of Dissenters. With them 
 religion is a matter of individualism, mistaken for personal piety, 
 and too often, it is to be feared, of self-will or intellectual 
 
44 
 
 caprice mistaken for Christian liberty. With them the “body” 
 is nothing more than the aggregate of the believers who chance 
 to be units in it. To them “ Private Judgment” is a reality ; it 
 is comparatively but a theory or a watchword in the Angli- 
 can Church, which justly claims a via media position, has 
 retained a hierarchy, and a ritual in the main ancient, asserts 
 authority though equivocally, and not only affirms a traditional 
 Creed but is itself a tradition — although, unhappily, but a National 
 tradition. It was a natural effect of those sympathies which 
 govern men unconsciously that, in the Dissenting sects, the 
 general law of thought and feeling should determine the special 
 relations between the sect and its ministers. Their idea of re- 
 ligion being this — that a knowledge of Revealed Truth is 
 derived primarily from certain Biblical studies aided by divine 
 graces imparted to each Christian irrespectively of the general 
 body, it followed that the minister should be paid or dis- 
 missed, like the lawyer or physician ; and it seemed of no vital 
 importance if a straggler were left without his aid. In the 
 Catholic Church, of course, an opposite principle prevails. In 
 her the body is not the mere aggregate of individual believers — - 
 that is a mere name — but the divinely organised Whole which 
 gives life to the parts. Faith is the heritage of millions who, 
 owing to their youth or other causes, cannot even fancy them- 
 selves capable of discovering a Creed, each for himself ; and her 
 sacraments are the channels through which grace is communi- 
 cated to rich and poor alike — to the learned and the simple. It 
 could not, therefore, be her desire that religious ministrations 
 should depend wholly on individual good will, much less upon 
 the individual’s ability to procure them. They may be most 
 needed by those who appreciate them least ; and it is pre- 
 eminently to the Poor that the Gospel is preached. She has, 
 indeed, had her mendicant orders, which in their place have done 
 a great work ; but they had renounced all worldly things, and 
 their position was consistent and complete. There is a strength 
 that belongs to poverty; and there is also a strength that belongs 
 to moderate resources, honorably secured, and virtuously 
 used : and in her amplitude both kinds of strength are nobly 
 united. The converse holds equally true. There is a weakness 
 which proceeds from excessive endowments ; and there is a weak- 
 ness which proceeds from the voluntary system ; — these two are 
 not by necessity disunited, and the faults of communities not 
 endowed have sometimes been especially those of old establish- 
 ments. The voluntary system may be the best at a particular 
 moment ; but it neither precludes the dangers of wealth nor 
 those of poverty ; and so far from uniting the merits of the 
 
45 
 
 monastic with those of the secular life, it creates a condition 
 different alike from both. The Church has ever condemned the 
 error which substitutes an individual for a national confession of 
 Religion. To her the “Voluntary System” never was con- 
 genial except under abnormal circumstances — before civil society 
 had developed its full Christian character — in periods of persecu- 
 tion — or in her missions among barbarous races. 
 
 Still less has the system of State pensions ever been con- 
 genial to her. Distrust, most commonly, perhaps, arises 
 from having trusted too much, and an unboastful indepen- 
 dence is the true preservative against it. The Church does 
 not naturally or willingly look on the State with suspicion, 
 and she makes large allowance for the State’s suspicions of 
 her. She bears to it a true, though not servile reverence. 
 Indeed, exalted as she is in her heavenly gifts and world- wide 
 expansion, there is yet nothing within the narrower limits of 
 national existence which so nearly resembles her in character, or 
 so sensibly presents her image to men, as that august creation of 
 God — the State. It bears the sword of Justice, while to her is 
 committed the dispensation of Mercy. Relatively to its own 
 subjects and citizens, it is, like her, a universal presence; and, 
 though not eternal, it is yet immortal compared with their fleet- 
 ing generations. Like her it has both rights and faculties which 
 could inhere in no mere association of individuals, apart from 
 that interior communion which gives them their political life. 
 Like her, it is at once beneficent and exacting — securing the 
 meanest from danger, anticipating the needs of the careless, 
 crowning the lowliest with the highest gifts, but also imposing 
 on the loftiest head the weight which steadies it, and binding 
 each man with the restraint which is his safety. It too has its drag- 
 chain as well as its wheels of progress, and is, therefore, often 
 reviled by those whom it protects. The Church reveres the 
 State, and inculcates loyalty to it, not merely because such is the 
 divine command, nor chiefly because her own safety must require 
 the obedience of men to such a compeer, so long as we are 
 actuated by habits not by maxims alone, and so long as the same 
 dispositions assert themselves in the civil and in the ecclesiastical 
 sphere, however discriminated by philosophy or opposed to each 
 other by untoward circumstances ; — not for these reasons only, 
 but because she sympathises with greatness in all its authentic 
 forms. But it does not become her to be dependent on the State. 
 F or her, and for it, an unworthy dependence has consequences worse, 
 in the long run, than those which result from her being outlawed 
 by the State, or even proscribed by it. The ecclesiastical condition 
 alike of France and of Ireland is abnormal religiously, and 
 
46 
 
 unsatisfactory civilly. It is a thing remarkable, and to England 
 honorable, that while the revolutionary or the imperial spirit 
 (mutual enemies, but akin not less) have swept religious endow- 
 ments successively from so many parts of Catholic Europe, they 
 still subsist in England and in Ireland, though in Ireland they 
 are alienated from their proper end. How is this circumstance 
 to be accounted for ? Thus : — The English Constitution has 
 been progressive ; but it has been conservative also. It has re- 
 tained many of the institutions derived from Catholic ages and 
 ancient principles, though lost elsewhere. That it has done so 
 seems a confirmation so far of a theory affirmed by many learned 
 Anglican divines, viz. : — that neither the English nation, nor the 
 English Church, set itself by deliberate purpose in antagonism 
 to the ancient order of things. It is, indeed, certain that 
 under the influence of despotic sovereigns, who did not know 
 their own minds, and of dynastic necessities, the nation drifted 
 upon a course the original selection of which was not so much 
 as referred to its choice ; and it is also certain that the schism 
 was widened by political confusions which associated the idea of 
 Catholicism with that of despotic power, and foreign interven- 
 tion: — it is, therefore, the less surprising that England has kept 
 her hold of some Catholic institutions abandoned in many Con- 
 tinental countries. Is Catholic Ireland after the fiery trials and 
 matchless fidelity of centuries to set her face against them ? Is 
 it for her to destroy them, or to pronounce that they shall never 
 again exist for the behoof of Catholics ? 
 
 IY. 
 
 I have answered some objections often urged against the prin- 
 ciple of a fair distribution of Irish Church property as opposed 
 to that of its destruction, and assigned some reasons in favour of 
 the former course. I shall now indicate several further reasons, 
 and glance at certain further objections which are connected with 
 the supposed state of English parties. 
 
 VI. The just distribution of Church property is the constitu- 
 tional course. Our Constitution has maintained the ancient 
 system of national endowments in preference to those two 
 modern alternatives, the voluntary system, or pensions from the 
 State. One of the greatest modern philosophers has made this the 
 foundation of his political teaching. Coleridge asserts that 
 the sacred Reserve, divinely sanctioned in the Hebrew common- 
 
47 
 
 wealth, was an institution substantially common to all the nobler 
 races. He says — “ The principle itself was common to Goth 
 and Celt, or, rather, I would say, to all the tribes that had 
 not fallen off to either of the Aplielia , or extreme distances from 
 the generic character of man, the wild or the barbarous state, 
 but who remained either constituent parts or appendages of the 
 stirps generosa seu historical as a philosophic friend has named 
 that portion of the Semetic and Japetic races which had not 
 degenerated below the conditions of progressive civilisation. It 
 was, I say, common to all the primitive races, that in taking 
 possession of a new country, and in the division of the land into 
 heritable estates among the individual warriors or heads of 
 families, a reserve should be made for the nation itself” . . 
 
 “ These, the property and the nationally , were the two con- 
 stituent factors, the opposite but correspondent and reciprocally 
 supporting counterweights of the commonwealth.”* This 
 “ national ty” amongst us became invested in our national church, 
 and “ the object of the national church was to secure and im- 
 prove that civilization, without which the nation could be neither 
 permanent nor progressive.” Its religious purpose was this — 
 that the lowliest of the casual poor should not be deprived of 
 man’s true heritage : — “ Try to conceive a man without the 
 ideas of God, eternity, freedom, will, absolute truth, of the 
 good, the true, the beautiful, the infinite; — an animal en- 
 dowed with a memory of appearances and facts might remain ; 
 but the man will have vanished, and you have instead a 
 creature more subtle than any beast of the field , but likewise 
 cursed above every beast of the field”] The nationalty had 
 a social and political office also; it was “to form and train 
 up the people of the country to be obedient, free, useful, organis- 
 able subjects, citizens , and patriots, living to the benefit of the 
 State, and prepared to die for its defence.” 
 
 I have already affirmed that a share in the national church 
 property not only is nothing analogous to pensions, but stands 
 opposed to them in principle and tendency. The quotations 
 above made explain my meaning. A share in the nationalty is 
 a share in the citizenship of the nation. The “ voluntary system,” 
 as imposed upon us three centuries ago by a giant “ eviction, ” 
 is exclusion from it ; and pensions are an alms such as the State 
 might give to aliens. Between the nationalty and that nationality 
 of which we have heard much at home, and seen something of 
 late in foreign countries, the connexion is plain. There is a 
 negative nationality which means hostility to some other country : 
 
 Coleridge’s Church and State, according to the Idea of each. 
 
 t Ibid. 
 
48 
 
 there is a positive one which means the possession of what 
 belongs to our own. I trust that Ireland does not despise 
 nationality in that form in which it seems a practicable thing, 
 and that England is not resolved to deny her what, in this form, 
 is necessary both for her and for the empire. The State has an 
 interest in this matter. Loyalty is the attribute of subjects ; 
 but a reverence for law proceeds from the sense of citizenship — 
 which must be preceded by the condition of citizenship. Cole- 
 ridge, whose philosophy so deeply appreciated the “ national 
 reserve,” would yet, by the strangest of paradoxes, have with 
 held it from the Catholic clergy. He stumbled against a 
 polemical antagonism, and assumed that they were subject to a 
 “ foreign allegiance.” Had this judgment of them been right, 
 he should have affirmed that they must neither be recognised 
 nor tolerated, and — as a consequence — have bidden Ireland to 
 depart. He had not apprehended that, according to the Ca- 
 tholic estimate, a “ foreign allegiance,” as regards matters 
 ecclesiastical, is found in the allegiance of the Church to the 
 State. Men declaim about a “divided loyalty!” They have 
 yet to learn that with the best intentions a man can be but half 
 a loyalist who is not alike submissive, in the spiritual sphere to 
 a universal, and, in the national sphere to the civil authority, 
 rendering thus obedience at once to Caesar and to God. But 
 wisdom is progressive, and one of Coleridge’s noblest disciples 
 applied his principle aright. Dr. Arnold, in 1834, made a 
 stronger statement than 1 have made. He said — “ The good 
 Protestants and bad Christians have talked nonsense, and worse 
 than nonsense, so long about Popery, the Beast and Antichrist 
 . . . that the simple, just, and Christian measure of es- 
 
 tablishing the Roman Catholic Church in three-fifths of Ireland 
 seems renounced by common consent . . the Christian people 
 
 of Ireland — i. <*., in my sense of the word, the Church of Ireland 
 — have a right to have the full benefit of their church property, 
 which now they cannot have, because Protestant clergymen they 
 will not listen to.” It is singular how like his are the state- 
 ments made by his successor in the chair of modern history at 
 Oxford. It is thus that Professor Goldwin Smith speaks : — 
 . “ The hold of the Irish establishment on the religious 
 
 affections of the Irish people is a garrison of 20,000 men. At 
 that price England purchases a source of just discontent and a 
 permanent disaffection.” He might have added that at that 
 price the Establishment itself' purchases a place less credit- 
 able than it might otherwise claim. An Establishment which 
 separates the tc nationalty” from the nation becomes an endowed 
 sect without the freedom of a sect. 
 
49 
 
 V II. It is the practicable course. W e shall fall into a deplorable 
 error if we infer that because the Radical party has lately expressed 
 sympathy with Ireland the Church question is most likely to 
 be settled in accordance with extreme views. This is emphati- 
 cally stated in a book characterised by the strongest hostility to 
 the Irish Establishment — “ If they (the Catholics) were to urge 
 a better title to the Ecclesiastical revenues than that of the 
 Protestants, it might be difficult to controvert such a claim ; but 
 to demand the exclusive appropriation of those funds to secular 
 purposes, for which they were never intended, is a pretension 
 unfounded in either justice or expediency, and which both the 
 pride and the religious feeling of England will most assuredly 
 resist.” The policy of secularization is advocated by one 
 political party alone. That party is the one least likely to 
 benefit Ireland on the long run, and least capable of under- 
 standing what is best in her. The Liberals have repeatedly 
 pledged themselves to the necessity of justice in this matter ; 
 while among the Tories are several, as Mr. Disraeli and Lord 
 Lytton, whose expressions have been fully as strong; and 
 every day there must grow up a larger number in both these 
 historical parties to recognize, with Mr. Burke, the folly of 
 alienating by injustice those who, as the children of a hierarchical 
 Church resting on authority and antiquity, must naturally be the 
 friends of order. But Liberals and Tories alike must oppose 
 Religious Equality if asserted in a manner at variance with the 
 Constitution. That Constitution cannot cease to recognise en- 
 dowments for religious purposes, without endangering all that 
 is cognate to them, — all that connects the present with the past, 
 and provides for a future in harmony with both. There is one 
 paramount question for the English legislator — “ How will our 
 mode of dealing with the Irish Establishment affect the Eng- 
 lish?” Now, of the two methods suggested, one must be fatal 
 to the English Establishment, while the other could in no way 
 injure it. Distribute the Irish Church property fairly between 
 Catholics and Protestants, and you legislate on the ground of 
 circumstances confessedly special to Ireland . At the Refor- 
 mation the Irish people remained Catholic, and has remained 
 such ever since. The problem is to-day what it was three cen- 
 turies ago. It is not with churches as with individuals. The 
 generations pass ; property is bought, sold, and mortgaged ; 
 new proprietors take the place of old, and prescription makes 
 their claims good. It is thus in Ireland. The settlement of 
 property has gradually blended itself with the interests of every 
 class, and so knitted itself to the whole structure of the body 
 politic that the repeal of the Act of Settlement would now be, 
 
 * E 
 
50 
 
 not the amputation of a limb, but a more formidable operation — 
 the extraction of a spine. It is thus in all nations. Were it 
 otherwise wounds could never heal, and, property never becom- 
 ing assured, the descendants of the earlier proprietors could never 
 recover by industry, and by the gradual blending of races and inte- 
 rests, what can thus alone be permanently regained. Time creates 
 prescriptive right ; but while time does all, time is nothing. 
 Races blend with time, but churches remain apart. Individuals 
 die, but churches live. In Ireland the two ecclesiastical rivals 
 stand face to face now, as the individual claimants for confiscated 
 estates stood in the first generation alone. To England this 
 principle does not apply. In England the nation became Pro- 
 testant, and the sects successively separated from the Establish- 
 ment. Again, the Catholics in Ireland form one solid and single 
 body, whereas in England the Dissenters consist of separate 
 bodies in frequent change. Lastly, there remains this momen- 
 tous difference. The English sects left the Establishment in a 
 large measure because they disapproved of endowments, and 
 consequently they could not demand them. From the just dis- 
 tribution of Irish Church property the English Establishment 
 would therefore have nothing to fear, for no precedent would be 
 created by it. On the contrary, that Establishment would gain 
 a new security. The English Dissenters claim to be nearly as 
 numerous as the members of the Establishment. Count the 
 Irish and English Churches as one, and there becomes at once a 
 majority against the Establishment. 
 
 But, on the other hand, the secularization of Church property 
 in Ireland would plainly be a precedent for England. All who 
 are in favour of the voluntary system would say, <c You have 
 yielded to the demand of Catholic Ireland : — yield then to that 
 of Protestant England. You might have satisfied the Irish by 
 merely giving them a just share of that property the alienation 
 of which was their wrong; but you can satisfy us in one 
 way only. The wrong we complain of is that all do not rest 
 alike on the voluntary system. On that principle we built our 
 secession, and in it alone we believe.” It is nearly certain that to 
 secularize the Irish Church property, would be to secularize the 
 English ; and thoughtful statesmen would resist in the beginning 
 what they could not resist at the end. Those only would act 
 otherwise who had always believed that the “ final cause” of the 
 Irish Establishment (to them otherwise inexplicable) was, that it 
 might prove the scandal and confusion of the English, and 
 eventually its ruin. 
 
 It is sometimes asserted that English statesmen would give 
 Catholic Ireland endowments only in the form of pensions. 
 
51 
 
 Facts disprove this. In the earlier part of the century pensions 
 were indeed advocated more than once, but the progress subse- 
 quently made carried us beyond this point. The avowal was 
 frankly made that the Irish Catholics must have their share of the 
 Church property. Thus Mr. Charles Buller said, in 1844, 
 “ While we continue to perpetrate this bold and wanton out- 
 rage on the first principles of justice and good sense, the people 
 of Ireland never will — nay, never ought to — believe in our 
 justice or good will . . . He held that had Mr. Pitt been 
 
 able to carry out his whole scheme, Ireland would have been as 
 well governed as any country in the world. The time for pay- 
 ing the Irish clergy was, however, now past. It was one of the 
 Sybilline books, irrecoverably missing . . . Were the 
 
 Catholic clergy now to take the pay of the State they would lose 
 all hold upon the people, and the Government would thus 
 lose an instrument upon which we now must rely for the main- 
 tenance of anything like order in Ireland.”* Lord Fitzwilliam 
 said, “ Let him warn their lordships against ever making the 
 Irish Homan Catholic Priesthood a stipendiary Priesthood, or 
 pensioners on the Government.” . . . “ The Protestant rector and 
 the Homan Catholic priest must be placed upon precisely the 
 same footing — they must both be made to feel that they had 
 an interest in the soil ” f Again, Mr. Edward Ellice said “ He 
 thought it essential upon this, probably the first step in a new 
 course of ecclesiastical policy in respect to Ireland, to make a 
 protest, so far as he was able, against taking from the taxes of 
 the country means for the support of any ecclesiastical establish- 
 ment in Ireland. Once more, Sir Charles Wood said, “ The 
 settlers in Ireland had frequently been called the 6 Pro- 
 testant garrison’ of that country. He must do them jus- 
 tice ; they had gallantly performed their duty : but the times 
 for such a course were gone.” . . . “ If Ireland now were 
 
 to be governed at all, she must be governed upon just principles.” 
 
 . . . “ Mr. Pitt proposed to pay the Homan Catholic clergy, 
 
 but the project failed. Another attempt with the same object 
 was made in 1825, which also failed. He believed the time for 
 any such purpose was gone by.” . . . “ The Establishment 
 
 was for the living people and not for the land.” The same 
 principle was maintained by many others, including Lord 
 Brougham, Lord Bussell, Lord Palmerston, and Lord Grey, who 
 plainly asserted, “ If you admit that you must govern Ireland , 
 so as to obtain the good will and affections of the Irish people, 
 
 * “ The Church Establishment of Ireland," p. 17. 
 
 J Ibid , p. 52. 
 
 t Ibid, p. 18. 
 
52 
 
 you ought to legislate as a Parliament sitting in Dublin, and 
 freely representing the Irish people.” 
 
 What would be the purpose of statesmen in offering pensions 
 to the clergy? To satisfy the people, and to stand well with 
 their pastors. If so, the moment they discovered that pensions 
 were hated by both, the same motives would forbid such an 
 offer. Would not a politician, who understood the Irish clergy 
 so little as to think he could bribe them, and the Irish people 
 so little as to imagine that a bribed clergy could maintain social 
 order, be deterred from such an enterprise by the thought that 
 the Government money, if accepted, might be applied to pur- 
 poses not identical with those intended, and by a fear that the 
 recipients of it might be sometimes driven, in order to avoid 
 painful imputations, upon courses to which they are less tempted 
 now ? But the whole theory is a chimera. Statesmen would 
 not be so anxious to support the Catholic clergy of Ireland 
 mainly out of English resources, just as they do not aspire to 
 put the Irish county rates or poor rate upon England : and if 
 the endeavour were made it would fail. How strange are the 
 politics of spleen ! They assume that the Irish people are ready 
 to destroy their own Church property in order to spite the Pro- 
 testants, and again that English statesmen are ready to tax Eng- 
 land in order to spite the Irish bishops ! They are convinced that 
 England never would take a penny from the Irish Establish- 
 ment in order to win Ireland by letting her have her rights ; 
 but they think that England might be induced to confiscate the 
 whole of its property to do good to no one ! 
 
 In calculating the course likely to be taken by statesmen on 
 this subject we have to bear in mind their religious as well as 
 their political prepossessions. In the debates between 1833 
 and 1845 we do not find any eminent statesman asserting that 
 no injury would be done to religion by the secularization of all 
 Church property in Ireland ; but we find many affirming, like 
 Lord Lansdowne, that the present position of the ascendant 
 minority is the greatest injury as well as discredit to Protes- 
 tantism itself. Thus Lord Granville said, in 1845, “ The cause 
 why that institution had not prospered as a national Church was 
 mainly attributable to Government protection and Earl Grey 
 affirmed, “ the maintenance of that Church has been the great 
 obstacle to the spread of the Protestant religion.” It is but in 
 a modified sense that a Catholic could sanction these statements ; 
 but he willingly concedes that Protestant Ascendency has 
 lowered the type of Irish Protestantism, and thus injured those 
 it was intended to benefit. He concedes also that the destruc- 
 tion of all endowments, far from remedying that evil (as their 
 
53 
 
 just distribution would) must aggravate it, and thus inflict a 
 religious injury upon one class of Ireland’s sons, without confer- 
 ing any benefit on the nation at large. From this an inference 
 follows. If we endeavour simply to pull down the present Irish 
 Establishment, in place of making an ecclesiastical settlement on 
 the terms of equality, we had better consider whether we may 
 not create such a counter-agitation in England as will greatly 
 strengthen it. About thirty years ago there was an anti-tithe 
 war, and many believed that the Irish Establishment was 
 doomed. But the Irish party did not adopt a principle capable 
 of imparting strength to their cause, or worth sustaining against 
 difficulties : — and the hands that weary themselves with beating 
 the air are sure to fall ere long in listless helplessness. The 
 result was that some specious reforms were made in the 
 Establishment, and the time for real action was indefinitely 
 postponed. Should this happen again it will be attended with 
 even worse results. 
 
 Those among us who mistake for a great principle that 
 “ voluntary principle” which is but the “free, unhoused condition.” 
 of one whose house was burned over his head, assure us that 
 even if the whole of the Church property were offered to them 
 they would refuse it. In this they are consistent. But when 
 they say they would secularize it, and yet apply it to national 
 uses, they walk in a vain dream. Give them their own way 
 and still they fail. The benefit they would confer on the nation 
 is something that it already possesses, or is entitled to from other 
 sources, as we have already seen. By their proposed transfer- 
 ence they could no more add to the nation’s wealth than they 
 could raise the level of a lake by transferring the water from 
 one side of it to the other. They might, indeed, secularize 
 Church property — and on the same principle they might change 
 the ancient cathedrals (holy still, no matter in what hands), 
 into railway stations ; and they might build schools out of the 
 ruins of old abbeys — “plunder churches to endow a school!” 
 — but the railway stations and the schools would, if wanted, be 
 equally ours in good time, without this sacrifice to “ general 
 utility!” This is not all. If we refused to receive back, as 
 such, a share of the Church property, we should have no claim 
 whatsoever to apply it to other purposes, selected by ourselves. 
 We have a right to demand Religious Equality, but not to 
 insist on receiving it in one way only, and that a way unknown 
 to Catholic times, injurious to our neighbour, and profitable only 
 to those who have no right to such profit. To refuse redress 
 would he to condone the wrong. If the Church abdicates, the 
 State steps into x her place. King James I. demanded of Bishops 
 
54 
 
 White and Andrews whether the Crown had not a right to the 
 episcopal lands. The former answered — “ Surely, your majesty 
 hath the right, for you are the very breath of our nostrils.” 
 “And how sayest thou, Dr. Andrews?” continued the king. 
 “ Surely,” replied the more wary prelate, “your Majesty hath 
 a right to my brother White’s lands, because he giveth them unto 
 your Majesty .” 
 
 Some persons assure us that the “ spirit of the age” is opposed 
 to Religious Endowments. The age, like the individual, is at- 
 tended by two spirits, and one of these is an apostate one. As- 
 suming, however, the correctness of the prophecy implied, it is 
 irrelevant. Inevitable wrongs are not only deprived of their 
 best consolation, but are rendered infinitely worse by the mean 
 complicity of the wronged. The conscience of the guilty party 
 is stultified as well as hardened by such tricky complicity ; and 
 — the sound principle being once surrendered — there remains no 
 power of resisting the next aggression, and none of recovering 
 what has been lost. To contend for the Right, and to fail, is 
 the next best thing to victory. 
 
 We are sometimes told that the principle of “levelling up” 
 would require something also of levelling down. This is a 
 mistake. That principle would require simply that the Irish 
 Church property — such as it is or such as it may be made — 
 should be equitably divided between the Catholics and the 
 Protestants. If the wealth of the Protestant church should be 
 diminished, this would be, not because the principle I assert re- 
 quires any such diminution, but because a legislature mainly 
 Protestant did not think it desirable that the Protestant endow- 
 ment in Ireland should be, when compared to the number of the 
 laity, three or four times larger than it is in England. I have 
 shewn elsewhere* that the gross revenue of the Irish Establishment 
 amounts to 17s. 3d. on each member of the laity, or more, and that 
 in England the proportion is about one-third of this, or less. 
 The population of the Established Church throughout Ireland 
 is reckoned in the census of 1861 at 693,357 ; and its gross re- 
 venue is estimated in the Stackpool Returns at £586,428 yearly, 
 without counting the value of the glebe houses, and other very 
 considerable sources of income. Nor is this all. Of that church 
 population the whole is included within the three consolidated 
 dioceses of Armagh, of Down, and of Dublin, with the exception 
 of 276,346 persons dispersed over the remaining nine dioceses 
 of the Establishment. It would be for Parliament to decide, 
 respecting, of course, vested interests — and I hope it may never 
 
 “ The Church Settlement of Ireland.” 
 
55 
 
 decide such questions in a niggardly spirit — whether the popu- 
 lation of one large-sized English town, scattered over more than 
 three-quarters of Ireland, is the better for possessing such wealth 
 as exists nowhere else. For the Catholic Church I should never 
 desire excessive wealth. I think the system that mingles endow- 
 ments with voluntary contributions is the best and the freest. 
 For other communities it would be presumptuous in me to speak. 
 Both for their own sake, and for Catholic interests, I wish them 
 nothing but good ; but, however I may differ from them, I do not 
 think so meanly of them as to identify that good with the main- 
 tenance of injustice. 
 
 Imaginary difficulties are sometimes made respecting the just 
 distribution of church property, considered in its smaller details. 
 The Irish Dissenters are too few and ephemeral to claim a share 
 in it, even if they approved of endowments. The Presbyte- 
 rians have their Tt.egium Donum , which, if insufficient, can be 
 augmented. At all events, living as they do in a comparatively 
 compact mass, their claim could not extend beyond a share of 
 the Church property in some parts of Ulster. As regards 
 Catholics and Church Protestants, the principle of equality 
 would by necessity be applied, not in a mathematical but in 
 a moral sense. Some persons insist upon an exact definition of 
 the relative proportions in which the Church property should 
 be divided. There is no definition which they would not object 
 to. It may be frankly admitted that those who disapprove the 
 principle will never approve the details ; but to them only will 
 there seem any serious difficulty in this matter. A true logician 
 sees at once the distinction between logic in the pure domain 
 of thought, and logic applied within that of social life. In the 
 latter, logic has always to abate somewhat of its technical pre- 
 cision that it may preserve its intellectual method and moral 
 purpose, as metals admit of alloy that they may become mal- 
 leable. The logical pedantry that refuses such concessions 
 would simply banish logic from the domain of practical things. 
 It would repudiate principles because it could not realise 
 them in the form of exact and invariable rules. We must fling 
 aside these pruderies, which have but an equivocal relation 
 with sound morals. Above all, we must not mix together 
 rhetorical assumptions with logical exactions. It is practically 
 absurd to deny the possibility of doing equal justice to the 
 Catholics and Protestants of Ireland except through equality 
 of loss. It is a logical sophism, no less, to insist upon a mathe- 
 matical equality between two communities which equally indeed 
 possess rights, but which include also the greatest differences both 
 essential and accidental, and to deal equally with which must 
 
56 
 
 therefore ever be an approximate thing, like catting equal 
 slices from a globe and a cube. W e must look at these things 
 in a manly way, and not mistake cavils and small points for 
 political logic. A man who insists on an equality based exclu- 
 sively on numbers will find it difficult to prove that this assump- 
 tion, confessedly empirical when applied to parliamentary 
 representation, constitutes a complete philosophy as regards the 
 distribution of Church property, or is strictly consistent with 
 the precedents of any country or age. A clever questioner, 
 moreover, may chance to meet questions as sharp as his own, and 
 more weighty. A Protestant opponent may ask him — “ Are you 
 going to make concessions to the State exactly equal to those 
 which Protestants make?” — To which our answer is thdtwe can 
 never concede the smallest particle of our freedom. A Catholic 
 may ask — “ You ignore the circumstance that the Church Pro- 
 testants are widely scattered, which circumstance is injurious 
 to us Catholics in the arithmetical calculation : — do you also 
 ignore the fact that the Presbyterians are concentrated, which 
 is to our advantage? Supposing that all the Church Protes- 
 tants inhabited one single city, would you ignore that circum- 
 stance?” Another might say — “You are so punctilious as to 
 the scales with which you weigh justice — scruple and drachm — 
 that you seem to jest, and tempt us to jest also. Do you admit 
 that you forfeit all claim to be thought a just man if the servant 
 in your household who requires most food eats more than the 
 servant who requires least, or than the child who might be 
 killed by a surfeit?” Singularly enough, this question about 
 fractions seems most to disturb those who occasionally affirm 
 that the Catholics are the better for having no endowments at 
 all ! The only answer their question admits is this — that as 
 soon as the principle of a just distribution has been agreed to 
 upon both sides, the details must be settled, as they are in all 
 practical affairs, by arrangements which include mutual conces- 
 sions, but not a sacrifice of principle. W e must lift up our minds 
 above the horizon of a “ minute philosophy,” and remember that 
 this high matter is not mainly a financial, but a moral and politi- 
 cal one. A basis will be laid for Ireland’s peace when a change 
 has been made in which men of sense can recognise the fact 
 that Religious Equality has been 'practically substituted for an 
 Ascendency, the record and symbol of all her woes and shames. 
 
 I have never yet heard one good reason for the alienation of 
 our church property from its original and sacred purpose — notone 
 that touches on a principle — not one that tends to the weal of 
 religion, or the happiness of Ireland. One might suppose it was 
 unreasonable to demand such a reason. I hear nothing except 
 
57 
 
 theories about party combinations, and assurances that if we 
 trust to the popularis aura we shall be wafted into Paradise. 
 Statesmen, it is said, will relinquish their most cherished con- 
 victions in a sudden alarm, scared as Sir .Robert Peel and the 
 Duke of Wellington were after the Clare election. There is no 
 •greater mistake than that of confounding the alarm of brave men 
 with that of cowards. The former class learn from experience 
 because they have courage, and change their opinions because 
 they were wrong. Such men were Peel and W ellington ; and 
 I hope that our soldiers and sailors may ever be cowards in the 
 sense in which they were. They abandoned prescriptive illusions ; 
 but they would not have been intimidated into passing wrong 
 measures. It is so with the best statesmen of our own time. 
 New political exigencies will dispel their old prejudices, but will 
 not force them to abandon their solid convictions. We are 
 sometimes told that our natural allies are the English Radicals ! 
 That seems strange. It would not have pleased those Catholic 
 loyalists of Ireland, who, at the time of "the great rebellion, 
 stood by their Sovereign, while they insisted also on the freedom 
 of their religion ; nor those in the next generation who fought 
 at once for their king, their parliament, their country, and their 
 liberty — and are still branded as rebels by those who give royal 
 honours to General Garibaldi. It would not have pleased 
 our countrymen in earlier days, who, whether they defended 
 the rights of a Gaelic prince or a Norman Palatine, were ever 
 loyalists at heart. Of course religion and politics lie in different 
 spheres; still, it seems a paradox that men who hold what 
 are called the most “ advanced” views in politics should be the 
 only allies fit for those who, alike in religion and social usages, 
 rest on antiquity, and have suffered much from revolutions. 
 However, they are our friends, we are told, and they would be 
 hurt if we demanded our Church property ! In that case 
 they must be very undesirable friends. I can understand their 
 preferring something else for us — something that has especial 
 relations with their own interests ; but surely conscience and 
 reason would compel them to help us to our own as an improve- 
 ment on the present system. I can understand their wanting 
 our aid, and offering theirs on terms ; but the terms must be com- 
 patible with our principles, our interests and the rights of all our 
 fellow-countrymen. To remove us from that solid ground 
 is to keep up the old system of ruling by dividing, which has so 
 long made Ireland contemptible. Allies are sometimes formid- 
 able. Our proposed allies belong to the “ voluntary’’ school ; — 
 but the voluntary principle applies to educational as well as 
 to religious purposes. W e want endowments for our University 
 
 * JT 1 
 
 ■ Jfcfc,;..-. 
 
58 
 
 and for middle class schools ; nor are we prepared to surrender 
 those which support our poor schools or our chaplaincies. What 
 if we should intend to accompany our new friends for one mile, 
 and they should insist on accompanying us for twain ? 
 
 Again, Catholics are sometimes told that the Dissenters are 
 their best political allies. Why so ? We are at opposite poles 
 of thought ; our traditions are at variance ; and, on the long 
 run, politics rest on sympathies and antipathies as much 
 as upon either interests or principles. We assisted the Dis- 
 senters to win their civil liberties, and they were very obliging 
 to us just then ; but, if I mistake not, they turned against us 
 on critical occasions. I do not know how many of them 
 voted for the increased grant to Maynooth ; but it certainly 
 was not so by their aid, but by that of Lord Aberdeen, and Lord 
 Monteagle, and Lord Herbert, of Sir James Graham and Mr. 
 Gladstone, that we defended ourselves against an “aggression” 
 which Ireland had not provoked — the “ Ecclesiastical Titles 
 Bill.” If ever they need our aid again to protect their liberties 
 they shall have it. They shall have it if the freedom of their 
 religious organization, or of their education, is assailed — two 
 things in which they have not always respected the liberty of 
 Catholics. They shall have it because this is required by 
 justice, and by all the best interests of the country. They 
 have an important place in the Commonwealth; but they are 
 not in sympathy with us; and if our principles were such as 
 they imagine them to be, it would be their duty to oppose us, 
 or at least to contract with us no alliance, except one likely 
 to draw us away from our true strength, which is to be found 
 in those principles alone. Observe the attitude of the Ulster 
 Presbyterians. Belfast College is almost wholly in the hands 
 of Protestants ; yet they cannot endure that the Government 
 should make any University reforms calculated to give fair 
 play to Catholics. Their able urgency introduced into the 
 National system of education several changes not favourable to 
 the mass of the people; but, those changes once made, they 
 nailed their weathercock to the mast, and proclaimed that every- 
 thing in that system must be immutable. This small body 
 sends a deputation first to Dublin and next to London, and 
 dictates a legislation for all Ireland ! What is the cause? “ Im- 
 perfect sympathies.” From such exploits we may infer how the 
 Dissenters regard Catholics. They dislike the Anglican Church 
 chiefly because they see in it a resemblance to the Catholic. W e 
 should be ill-advised to plagiarise from their principles in the 
 hope of retaining their alliance. There existed among the English 
 Catholics at the beginning of this century a certain club full 
 
59 
 
 of 44 faith and fear” — that is, it had a great fear of opinion, and a 
 great faith in expedients. In this faith and fear it recommended 
 to the descendants of those who had faced the tempests of 
 centuries a very notable device — that of emblazoning upon their 
 banners in future the title of 4 4 His Majesty’s Catholic Dissent- 
 ing Subjects.” I do not know that they made much of this 
 dexterous move, which resembled the Knight’s move at chess 
 that always takes one by surprise, more than the deeds of the 
 knights of old. Eventually when we were received back into 
 the Constitution it was not in disguise ; and the English states- 
 men who so largely assisted us were those who belonged to the 
 historical schools of politics. 
 
 F ar from snatching at the principles of others, I think we had 
 better impart to them our own. They alone reconcile freedom 
 with stability, the rights of the individual with the hierarchy of 
 society, because they alone are based, not upon that fiction, the 
 Natural Equality of man, but upon that truth, the Spiritual 
 Equality ofKedeemed Humanity. The expression 44 levelling 
 up” has been called a novelty and obscure. It is on 44 levelling 
 up” that Christianity has been engaged ever since it declared 
 war upon serfdom and laid the foundations of a Christendom. 
 The obscurity may be dissipated by degrees. It is not only to 
 the question of the Irish Church that the principle applies. On 
 the power of statesmen to understand it will depend their power 
 of solving both in Europe and America all the great political 
 problems of the coming time. Destruction is an easy thing — 
 construction is an arduous but noble one. It is something to 
 create — it is something to preserve — but in restoration — not 
 the restoration of conventional details, but the restoration of 
 permanent principles — what is great in both stands united. 
 This is our work in Ireland, and every English statesman, wise 
 or capable of wisdom, even if he begins with opposing, will end 
 with applauding it. 
 
 There are those to whom everything in politics is a game or a 
 jest, but with us it must not be so ; the greatness of our cause 
 forbids it. There are those who ever seek short cuts, and lose 
 themselves in quagmires ; but with us it must not be so ; the 
 goal stands right before us, and we have but to run straight. 
 It is not for us to consult auguries, or vaticinate about party 
 combinations, or throw in a Church to balance the trembling 
 scale. Alas ! how much are men deluded by what is near ! 
 How easily can a pebble, held close to the eye, blot sun and 
 moon from the firmament ! We must think of the great things 
 of the past and future, for they are essential, and pass by the 
 accidents of the moment. The religious question of Ireland 
 
60 
 
 will be settled by no clever devices, or startling leaps, but by 
 the progress, whether rapid or slow, of just principles and 
 generous aims in her and in England. Let parties act as they 
 please ; — the time will come when no party will think that it can 
 do without Ireland. Ireland is not to be won by fair speeches in 
 the mouth of one party, nor is she to be held and disposed of as if 
 she were a farm, the hereditary possession of another. Those who 
 assert the cause of a Nation and its Faith have nothing eventually 
 to fear but themselves — they must be vigilantly conscientious, 
 and they must never compromise the dignity of that cause, which 
 is, in a large part, its strength. The Catholic cause is not a sec- 
 tarian one ; — it is that of justice, a faithful adherence to which, 
 as distinguished from what faction calls zeal, is, in politics, the 
 chief note of a statesman truly religious. It is the cause of peace 
 also, and we must sustain it in the spirit of peace, remembering 
 that Ireland has need of all her sons, and that it little becomes 
 us, deliberating on matters of gravest religious importance, to 
 permit our blood to be agitated by the passions of the inferior 
 animals. With whom should we be incensed ? Those whose 
 unhappy inheritance it is to defend a fortress that frowns on 
 their country are yet often but acting much as we might have 
 acted in their place. It is the cause of Ireland, and of her Church. 
 Would that we had known this in time ! The moment we had 
 attained our civil freedom it became our primary duty to vindi- 
 cate the rights of religion. Had we sought first what was spiritual 
 the other things which we truly needed would have been “ added 
 unto us.” But we preferred what flattered the imagination to 
 that which was precious to the soul. Let us now accept our 
 lesson, and demand the equal rights of our Church, insisting upon 
 this one thing — no less and no more — and bearing in mind that 
 Powers greater than our own are at our side, if, having once as- 
 serted this sacred cause, we uphold and advance the same with 
 invincible fortitude by all just and expedient means known to 
 .the Constitution, and by them alone. If England thinks of 
 nothing but pensions, and Ireland of nothing but the confiscation 
 of Church property, much may be said but nothing can be done. 
 The question that torments both countries will remain. I have 
 endeavoured to indicate the common ground upon which just 
 men in both may take their stand — not ignorant that my 
 opinions will displease many persons, both Catholics and Pro- 
 testants, but remembering that to please is no man’s duty, and 
 that Truth, if once presented to truthful minds, though by the 
 feeblest advocate, advances by its proper strength and prospers 
 on its way. 
 
s 
 
 1