that point, you decide whether the Connexion shall prosper or languish."

Or let us suppose again that the Connexional policy and administration had in some respects been different to what it has been. That is, suppose we had said less about our distinctive principles and form of church government, and descanted more on the preciousness of Christ and the importance of winning souls to Him; suppose we had curbed our appetite for legislation a little, and spent our time and energies in trying to provoke each other to abound more in love and good works, moderating our passion for individual rights and liberty, and intensifying our passion for souls, so that from the centre to the extremities of the denomination, there should have been a striving together for growth, enlargement and increase; suppose this object had been sought by building up and strengthening our interest in large towns, such as Manchester, Liverpool, Hull, Nottingham, &c., instead of spending our resources, resources often liberally supplied by the churches existing in the towns referred to, amongst a distant population where we were altogether unknown; a policy this which may be too faithfully described as giving the children's bread to strangers and leaving the children to starve; suppose the strong had helped the weak, and the weak had to the utmost helped themselves, and in all there had been a mind to work, might we not in the year of grace 1867 have witnessed results which should have filled us with wonder and joy.

Well let the dead past bury its dead; of this the writing of the present article has given us the strongest conviction that for men and material resources the Methodist New Connexion is in a position for the future to run side by side in a career of devoted Christian service with any other church in the land. And if the denomination is faithful to itself, and to its Divine Master, and to all its other gifts seeks to have added, in all the abundance in which it is possible to possess it, the gift of the Holy Spirit, the pages of its history for the next thirty-five years will far transcend any of those on which our eye has now been gazing.

ART. VI. THE IRISH CHURCH ESTABLISHMENT.

SCHEMES for the re-appropriation of Irish Church property are becoming plentiful. Some of them are unquestionably of great merit and will deserve careful consideration in due time. The scheme propounded by Mr. Bright, at Birmingham, is a remarkable example. But for the present such consideration may well be waived, in order that more earnest and undivided attention may be given to the prior question, now pressing for settlement, but the speedy settlement of which we seem in danger of taking too readily for granted-the question, namely, Whether the ecclesiastical revenues of Ireland shall be diverted at all from their present use? The strenuous resistance which will be offered on this ground must first be overcome before anything further can be done. question, therefore, we propose to address ourselves.

To this

The endowments of the Church in Ireland are of two kinds -landed estates, and rent-charge, the latter being the tithe commutation under the Act of 1838. Some of the land, it is said, was given to the primitive Irish Church by native princes in the times of Irish independence; other portions of the land we know to have been given by the English Government at various periods,-as, for instance, glebe lands in the northsaid to be the most valuable in Ireland-by the Government of James I. through the Commission for "the planting of Ulster. " Tithes were first authorised by Henry II. in 1172, at the Synod of Chashel, when the Irish Church at his bidding submitted to the authority of the See of Rome. But the origin of the several portions of ecclesiastical property, and whether they were given in the first instance to primitive Christians, to Romanists, or to Protestants, are now matters hardly worth enquiring into; except, perhaps, for the purpose of observing that this property was all originally the gift of the State. The real title of the Protestant Establishment to the property now in its possession is the Act of Settlement of Charles II. upon the authority of which Churchmen to this day very properly fall back. By this law it was enacted, "That all and every, the manors, lands, tenements and rents, whereof any Archbishop, Bishop, Dean and Chapter, or any other ecclesiastical person or persons whatever, in his or their public capacity, or any of them, were actually seized, or by themselves or their tenants possessed, in the year of our Lord

1641, and out of which, or any part thereof, they or any of them, through the fury and violence of the late times, have been disposed, be forthwith restored, settled, and delivered into the peaceable possession of the respective Archbishops, Bishops, Deans," &c., &c. Provision was made for the payment of certain tithes, and a clause was inserted, "For erecting churches and maintenance of ministers, and the declaration that out of every 100 acres forfeited, not yet distributed, two most convenient for the several parish churches shall be set apart for glebes. As to those already distributed, the possessors shall pay so much as is sufficient to purchase the like quantity of land for glebe. The Act of Settlement in which these and other similar provisions are made, and which is acknowledged to be "the fundamental law of property in the kingdom," is not a mere restoration of the property to its former real or supposed rightful owners; it treats all the property of the kingdom as belonging to the State, and makes a redistribution thereof. Hence it not only restores,-it also adds and subtracts-giving, for instance, new possessions to the Church, and taking them away from other holders. Now the Act of Settlement is an Act of Parliament, worth as much as and no more than other Act of Parliament whatever. That is to say, it is within the power of Parliament to repeal it, in whole or in part, and to enact instead thereof such other law or laws as may seem needful or wise. But it is said that so far as the property of the Church is concerned this repeal is made impossible by the fifth clause of the Act of Union. Here is the clause referred to :-"That the Churches of England and Ireland, as now by law established, be united into one Protestant Episcopal Church, to be called The United Church of England and Ireland,' and that the doctrine, worship, discipline and government of the said United Church shall be, and shall remain in full force for ever, as the same are now by law established for the Church of England, and that the continuance and preservation of the said United Church as the Established Church of England and Ireland shall be deemed and taken to be an essential and fundamental part of the Union." To the plea based on this clause several answers are possible; as, that there is no mention made of the temporalities of either Church; that the words "for ever" in an Act of Parliament mean no more than "until this Act be annulled or repealed;" and that, if the Act of Union be of literal interpretation and unchangeable obligation, it renders all further legislation concerning any portion of the United Church for ever impossible, and prohibits the slightest departure, even in the

remotest periods of our history, and by any authority whatever, from the "doctrine, worship, discipline and government of the said United Church as the same were "by law established for the Church of England" in the yesr 1800. But the readiest, and at the same time the most conclusive, answer is supplied by the action of Parliament itself since 1832. Since that time the Imperial Legislature has again and again exercised the most absolute control over the temporalities of the Irish Church, the Act of Union notwithstanding. It has abolished vestry-cess (the Irish name for Church Rates) and provided funds for church repairs by suppressing nearly half the total number of bishoprics; it has altered the mode of levying, and actually remitted 25 per cent. of the tithes ; it has appointed a Commission which forms no part of the Church organisation, but exists by the authority of the State, acts in the name of the State, and in that name and by that authority alone receives and pays considerable portions of Church revenue; and in short it has shown in the most effectual way that its power over Irish ecclesiastical property is not in the slightest degree impaired or limited either by the Act of Union or by any other Act whatever. We have no hesitation therefore in laying it down as a principle that Parliament has full power to deal according to its own will with the public property of the Irish Church.

In Ireland almost universally, and in England among nearly all classes of liberal politicians and religionists, there is an increasingly loud demand for the speedy resumption by Parliament of the national property now exclusively devoted to the Protestant Establishment in Ireland, and its application to some more truly national purpose. Irishmen hate the Establishment, and will never be content while it continues to be supported at the national expense. Englishmen affirm that the Irish Establishment is unjust, and declare that they will have an end of it. The strength and importance of this movement is acknowledged on all sides; its justice is the matter of our present enquiry.

The hostility of Irishmen to the Protestant Establishment is no doubt in part traditional; but to the extent within which this is true, it is not altogether without reason. English Protestantism, for which this nation had been long preparing, and which was the revolt as much of the kingdom as of the king from the usurpations of Rome, was in Ireland forced upon a heartily unwilling people. English Protestants were appointed to ecclesiastical offices, and were made the recipients of ecclesiastical revenues-the English Prayer Book was appointed to

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be used in public worship-English sovereigns claimed supreme ecclesiastical jurisdiction-in short, the Protestant Establishment was set up by English authority and English instruments; but the people were by no means converted-they were not so much as moved in the slightest degree from their allegiance to the Bishop of Rome. It is not too much to say that by the time when the work of setting up the new Establisment was at all complete, the Irish nation had been expelled from its own Church, supplanted by a mere handful of English emigrants. Then came discontent, disloyalty, confiscation, banishment, butchery-all the long tragic struggle that was at length succeeded by the complete subjection of the Irish under the barbarous penal statutes of William III. and Anne. A few examples of those laws will suffice to give a notion of their general character. No priest was allowed to leave his own parish. All the superior clergy were banished on pain of transportation, and for them to return from banishment was high treason, the penalty of which was disembowelling. Papist was allowed to teach a school, nor could any one go himself or send others to be educated beyond the seas. Intermarriages between persons of the two religions were forbidden. Children in case of either parent being Protestant were to be taken from the other and educated in that faith. No Papist

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could be guardian to any child. The eldest son, if a Protestant, could turn his father's estate into a tenancy for life, and so secure his own inheritance. No Papist could purchase land except for a term of not more than thirty-one years, at a rent not less than two-thirds of the full value; and if any Papist should obtain by descent, devise, or settlement, the title to an estate, he must conform to the Protestant religion within six months, on pain of forfeiture to the next Protestant heir. These, and many other things not a whit better, were enacted in that dreadful period; and to crown all, large rewards, to be levied in the manner of a tax upon the Popish inhabitants of the country, were offered to informers who should detect any violation of these statutes. "To have exterminated the Catholics by the sword," says Hallam, "like the Moriscoes of Spain, would have been little more repugnant to justice and humanity, but incomparably more politic." For more than a hundred years those laws remained in force. Some of them were repealed during the very last years of the eighteenth century; and it is even now little more than a generation since the last remnant of them was swept away and the principle on which they had rested renounced by the Catholic Emancipation Act. Can a nation soon forget such things? Men and women are