CHRIST CHURCH CATHEDRAL, DUBLIN.
Yet his followers heard his epigrammatic assault with unconcealed dismay, and after it was delivered condoled with each other because it was a fiasco. The fault of the orator was that he gave his Party no position or counter-scheme behind which they could entrench themselves. He ignored the cardinal fact of the controversy, that the Irish people were smarting under a sense of injustice, because their own national church had been robbed to enrich the ministers of an alien creed. He conjured up terrible but imaginary revolutionary catastrophes as the results of the Bill. He dwelt on the value of the Irish Established Church as a body bound by law to receive the religious pariahs of the country, an argument that made the blood of most of his lieutenants, who were pious Churchmen, run cold. Three discontented priesthoods instead of one, said he, would make themselves organs of Irish discontent; ignoring the fact that the one priesthood which would not be smarting was five times as numerous and potent as the other two put together. But the debate as a whole was unreal and academic. It was more like a bout with foils than a duel à outrance. The speakers who were chiefly affected by the religious side of the question thought it expedient to represent the Bill as an alarming attack on property. The champions of property, on the contrary, represented the Bill as an impious attack on religion. Three speeches alone maintained the reputation of the House—those of Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Bright, and Sir R. Palmer. They each spoke as if they had a heart and a conscience, and were personally responsible for the moral and political results of their votes. Mr. Gladstone rested his case on the absolute necessity of redressing a wrong done by a strong nation to a weak one in an age when might was right. The Empire as a whole had a moral right in national interests to prevail over any of its parts. But Ireland, he said, had a right to be governed so that it might be known to all men that her life was not hostile but supplementary to that of the Empire. Mr. Bright’s speech was full of intense Christian feeling. He expressed, in words vibrating with genuine emotion, his horror at a system which associated any Christian church with a policy of conquest. As for the charges of robbery, he disposed of them in the splendid peroration in which he declared that the plan for disposing of the Church surplus realised his highest ideal of Christian statesmanship. It applied funds which were misused in stimulating barren sectarian controversies and enmities, to beneficent purposes untainted by doctrinal partisanship or dogmatic preferences. Sir Roundell Palmer surprised every one by his candid admission that a large measure of disendowment in Ireland was a moral necessity. All establishment revenues, such as those attached to episcopal sees, the capitular revenues of cathedrals, and funds for preaching Protestantism in places where there were no Protestants, he admitted could not justly be appropriated by a small alien sect in the name of the Irish nation. But then, he argued with subtlety and power, it was equally unjust to alienate parochial endowments, which were locally of parochial use in promoting the objects which they were instituted to further. Sir Roundell Palmer’s speech, in fact, revealed what would have been a possible compromise had it not come too late. He suggested that which Mr. Disraeli had failed to discover—an alternative policy—when he issued his electoral manifesto staking the fortunes of the Irish Church on the cry of “No Surrender.” The Second Reading of the Bill was carried, after a week’s debate, by a majority of 118.[300] Paucis carior est fides quam pecunia. Hence, after this division, the Churchmen thought there was nothing left to fight for save the money which the Irish clergy should be allowed to carry with them into the desert of Disendowment. On Wednesday, the 14th of April, Mr. Disraeli called the Tory Party together at Lord Lonsdale’s house, and the meeting agreed not to press private amendments, but to support Mr. Disraeli’s own proposals which he submitted to the House of Commons next night. He proposed that the Church, though disendowed, should remain under the discipline and patronage of the Crown. [301]
He demanded a year’s reprieve from disestablishment. He proposed to compensate permanent curates, to pay over to the Church a capital sum of four times its net annual revenue, also a sum equal to fourteen times the annual charges for repairs; and he demanded that the Church should be allowed to hold all private property ever given to it, whether in Catholic or Protestant times. He insisted on compensation for life interests on a more extravagant scale than the Bill sanctioned, and his proposal as to tithes was amusingly unscrupulous. One of the great points in his speech on the Second Reading was, that the Bill, whilst it confiscated the property of the Church, offered a conciliatory bribe to the landlords. The tithe rent-charge was sold at twenty-two-and-a-half years’ purchase to the landlords, on condition that they made it yield the State four and a half per cent. on its capital value. But to accommodate them Mr. Gladstone said that if they wished to buy up the tithe but could not pay the money down for a twenty-two-and-a-half years’ purchase, they could borrow it from the State, and refund it by paying three per cent. on it for forty-five years. In other words, Mr. Gladstone charged them three per cent. for interest, and kept the other one and a half per cent. of the tithe yield for forty-five years as a sinking fund to wipe out the original advance. Mr. Disraeli, however, proposed to sell the tithe rent-charge to the landlords at an average price struck from the records of the Landed Estates Courts during the past ten years. As rent-charges sold in the Landed Estates Courts were not sold under the security of the Government, the price at which landlords would have bought up these charges under Mr. Disraeli’s amendment would have been about twenty-five per cent. under that demanded by Mr. Gladstone. The case of the “permanent curates” seemed to excite much sympathy in the House. Mr. Gladstone was also at first inclined to yield to, though he ultimately rejected, an appeal from one of his supporters, Mr. Wykeham Martin, who desired to let the clergy of the Irish Church keep their glebe houses when free from building debt, without paying ten years’ purchase for the site as the Bill provided.
In truth, it was soon seen that it was hopeless to attack the Bill in Committee. Mr. Gladstone was master of every detail—legal, historical, and archæological. He showed himself an expert among the experts, and it appeared that he had foreseen every objection and forestalled every counter-plan. Mr. Disraeli—who had left much of the work of Opposition to Mr. Hardy and Dr. Ball—soon grew sick of the discussion, and used his influence to quicken the progress of the measure, the Third Reading of which was fixed for May 31st, when it passed by a majority of 114. On the Queen’s birthday the leading Conservative Peers held a meeting, at which strong efforts were made to reject the Second Reading of the Bill in the House of Lords. The ablest peers were, however, in favour of timely surrender, in the hope that they might extort better terms of compensation for the Church. That was also the view of the Episcopal Bench. On the other hand, the Irish Bishops said frankly that feeling ran so high among their flocks that they did not dare to let the Second Reading pass unchallenged. To do so, would sacrifice all their moral and personal influence in the Irish Church. The English Bishops admitted that they must do whatever their Irish colleagues did, and thus it came to pass that whilst Dr. Magee, the Bishop of Peterborough, privately argued in favour of accepting the principle of the Bill, and then making the best possible terms for disendowment, he delivered in the House of Lords by far the most eloquent and powerful speech denouncing its principle from a moral point of view. At another meeting of Tory Peers held at the Duke of Marlborough’s house, Lord Cairns and Lord Derby unfortunately induced the majority to sanction the policy of moving the rejection of the Bill. The debate in the House of Lords lasted all through the week, beginning on the 14th of June, and it was remarkable for sustained eloquence and intellectual power. The Bishops, especially Dr. Magee, carried off the honours of the fray. The Archbishop of Canterbury produced a strong impression against rejecting the Second Reading, for the burden of his argument was that the State should establish a church in order to keep it from becoming fanatical, and then maintain it only as long as it could do so without defying the will of the people. The Liberal Peers were timid and feeble, and the case for passing the Second Reading was really made out by Lord Carnarvon, Lord Salisbury, the Bishop of St. David’s, the Duke of Richmond, and Lord Stanhope. Perhaps the most striking point in the discussion was the clear indication it gave that the Peers, with the exception of Lords Salisbury and Carnarvon, were at heart partisans of concurrent endowment, and it was in this direction that most of the Amendments they proposed pointed, after the Second Reading had been carried by a majority of 33.[302] Lord Grey, for example, desired to cut out of the preamble of the Bill the clause forbidding the application of the Church surplus to religious uses, and Lord Russell wanted to authorise the purchase, out of the surplus, of churches, parsonages, and graveyards for all the sects in Ireland.
On going into Committee the Peers forced several amendments on the Bill. The date at which the Bill was to take effect was changed from 1871 to 1872. Existing Irish Bishops were to hold their seats in the House of Lords till they died out one by one. Curates’ salaries were not to be deducted from life interests—an alteration that increased the compensation to the Church by about £300,000. Life interests were to be taken at fourteen years’ purchase—the capital value to be paid to the Church, which would pay the annuities, a clear gain of about £2,000,000 to the Church. Glebes and glebe-houses were
DR. WILBERFORCE, BISHOP OF WINCHESTER.