"They" (the Anglican ministers of Ireland) "will not fleece the sheep they cannot feed, and spend the spoils of a people conquered, not won.—
"London Times, March 4th, 1869.
The measure for the disestablishment and disendowment of the English Church in Ireland, recently introduced by the English premier into the British Parliament, is one of the most startling and boldest steps which has yet been taken by that body to rectify the criminal blunders of three hundred years of mistaken legislation. Mr. Gladstone, in moving the first reading of the act, in a very long speech, evidently prepared with great care, while admitting it to be "the most grave and arduous work of legislature that ever has been laid before the House of Commons," felt the necessity of cautiously and almost apologetically stating the case and explaining the views of those with whom he acted. Mr. Disraeli, the leader of the opposition, while agreeing with his distinguished successor in office in nothing else, was forced to allow the scheme to be "one of the most gigantic that had ever been brought before the house"—an opinion which, judging from the temper of all parties inside and outside of parliament, appears to be unanimously entertained.
The friends of the act are numerous in England as well as in Ireland, embracing all the Catholic population and a very large portion of dissenting Protestants of more advanced and liberal views in both countries. The Catholics of Ireland see in it the destruction of that infamous system which has not only robbed them of their altars and the graves of their ancestors, but compelled them to support in idleness and luxury what even Disraeli himself long since denounced as "an alien church." Though the partial restitution contemplated at this late day by this act bears no corresponding comparison with the magnitude of the evils borne, it is still restitution, and a most significant and, in a sense, abject admission of the utter failure of the experiment of the English government to force Protestantism on an unwilling people. The successful passage of the act will also necessitate the expenditure of large sums of money for purely charitable purposes, and what, in a national sense, is of more importance, it will remove one of the most salient and fruitful causes of Irish discontent. But it is in England that the question assumes the most portentous magnitude; for it has become apparent to every one there that the fall of the Irish Establishment is but the first act in the drama of the total severance of church and state in the entire British empire. The entering wedge well driven home in Ireland, the results in other parts of the United Kingdom become merely a matter of time. Sir John Grey, one of the strongest supporters of Mr. Gladstone's bill, himself a Protestant, hints at this in an article in a late number of his paper, the Dublin Freeman's Journal, in which he says: "He (Gladstone) will soon have powerful auxiliaries in the English curates, and they have more influence in forming public opinion in England than the bench of bishops and the ten thousand incumbents. The Irish curates will be in Mr. Gladstone's favor, and if ever disestablishment should be the lot of England—and he would be a rash politician who would negative such a proposition—the English curates would have in Mr. Gladstone's Irish measure a precedent for an equal measure of justice to themselves."
The opposition to the act comes in the first place from the whole body of Anglican bishops and clergymen in Ireland, if we except the Bishop of Down and a few badly paid curates who would benefit by its passage. The Orangemen, that most pestiferous of all social and political scourges, of course sustain their reverend friends, and their loyalty on this occasion has culminated in a remonstrance signed, it is said, by over two thousand noblemen and landed "gentry." Hostility to the policy foreshadowed by Mr. Gladstone was very active and virulent in England during the late elections, and is now exhibited in the Commons by a large and active tory minority. The English ecclesiastics have also taken up the cry with equal earnestness and scarcely less vehemence. At the last sitting of the New Convocation of Canterbury in London, an address to the queen in opposition to the provisions of the act was proposed and carried by the upper house, and upon being sent down to the lower house for adoption, the following and similar amendments were enthusiastically added: "Above all," say those reverend gentlemen, "we are constrained by our sense of duty to your majesty and to the Reformed Church of England and Ireland, humbly to represent to your majesty that disestablishment of the church in Ireland cannot be had without repudiation, on the part of the nation, of the necessity and value of the Reformation." This language is explicit and forcible enough, but the Synod of both Houses of Convocation of the Province of York, held on the same day, goes a little farther. "This convocation," they affirm, "view with sorrow and alarm the proposed attempt to disestablish and disendow the Irish branch of the United Church of England and Ireland, as seriously affecting the interests of the church in that part of the British dominions; as a fatal encroachment on the prerogatives of the crown; as unsettling the constitution of church and state guaranteed by engagements entered into by acts of union, and confirmed to members of the church by the solemn sanction of the coronation oath."
That part of the coronation oath prescribed by the first William and Mary, chapter sixth, to which allusion is here made and which is the straw that the drowning Anglicans are endeavoring to grasp, reads as follows: "Question: Will you, to the utmost of your power, maintain the laws of God, the profession of the Gospel, and the Protestant Reformed Religion established by law? And will you preserve unto the bishops and clergy of this realm, and to the churches committed to their charge, all such rights and privileges as by law do or shall appertain unto them or any of them? King and Queen: All this I promise to do, (king and queen lay hands on the holy Gospel, saying,) so help me God." The condition of this solemn oath would at first sight appear to preclude the queen from signing the act, were we not assured by the confident tone, and even the express words, of Mr. Gladstone that her majesty's views were entirely in accord with those of her first minister, and in fact, that she had already placed in the hands of parliament her right of ecclesiastical appointments in Ireland.
The history of the Irish Church Establishment, now happily about to disappear for ever, is so familiar to most intelligent readers that it requires but a passing notice. Since its birth at a so-called Irish parliament, summoned by Lord Grey in 1536, down to the present time, so unjust have been its proceedings, so rapacious its ministers, and so oppressive its exactions of an ill-governed and neglected people, with whom it never had the least sympathy, that Christendom has stood aghast in mingled wonder and disgust. Not only were the Catholics of Ireland despoiled of their churches, abbeys, and convents, the monuments of piety and learning and the dispensaries of Christian charity, reared by the hands of benevolent ancestors for over a thousand years, but the very humblest abodes of worship were handed over to a foreign clergy, preaching a new religion at the point of the sword, ignorant of the very language of the country, and by birth and training bitterly hostile to every interest, spiritual and temporal, of the people they were sent to teach. Nor was this all. The despoiled masses were compelled to pay, and still pay, for the support of this "alien" church a tithe on every foot of cultivated land in the kingdom, and upon the produce and stock derived from or raised on the same. The amount of property thus filched from the overburdened farmers and peasantry of Ireland under color of law, and the additional annual revenue wrung from that half-famished nation, is thus estimated by no less an authority than the English premier: [Footnote 51]
[Footnote 51: This, of course, is but a very small portion indeed of the property taken from the Catholic Church in Ireland under Henry VIII. and succeeding monarchs. Most of the abbey lands were first vested in the crown and then granted to courtiers and others at a nominal rent as the reward of their apostasy. Many of the wealthiest families in Ireland derive their titles to their lands from those acts of spoliation.]
"The commissioners appointed in 1868 estimated the annual value at £616,000, but, with all respect for their long labors, he must differ from them, for they had placed it too low; for one of their body, in a subsequent publication, estimates it at £835,000, but for the present purpose he would take it at £700,000. The capitalized amount was as follows: