and Tithes, Justification by Faith and sinecure bishoprics. The religion of an Establishment is a geographical religion, the religion of the soil, not of the people; and the Established Church of Ireland, therefore, still calls the country her own, because, with not a tenth of the population within her pale, she owns the tithes. But in these views, how can Dissenters be brought to participate or sympathize? They see that, instead of being even co-extensive with Protestantism in Ireland, above one half of the Protestants belong to another communion; and that the only denomination of Protestants which has not increased, is that for whose benefit the costly and ill-constructed apparatus of the State hierarchy is maintained, at the expense of the whole

country.

The splendid Protestant Church Establishment has done nothing for Ireland, in comparison with the vastness of its apparatus, and its immense resources, even on the lowest calculation of its revenue. So inefficient has it proved, after the lapse of three centuries, in gaining over the Irish people to the principles of the Reformation, that vigorous measures have been taken by Parliament for the diminution of its machinery; a considerable part of which is allowed to be useless, even by the most enlightened supporters of its connexion with the State, who declare the necessity of its being rendered more commensurate to the very limited sphere of the Anglo-Irish Episcopalian population, beyond which, notwithstanding the number of its ministers, the Establishment appears to have made comparatively little salutary impression. In some parts of the country, notwithstanding its supposed advantages for usefulness as the religion by law established, it has been known only as a bare endowment; it has possessed no congregation, sometimes no sanctuary.-Nay, how lamentable is the fact, that the more recent troubles of Ireland, which have called for the presence of troops, and the rigour of martial law, have been mainly owing to the hostile and malignant feelings engendered by those laws which have demanded the surrender of property by Roman Catholics, to support a religion which they are taught to consider as a dangerous and damnable heresy! Even the sword unsheathed, (O spectacle of grief and shame!) expressly to add the dread of ghastly wounds and death to the claims of the avowed church of the meek and lowly Saviour, has utterly failed to give efficiency to those claims; and the Protestant church, descending from her proud eminence as the lady of kingdoms, and with her garments stained with the blood of those who were slain in their resistance to her demands, has been reduced to sue, as an humble suppliant, at the door of the Legislature, for the pecuniary means of preserving her clergy from actual want! Can it be imagined that such a system of attempting to maintain the religion of Jesus will ever convert its enemies to friends? or that any kind of compulsion, however modified by ingenuity-whatever Protean forms and mutations it may assume, will prove otherwise than disastrous to the triumph of the truth? Can such a system regenerate Ireland?' Hoppus, pp. 46, 47.

VOL. XIV.-N.S.

T T

But the Church Establishment has not been merely inefficient: it has raised up positive obstacles to the diffusion of pure Christianity, both by discountenancing the use of the Irish language as a vehicle of religious instruction, and by the restrictions which Episcopal etiquette has imposed upon the zeal of even its own

ministers.

May not,' asks Professor Hoppus, the assertion safely be hazarded, that whatever has been done by the Church of Ireland to conciliate the attention of Roman Catholics, and to effect their conversion to the truth, has not been accomplished in the spirit of the Establishment? Every friend to Ireland must rejoice to know, that there are very many among the clergy who are the brightest ornaments to the Christian community; who are sedulously devoting themselves to the spiritual good of their respective neighbourhoods, and are spending and being spent in the work. These excellent men owe their usefulness, under the Divine blessing, to their own extraordinary exertions ; departing from the mere routine of ecclesiastical forms and rules; being instant in season and out of season, in carrying the gospel through their preaching circuits; and acting in the laborious spirit of missionaries.

The same principle pervades, in a very decided manner, the labours of the numerous purely voluntary Societies, of various denominations, which have been instituted, expressly, for the religious benefit of Ireland. Of these, the incomes amounted last year, if I mistake not, to less than twenty thousand pounds-a sum totally inadequate to the magnitude and importance of the object, when we consider the spiritual destitution of the sister kingdom; or even the temporal weal of the empire at large. What effects might not be anticipated, if resources even approaching to those of the Protestant Establishment, were devoted to zealous missionary labours for the salvation of the Irish-if the Episcopal Church, no longer bearing the appearance of a mart for worldly emolument and ambition, nor sustained by cruel exactions, but by the offerings of her own wealthy adherents; and strong in the purification of her sanctuary, the simplicity of her aim, and the apostolic labours of her clergy, were to seek no other ascendancy than that which would be attained by winning the millions of Ireland to Christ!

The Reports of the Societies I have alluded to, and those of the more stated associations of ministers of different denominations, are clear evidence that, notwithstanding all difficulties, great good has been accomplished through these christian exertions. The Irish Evangelical Society alone, four years ago, had fifty-seven agents performing various services; and the Report for the year 1834 sufficiently proves, that in each of the four provinces of Ireland, the gospel, going forth in its own native simplicity, appears, in numerous instances, to have been rendered the means of conversion, not merely to the profession of Protestantism, but also to the truth as it is in Jesus. Yet the spots where there are collected bands of decided and zealous Christians, are still but as oases in the mighty desert. The churches and ministers of all denominations, whose lamps are trimmed and burning

are but as beacon-lights scattered at distant intervals over the vast tracts of darkness, and are insufficient to produce one continuous and extended illumination.' PP. 53-55.

The Irish Society of London, for promoting the Education and Religious Instruction of the Native Irish through the me'dium of their own language,' was established in 1822. It has for its president, a Bishop, not of the Irish Church; and its income is about £3000 a year, derived from voluntary contributions! What a libel is the very existence of this Society upon the Irish Establishment! Does it not imply an admission on the part of the handful of Episcopalians by whom it is supported, that, for the purposes contemplated and the means pursued by this Society, the Establishment, with its princely revenue of £800,000, has been altogether useless? Such at least is the fact. While the Irish language has been employed as the medium of instruction, and the instrument of power, by the Romish priesthood, and the Irish press has been in busy operation at Antwerp, Louvain, and Rome, the crooked and short-sighted policy of the British government and the Protestant hierarchy forbade the attempt to employ it as the channel of conveying Scriptural knowledge to the minds and hearts of the Irish peasantry; and the Irish Bible was virtually placed in the Index Expurgatorius of the Protestant Church. Forty years elapsed after the death of the apostolic Bedell, before his Irish Translation of the Scriptures was suffered to see the light; and down to the close of the seventeenth century, a single edition of about 600 copies, in quarto, of the whole Bible, and two editions of the Irish New Testament at an interval of eighty years, were all that had been given to the Irish natives. And yet we wonder that the Reformation has not advanced in Ireland! It was not till the year 1828, nearly 200 years after the venerable Bedell sat down to his gigantic labours, that the Irish Bible complete, in its appropriate native character, for the first time issued from the press. As an apology for this Anti-Protestant policy, it has been constantly affirmed that the Irish language is exclusively spoken and understood by comparatively few. Mr. Christopher Anderson, on the contrary, states, that no fewer than three millions require that instruction should be conveyed to them through this medium. Two millions will, he affirms, be found in Connaught and Munster alone; a number equal to the whole population of Scotland, and five times that of its Gaelic natives. Besides, it has been forcibly remarked, the natives of those provinces who can speak Saxon, (as they call it,) think and feel in Irish; and Protestantism is still a foreign religion, because it has disdained to use the language of the people whom we execrate for blindly clinging to the faith of their fathers!

Why has not the Reformation advanced in Ireland? The reply is thus given in the able, temperate, and unanswerable pamphlet put forth by the Reform Association.

The Reformation only widened the breach which cruel and impolitic laws had created. It added another distinction to the distinctions which existed before.-It converted the war of Races into a war of Creeds.-Espoused by the higher Clergy, whose interests had always been identified with those of England, and by the Settlers of the Pale, it became, on that very account, an object of suspicion to the Parochial clergy, and to their Irish flocks.-They rejected it.-We think that in doing so, they closed their ears to the voice of truth; but how much was wanting in Ireland, which endeared that truth to ourselves? If there be one thing that tended more than another to open the hearts of Protestants to the doctrines of the Reformation, it was the privilege of praying to God in their native tongue. That privilege was denied to the Irish. The Liturgy was never translated. It never has been translated up to the present day. The people were told, of two strange languages to choose the one least familiar to them, and which, in lieu of being endeared by old associations, was the symbol of little else than humiliation and conquest. Then, the Clergy sent to replace the old Catholic priesthood, were strangely, and culpably negligent. The only proof of their zeal was the destruction, by armed bands, of churches, which they said had been polluted by the Mass. In place of those great and good men, who founded Protestantism in Scotland, in Germany, and amongst ourselves, Ireland was given in prey to the refuse of the English Church. We wish no stronger evidence upon this point, than that of contemporary Protestant writers, such as Spenser,-men, who saw with indignation the excesses which they have recorded,-and we ask, whether it was by instruments such as these that a great moral revolution could be accomplished? Whether, if the Reformation had been entrusted to similar hands elsewhere, it would have produced the rich harvest which has sprung from the labours of Latimer, and of Ridley, of Calvin, of Melancthon, and of Knox.

In Ireland, Penal enactments took the place of that rational conviction, which was all powerful amongst ourselves. Without taking one single step for the conversion of the people, the Irish legislature proceeded to lay the foundations of that system of coercion, which has since been worked out with cruel, though fruitless, perseverance. The country was treated as a Protestant country, though Catholic in all but the name. The funds of the Catholic church were transferred by act of Parliament to the ministers of the new Creed, and an Establishment founded upon a scale befitting a nation, although but a fraction of that nation was included within its pale. History tells us how this experiment has succeeded, and how dearly we have expiated the original sin of conceiving that an Establishment could be maintained, which did not rest upon the belief of the majority of the people. In all the dissensions and disturbances which have distracted Ireland, the claims of that Establishment have been mixed up. They have served to perpetuate the old distinctions of Englishry, and Irishry,

amongst her population ;-they have stood as a barrier between the two countries;-rendering any identification of their interests impossible, and forbidding even any kindly approximation of feeling. They have added bitterness to political animosities, and infused a more deadly spirit into political feuds. In vain have we endeavoured, (to use the words of an eloquent writer,) "by one of those daring fictions, in which law leaves poetry far behind it," to deny to the Catholics a legal existence; in vain have we striven to crush them by Penal laws. They constitute the great mass of the Irish people, Out of a population of less than eight millions, 6,427,712 belong to this proscribed Creed. There are but 852,064 Episcopalian Protestants in all, of whom some 80,000, at the least, as Wesleyan Methodists, are Dissenters, to a certain extent, from the Church; and it is for the benefit of these 852,064 souls that an Establishment is kept up, which ought to provide spiritual instruction for a whole people ;-endowed with funds amply sufficient to provide it ;-founded upon the supposition that a time would come when it would so provide it ;-but now, weakening, undermining, destroying, the influence of Protestantism itself, by the irritation which its own claims are necessarily exciting; -contributing nothing to the moral and religious education of fourfifths of the people; but constantly coming into collision with them by its demands, and by the scenes of violence and bloodshed to which the attempt to enforce these demands has unfortunately led!'

pp. 4-7.

For the religious instruction of the seven millions of Roman. Catholics and Protestant Dissenters, the State Church makes no provision. And if we deduct from the number assigned to the Episcopal Church, the Wesleyans, who, though included under the head of Episcopalians, support their own ministers and places of worship, we shall have not much above 750,000 souls left within the pale of the Established Church*. But for even the whole of this small section of the population, the Establishment does not actually provide the means of religious worship out of its princely revenues. In Dublin, besides the parochial churches and chapels of ease, there are no fewer than sixteen chapels wherein Episcopal clergymen officiate, and which are supported by funds independent of parochial assessment or tithes. Some of

It is evident that the number of Dissenters are underrated in the Report of the Commissioners. The Presbyterians, who number 642,356, have 452 places of worship, or one to every 1411 souls. The Dissenters are set down at 21,808, with 403 places of worship; but the places belonging to the Wesleyans are included under the latter head. Taking 300 men, women, and children as the average congregation by which each chapel is supported, we shall have a body of 120,900 Dissenters, including the Wesleyans; which will leave only 752,973 Episcopalians. But 300 is much too low an estimate, and it is difficult to understand how the Established Church can make out her claim to any such number.