unwavering fidelity. The chiefs in the south, and in the east and west, had, as the Queen's Chancellor relates, "free use of all Papistry during the early part of Elizabeth's reign. In the northern province, the Archbishop of Armagh (Dowdall's successor, and the then sole claimant of the Primacy traditionally founded by St. Patrick) was a rebel, and sang masses to encourage the soldiers of O'Neil.* His suffragans in three other sees continued independent of the Queen to the day of her death. When the choice of the bishops lay between treason and renunciation of their religion, they accepted treason, overt or secret, without hesitation. The entire population, as well as the clergy, continued steadfast to Papal doctrines. But the Papal Church was not long able to keep possession of its property and its temporal status against the laws which gradually came into operation, according as one Irish chief after another succumbed to superior force or policy, and yielded his life, liberty, and estates to the royal discretion. The disestablishment of the Papal Church became eventually complete, although the spiritual organization of that Church remained intact. It maintained in its disestablished condition the succession of its bishops and clergy, and its ecclesiastical jurisdiction. Its rites and ceremonies, as long as the State was unable to suppress their open celebration, were performed in its ancient temples; and when the churches were laid waste or tenanted by Protestants, in private and secret places, even in caves and dens of the earth. There is no need to repeat here the dreary catalogue of the laws which, from Elizabeth to the Georges, made rebels of Papists, and Papists of rebels. But when the storm and fury of that penal epoch was overpast, the disestablished Papal Church, instead of being rendered weak and powerless, seemed to have positively thriven upon disestablishment. It had preserved to its allegiance the great bulk of the Irish population. It soon covered the land again with Roman Catholic churches, monasteries, and schools. It raised funds for those buildings, and for the maintenance of a numerous priesthood, without aid from the State, and without restoration to any share of the ancient endowments. But the Roman Catholic Church seeks not for re-establishment, nor to be placed again, as it was placed in 1172, at the disposal of the English Government. It still smarts with the memory of unforgotten wrongs. It is loyal to the Queen, and its loyalty is known to English Premiers of all parties in the State, who without hesitation admit Roman Catholics to offices of political trust. The blood of Roman Catholic, as freely as that of Protestant, soldiers flows for the sake of the glory or interests of the empire. But the Roman Catholic Church can best be loyal to itself and the Constitution by continuing disestablished. Its old carcer of Establishment and State * Froude's "History of England," vol. viii. p. 22.

endowment was unhappy and disgraceful alike for Papal Ireland as for Papal England. Its days of degradation were days of evil, but brought, perhaps, more harm to the Protestant State than to the Roman Catholic Church. But while protesting now, as ever, against past injustice, the Roman Catholic Church and people of Ireland decline re-establishment of their Church in the place of its Protestant rival. They are convinced that what will best enable them to fulfil their respective duties to the Queen and commonwealth is not reestablishment or re-endowment of their Church in Ireland, but religious equality.

To members of the Reformed Anglican Church in Ireland, loyal to their Church and to their sovereign, the contrast between the Papal Church established and the Reformed Church established need not be altogether mortifying, but may be highly instructive if dispassionately considered. The balance of iniquity may perhaps lie with the Papal times. Both establishments were guilty of appropriating the Church revenues of the Irish people to the use and benefit of the English settlers. Both establishments were garrisons as well as churches. But the cruelty and atrocity practised under the Papal appears more horrible and unnatural than similar cruelty and atrocity under the Reformed Establishment, because in the former case exercised without the stimulus of religious bigotry. As civil is more frightful than foreign war, so the outrages perpetrated by men of one creed upon cach other seem more atrocious than when the same outrages are inflicted on men of a different faith from that of their persecutors. To murder a heathen or heretic is wicked, but to murder a fellow-Christian is of more revolting wickedness. The Anglo- Papal policy, which treated Irish Christians as brute animals whom it was not murder to kill, seems far more cold-blooded than any penal legislation in Protestant times.

But the greater crime of Henry II. and his Papal successors on the English throne, is no justification of the lesser crime of Elizabeth and her Protestant government in forcilly substituting a Reformed for a Roman Catholic Church Establishment in Ireland. The Reformed Establishment was at first almost without a Church, for— in the words of Dr. Townsend, a late Bishop of Meath-"except the English functionaries and the military there were but few Protestants." * Gradually, however, the English immigrants, and the grantees of forfeited estates, and the settlers under the various plantation schemes, formed Anglican congregations. Doubtless many of the natives conformed to the established religion, under the influence of the laws concerning land, those limiting certain offices of rank or emolument in cities and towns to members of the Reformed

*

"Facts and Circumstances relating to the Condition of the Irish Clergy," &c., by the Rev. T. S. Townsend, &c. Dublin. Curry. 1832.

Church, and the education laws. But of course the Irish, with whom the Papal Establishment had been far from popular, regarded the Reformed Establishment as more intensely un-Irish and unpopular. The Reformed Church, accordingly, as an Establishment, existed on sufferance merely, supported by the force which established it. It is a sad fact, but one which has few gainsayers, that the Reformed Church Establishment in Ireland would not exist for one moment after British power ceased to be exercised in its favour. It seems to have inherited all the rancour excited by its Papal predecessor, and to be hated as almost the sole remaining symbol of the old unchristian policy which administered Irish Church revenues for the benefit of Englishmen, and heartlessly ignored the interests, spiritual and temporal, of the Irish people. The natives of Ireland were treated as aliens by the Reforming princes, Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, as well as by the Papal prince, Henry II. In 1537 an Irish statute was passed, "directing spiritual promotions to be conferred solely on such as could speak English, unless, after four proclamations in the next market town, such could not be had." Elizabeth commanded the performance of Divine service in English or Latin, but not in the Irish tongue. Marriages between the English and Irish were treasonable by statute, and no man within the pale "could let any land for years or at will" to "any man of Irish blood." These penal laws against Irishmen are mentioned by Elizabeth's Deputy, * in 1562, without any consciousness of their iniquity, and continued unrepealed throughout the entire of her reign. James I. affected to remove wholly from the Statute Book these unrighteous distinctions of language and blood, but virtually retained them by his Plantation Rule, which embraced all Ulster, one-third of Leinster, one-half of Munster, and a great part of Connaught. According to this rule, it was illegal for any English planter-man or woman-to intermarry with the Irish. The distinction of race has now, in a great measure, disappeared from Ireland; the distinction of religion-introduced by a Protestant Establishment-continues. Two peasants, for instance, live side by side. They have similar cottages, similar wages, and contribute in similar proportions by their labour to maintain all the institutions of the country, including the Church Establishment. But they are most unequally harnessed for the race of life. The one is a Catholic, and pays out of his pittance his pence and shillings for the erection or repair of a building for worship, for baptisms, marriages, confessions, and all the offices of religion. A funeral service is beyond his means or hopes. No clergyman attends the Catholic peasant to the grave. No bell is tolled for him in the churchyard where his corpse is laid. The other peasant is a Pro

"Calendar of the Carew MSS.," vol. i. p. 343.

testant, and for him all sorts of religious ministrations are freely supplied. He has nothing to pay for his parish church, or its repairs, or for fuel to warm it, or for sacraments, marriage, or burial. The rector visits him in health and sickness. The church bell tolls out his death. The parson celebrates his funeral service, and, perhaps, preaches, over his honoured remains a funeral sermon, to impress upon the Roman Catholics present the superiority of the Reformed faith. Again, two farmers possess adjoining farms, of equal size, and with equal rents. The one is a Protestant, with his pew in the parish church, and the usual religious privileges, costing him neither money nor trouble. The Establishment even gives him the occasional dignity of the churchwardenship, and holds out to him—if his family are clever and ambitious—the prospects of a church living for his son. The other farmer is a Catholic, and has no such privileges. He must pay-many times in the year ―towards the support of Catholic worship, for which his every acre is duly assessed. Nothing in the way of his religion comes to him gratuitously. He must pay largely for his church accommodation, for masses, baptisms, confessions, and marriages; and the luxury of a burial service, and a month's mind costs his family dear. Not only do the Catholic farmer and peasant thus support their own religion on the voluntary system, if that can be called voluntary which has long custom and public opinion to enforce it; but they also support --for their labour and industry produce the tithe rent charge-the religion of their Protestant neighbours, on the compulsory system. Thus the two men-the Catholic and the Protestant-run on unequal terms. One is vastly over-weighted in the race. And the Roman Catholics bear this burden simply because their forefathers were loyal to the Papal Church, which—as some controversialists say—was introduced by England, and because their grandfathers were too loyal to James II., the Popish King of England!

And yet the Bishop of Oxford hints that to remove this inequality from off the shoulders of the great bulk of the Irish population is to "buy off assassins;" and the Earl of Derby proclaims that he does "not believe that the Protestant Church is any grievance whatever to the people of Ireland!" He says "there is only one thing the Roman Catholics in Ireland do not possess, and that is the property belonging to their neighbours." But what are the facts? There are, at this moment, many estates occupied exclusively by Roman Catholics, whereon the Roman Catholic tenants are forbidden, on pain of penal rents, to erect buildings for Roman Catholic worship. There are many estates with landlords and occupiers belonging to the Roman Catholic Church, yet producing and paying tithe-rent charge for the Anglican Church. There are even whole parishes, inhabited exclusively by Roman Catholics, but with glebes and tithe

rent charges appropriated to the religious uses of Anglicans in other parishes. The very graveyards surrounding the ruins of the ancient church or abbey, or surrounding, it may be, the site of the ancient parish church, long since turned to Anglican uses, are the freeholds of the Anglican Establishment. Roman Catholics feel that the ashes of their forefathers lie beneath the shadow of "an alien church," to which they must pay unwilling homage even in the grave. And their resentment towards the alien Establishment, and against the English Government for maintaining it, is a feeling not likely to diminish with time. Dr. Arnold very truly remarked that "whether Ireland remain in its present barbarism, or grow in wealth and civilization, in either case, the downfall of the present Establishment is certain: a savage people will not endure the insult of a hostile religion a civilized one will reasonably insist on having their own." Ireland, since the period when Dr. Arnold thought it barbarous, has greatly advanced in civilization. Religious equality"—to quote the Earl of Cork's words," is every day becoming more and more a necessity in Ireland. As education increases, so does the knowledge of national wrongs, and the determination to redress them. As wealth augments among Roman Catholics, so does the self-respect which protests against the ascendency of the creed of the minority." Thus, in proportion to the spread of civilization, the enmity of Irishmen to the Church Establishment becomes more intense. And the progress of Irishmen in loyalty, and their increasing appreciation of the merits of the Constitution under which they live, lead them in the same direction of hostility to the Establishment. Their knowledge tells them that the Establishment is unjust, that it violates the maxims of constitutional government, that it must appear to Englishmen themselves, as to all the rest of the world, an injustice, only to be justified by some special and exceptional causes. And their very obedience to law, and regard for the Constitution, and loyalty to the Queen, prove to them that those special and exceptional causes no longer exist. They feel that England maintains the Establishment, either because she suspects the loyalty of Roman Catholics, or through perversity refuses to repair confessed injustice. Moreover, in proportion as the Church established seeks more earnestly to live as a Church, so will her position as an establishment become less tolerable. Some years back the Anglican clergy were much more wealthy than at present. They held large unions, paid curates to discharge most of their duties, gave large employment to Roman Catholic peasants, were very charitable, and took little trouble about converting the people. They were the managers of schools, and the paymasters of the teachers, and in various other ways were brought into friendly intercourse with Roman Catholics. But Anglican clergymen are by no means as wealthy, individually, in present as in former times.