I

Gladstone entered the House of Commons in February 1833, taking his seat at the historic opening of the first reformed parliament. He was still uneasy in politics, having reluctantly decided to pursue a sublunary profession at the insistence of his father, rather than answer a call to the church. Earnest and prone to doubt, Gladstone sought to reconcile his ambition and idealism by emphasising the religious basis of his political action. Rationalising his choice of career on the eve of his election for Newark in the autumn of 1832, he had concluded that a ‘life’ in politics might be ‘of the very highest utility’ because it would provide the opportunity not merely ‘to maintain the principle of Church and State’, but also ‘to unfold and apply it’.Footnote ² Six months later, in the midst of his first parliamentary session, he recurred to this theme, reflecting that ‘wherever power exists, religion has a claim on it for its services’.Footnote ³ The young M.P. thus found his political raison d’être in the defence of the confessional state.

Any politician seeking to preserve the confessional character of the United Kingdom in the early 1830s was obliged to confront the problem of the Church of Ireland. In England the establishment could be justified on majoritarian and utilitarian grounds, but social and economic realities made such arguments untenable across the Irish Sea. Over portions of southern Ireland, impoverished Catholic peasants forcibly resisted the payment of dues to the established church, fighting a ‘tithe war’ against the authorities. Their opposition was given a sharp political edge by the ‘Liberator’, Daniel O’Connell, who harnessed demands for the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland and the abolition of tithe to his campaign for the repeal of the Act of Union with Britain.Footnote ⁴ Lord Grey’s reform ministry, attempting to restore order in Ireland and to sap support for O’Connell, devoted much of 1833 to Irish legislation. The government balanced a coercion act, aimed simultaneously at stifling O’Connell’s repeal movement and winning the tithe war, against the more emollient Irish Church Temporalities Act, 1833, intended to diminish Catholic objections to the Church of Ireland by reducing its establishment and reforming its abuses.Footnote ⁵

Despite Gladstone’s desire to be a useful Christian statesman, his parliamentary influence was initially minimal. He began to ‘read & analyse’ the Irish church bill on 13 March, and intended to speak on the subject on 2 April, but a political compromise forestalled debate.Footnote ⁶ He only managed a criticism of the bill after its third reading in July. The gravamen of his case against the measure was that ‘it would tend to desecrate the Established Church’, though he also adduced prudential and utilitarian arguments in support of the church.Footnote ⁷ The speech of a neophyte M.P. at the close of debate on a major bill was scarcely calculated to influence the outcome of legislation. ‘I … was heard with kindness & indulgence’, Gladstone reported to his father, ‘but it is after all uphill work to address an assembly so much estranged in feeling from one’s self.’Footnote ⁸ Still, he had at least staked out a position as a champion of the Irish establishment.

The status of the Church of Ireland, in any case, remained unsettled. When parliament reconvened in February 1834, the king’s speech promised ‘a final adjustment’ of Irish tithe. Notably, the speech evaded the contentious subject of appropriation, or the reallocation of church revenues to secular purposes, which had figured prominently in the previous year’s debates on the temporalities bill. On the other hand, it unambiguously declared the administration’s ‘fixed and unalterable resolution’ to preserve the Union between Britain and Ireland, and it called upon ‘the loyal and well-affected’ to assist the government in restoring law and order.Footnote ⁹ Gladstone greeted the speech with cautious optimism. ‘The general impression’, he informed his father, ‘seems to be that the Speech indicates a strong intention on the part of ministers to pursue a very conservative course, but I should like to have some proofs in their action.’Footnote ¹⁰

Such a phlegmatic response was impossible for Protestants in Ireland, where O’Connell had spent the parliamentary recess campaigning for appropriation and repeal.Footnote ¹¹ The 1830s was a crucial decade in the evolution of Irish conservatism, as O’Connellite agitation provoked an evangelically-inflected Protestant alliance that united Anglican landlords, urban professionals, and northern Presbyterians in opposition to the Liberator’s brand of resurgent political Catholicism.Footnote ¹² Among the many Irish Protestants discomfited by O’Connellite politics was Owen Blayney Cole, a resident landowner in County Monaghan. Though Cole is today a forgotten figure, he and Gladstone were close friends at Christ Church in the late 1820s.Footnote ¹³ After taking his B.A. in 1830, Cole had returned to Ireland, where he pursued a gentlemanly career as a man of letters.Footnote ¹⁴ Despite his removal from England, Cole and Gladstone continued to correspond until the Irishman’s death in 1886. At the outset of the 1834 parliamentary session, having lately been in contact with some of Dublin’s ‘literati’, Cole encouraged Gladstone to contribute to the recently launched Dublin University Magazine, which he characterised as ‘the ablest periodical that Ireland has ever produced – highly conservative in its principles’. If Gladstone submitted a piece on ‘Irish affairs’, Cole offered on 10 February, ‘I will get it inserted’.Footnote ¹⁵ The young Irishman was well aware of the affinity between Gladstone’s views and those of the D.U.M., which aimed – according to an early account of its first years – ‘to further the cause of Protestantism throughout the empire’.Footnote ¹⁶

Gladstone already had some experience with political journalism. His brother Robertson, with their father’s support, had been an organising member of the Conservative Association of Liverpool, and was an early co-editor of the Liverpool Standard, founded in November 1832 to help stem the tide of reform. Between November 1832 and March 1833, Gladstone himself had authored dozens of strident leaders and short articles for the first numbers of the new Conservative newspaper.Footnote ¹⁷ Gladstone’s reply to Cole on the subject of publication was noncommittal, but encouraging. ‘I make the House of Commons work the basis of all my occupations so far as it is practicable’, he explained to Cole on 15 February, ‘But the subject matter at least of the D.U.M. does not appear to be far apart from that which forms what I may call for the present my professional employment.’ Gladstone was attracted, too, by the possibility that the review might avoid the ‘almost unavoidable subserviency’ he found so common among periodicals.Footnote ¹⁸

This response was sufficiently favourable for Cole to return to the subject on 17 February. ‘The D.U.M.’, he counselled Gladstone, ‘will supply you with a convenient speaking trumpet – the hustle of the House may prevent your being heard there – your words will not [be] wasted here – on the contrary they will have great weight.’Footnote ¹⁹ Cole’s advice was well calculated to appeal to Gladstone’s ambition to influence policy for the sake of the church. Cole also forwarded an extract from Gladstone’s letter to the editor of the D.U.M., Charles Stuart Stanford, who wrote on 21 February to assure Gladstone that ‘political news from head quarters’ would be warmly welcomed by his readers.Footnote ²⁰ Within a few days of receipt, Gladstone sent letters to both Stanford and Cole, but thereafter the triangular correspondence lapsed.Footnote ²¹

A revival of the threat to the Church of Ireland eventually prompted Gladstone to renew contact with Stanford. In mid-February, the Grey ministry proposed to commute Irish tithe into a land tax, which might itself be converted into a rent charge at 80 per cent of the current assessment, without committing itself on the issue of appropriation.Footnote ²² Gladstone gave no indication of undue alarm at this stage, but his attitude changed in early May, when a prominent member of the cabinet, Lord John Russell, endorsed appropriation in the House of Commons during debate on the second reading of the Irish tithe bill. A break-up of the government appeared imminent.Footnote ²³ On 15 May, only nine days after Russell’s declaration, Gladstone ‘began to write a paper for D.U.M.’ – the first of three distinct essays on Irish affairs that he would write between May and September – and he also sent a letter to Stanford, nearly three months after their previous communication.Footnote ²⁴ Two days later, he recorded in his diary, the essay was ‘finished’. Though Gladstone considered it ‘a sorry affair’, this low appraisal did not deter him from despatching it to Stanford that same day.Footnote ²⁵ Gladstone’s paper denounced what he assumed to be ‘negotiations’ between ministers and ‘the agitator’, and warned forebodingly about the sacrifice ‘of our institutions … to fraud’. A draft of his submission is preserved in the British Library, under the heading ‘Political article for the Dublin Univ. Magazine’.Footnote ²⁶

Stanford was delighted to receive Gladstone’s ‘admirable paper’, but regretted that it had arrived too late for the ‘June number’. On 19 May the editor offered to produce proof sheets, and promised that the journal would ‘lead with’ the essay ‘in July’.Footnote ²⁷ Gladstone’s reply has not survived, though he evidently agreed to publication, as the proofs were prepared.Footnote ²⁸ The rapidly mounting political crisis, however, overtook what soon appeared to be an incomplete assessment, and the article was never published. At the end of May, a radical motion in favour of appropriation, introduced by H. G. Ward, split the cabinet, and on 2 June the leader of the House of Commons, Lord Althorp, announced the resignation of those ministers opposed to appropriation – Edward Stanley, Sir James Graham, the duke of Richmond, and the earl of Ripon. Althorp also explained that the reconstructed government had set up a commission of inquiry to examine the state of the Irish church. The immediate effect of his statement was to delay any decision on the vexed subject of appropriation, but for defenders of the establishment the Church of Ireland’s prospects seemed uncertain.Footnote ²⁹

Gladstone responded to these unwelcome developments by drafting a substantial memorandum on ‘Irish church property’, which he composed at irregular intervals between 9 and 28 June.Footnote ³⁰ Analytical rather than polemical in its tone and content, the preparation of the paper was consistent with his customary method of readying speeches and refining ideas. After a lengthy investigation of the historic disposition of church property in Ireland, Gladstone surveyed alternatives to its current distribution – secularisation, the establishment of the Roman Catholic church, and concurrent endowment – only to reject them. Admitting that ‘the Church does not instruct the great bulk of the people’ in the western island, Gladstone upheld the Church of Ireland ‘not as a matter of expediency only, but as a matter of conscience’. As in his earlier speech on Irish church temporalities, however, he buttressed arguments derived from principle with appeals to prudence, insisting that ‘we may well meet the destroyers of the Irish Church on the grounds of consequences alone’. This memorandum, which was never submitted for publication, is held at the British Library.Footnote ³¹

The cause of the Irish church suffered another setback in early July, when ministerial disagreements over the renewal of the expiring coercion act were made public by O’Connell, resulting in the departure of Earl Grey from his own government.Footnote ³² The ministerial crisis – which considerably strengthened O’Connell’s position in the House of Commons – coincided with the resumption of debate on the Irish tithe bill, and Gladstone was left uneasily calculating ‘the strength of the antispoliation party in the House of Commons’.Footnote ³³ The Liberator’s newfound political influence was unmistakably demonstrated later in the month, when the remodelled government, led by Lord Melbourne, dropped the most obnoxious provisions of the coercion bill.Footnote ³⁴ The ministry’s pliability on coercion had worrisome implications for its position on the Irish tithe bill, debate on which was set to continue at the end of July. With the spectre of appropriation once again looming, Gladstone revived his correspondence with Stanford, writing to the editor on 28 July, apparently to request the return of the proofs from his earlier article.Footnote ³⁵ Two days later he perused the most recent issue of the Dublin University Magazine, reading an article on ‘Protestant emigration’.Footnote ³⁶ That evening, the Melbourne ministry made a significant concession to O’Connell on the tithe bill, reducing the proposed tithe rent charge from 80 per cent to 60 per cent of the current assessment.Footnote ³⁷

The crucial debate on Irish tithe in the Commons having concluded, Gladstone departed from London at the beginning of August, in anticipation of the parliamentary recess. The House of Lords threw out the tithe bill in the middle of the month, while Gladstone was en route to Fasque, his father’s Scottish estate, for an extended holiday.Footnote ³⁸ He spent part of his first full day at Fasque ‘arranging … books & meditating great doings’.Footnote ³⁹ Stanford had not yet responded to Gladstone’s letter of July, prompting the young M.P. to send a second note to the editor on 18 August.Footnote ⁴⁰ Though the session had concluded favourably enough, the Church of Ireland remained vulnerable, and O’Connell was already making plans for an autumn campaign against tithe.Footnote ⁴¹ Gladstone passed the close of the month in a state of heightened anxiety.Footnote ⁴² Toward the end of August, he finally received Stanford’s reply. Suffering from ill health and preoccupied with an ongoing translation of Plato’s Dialogues, Stanford had been in ‘the country’ when Gladstone’s first missive arrived, and upon his return to Dublin it had taken him some time to locate the page proofs. After apologising for the delay, Stanford explained that he was resigning the editorship of the Dublin University Magazine to Isaac Butt.Footnote ⁴³ Gladstone responded to Stanford on 29 August, and on 12 September he ‘began to write an Irish paper’. The following day he was back at work on an ‘Irish paper for D.U.M.’, which – after a pause for the Sabbath – he continued on 15 September, when he again wrote to Stanford. On 16 September, Gladstone ‘finished & dispatched’ his ‘paper on Irish Church Prospects’.Footnote ⁴⁴ It was his third important exposition on the Church of Ireland in the span of four months.

The recipient of Gladstone’s submission, Stanford, forwarded it to Butt, a precocious 21-year-old undergraduate at Trinity College Dublin. The essay found a receptive reader in the new editor, who was to make the defence of the established church and the denunciation of the Whigs central themes of the journal during his four-year tenure at its helm.Footnote ⁴⁵ ‘I have perused your able paper with much attention’, Butt assured Gladstone on 22 September, ‘and shall have much pleasure in using it for the purposes of the Magazine.’ He indicated that it might be necessary ‘to make a few alterations’ to the essay for the sake of editorial consistency, and added that the submission was too late for the next month’s issue.Footnote ⁴⁶ In mid-October, Gladstone notified Cole that he had ‘an article about the parliamentary prospects of the Irish Church’ in press, which he self-deprecatingly characterised as ‘remarkable’ for its ‘stupidity’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Still, the young author greeted the essay’s publication with a touch of vanity. ‘If you happen to see the Dublin Univ. Magazine for November in any of your reading rooms’, Gladstone informed his brother Robertson on 10 November, ‘the first article in it is mine.’Footnote ⁴⁸

II

It is remarkable that Gladstone’s contribution to the Dublin University Magazine remained unknown for more than 180 years. The most inexplicable part of the mystery is the fact that his anonymity held through four ministries substantially devoted to Irish affairs, in which the smallest details of the Grand Old Man’s life were thought worthy of notice in the press. Especially after Gladstone became prime minister in 1868, every friend and acquaintance seemed to have a lost letter or fund of anecdotes to share. Stanford and Butt both knew of Gladstone’s affiliation with the D.U.M., and lived to witness his first ministry and his reversal of policy on the established Church of Ireland. As we have seen, Gladstone himself informed at least two other people that the article was his, and there is no evidence to suggest that he enjoined secrecy. In a letter to the editor of the Foreign and Colonial Quarterly Review in 1844, having nothing to do with Ireland, he volunteered that he had written for a magazine ten years earlier, though he did not name it.Footnote ⁴⁹ During any of his fifteen parliamentary elections, particularly after 1845, even the rumour of authorship likely would have led opponents to use the article’s vitriolic language and dire predictions against him, much as they exploited a combination of truth and insinuation regarding his ‘Puseyism’ and ‘Romanism’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Yet in the hundreds of newspaper accounts, periodical articles, and biographies that were written about Gladstone between 1834 and his death in 1898, no hint of his authorship of ‘Parliamentary Doings with the Irish Church’ ever surfaced.

Gladstone himself had something to do with the article’s omission from the historical record. Though there is no evidence that he deliberately suppressed his authorship, almost from the moment of publication he had strong political reasons for maintaining his anonymity. Just days after the article’s publication, William IV unexpectedly dismissed his ministers and appointed the duke of Wellington as locum tenens for Peel, who assumed the premiership of a minority government in December and offered Gladstone office. In less than two months, ‘Parliamentary Doings’ had become an artefact of history. Already unsure of himself in the company of the Tory leader, Gladstone must have quickly learned the true extent of Peel’s wariness of religious enthusiasm, of his disdain for politicians who dabbled in the press, and of his disapproval of the D.U.M. in particular.Footnote ⁵¹ Certainly he felt these concerns in the wake of the publication of The state in its relations with the church in 1838, when Peel ‘was repelled and dismayed’ by its appearance, and would not even acknowledge its receipt.Footnote ⁵² Some have argued that Peel was merely ‘irritated’ with Gladstone’s youthful indiscretions.Footnote ⁵³ Even under the most favourable interpretation of the evidence, however, the tinge of political doubt in Peel’s mind – and Gladstone’s perception of that doubt – is clear. Fresh evidence of still greater immoderation in the form of a political diatribe would not have been welcome, particularly as Gladstone harboured hopes of becoming chief secretary of Ireland.Footnote ⁵⁴ For Gladstone’s part, it was just as well that Peel did not have to answer for his wildly exaggerated claims regarding the protection of the Church of Ireland, especially after his vote in favour of the augmented Maynooth grant in 1845.

As Gladstone took increasingly liberal positions on Irish church and land questions, he wrote a number of articles and pamphlets that bore on his Irish views in the 1830s. None alluded to his work with the Dublin University Magazine, and all tended to minimise the extent of his early conservatism regarding the Church of Ireland, as well as his hostility to the Whig ministries and O’Connell.Footnote ⁵⁵ The autobiographical memoranda he composed in old age evinced a similar pattern of revisionism.Footnote ⁵⁶ Given the lack of direct testimony from Gladstone’s colleagues, friends and enemies across sixty years – and Gladstone’s own quiet alteration of the historical record – one can begin to see how scholars have now for more than a century overlooked clues suggesting his contribution to the Dublin University Magazine.

This oversight began with John Morley, the first author who enjoyed unfettered access to Gladstone’s vast collection of papers. Gladstone apparently had not retained a copy of ‘Parliamentary Doings’, and Morley missed in Gladstone’s diaries the confluence of five letters written to Stanford between 28 July and 16 September 1834 with the ongoing debate over Irish tithe and the evidence of authorship recorded in the diaries. In some ways Morley was in the least favourable position to sort the matter out, as he was born four years after ‘Parliamentary Doings’ was written; probably had no idea who Stanford was (even if he could decipher the name); wrote when few public figures who had been active in the 1830s were still living; and did not have the benefit of decades of scholarship in helping him to render the cramped and cryptic bounty of seventy years of diary entries. Morley was intent, moreover, on emphasising Gladstone’s great liberalising achievements. Accordingly, as D. M. Schreuder has observed, ‘it was clearly not in Morley’s interest to deploy all the protean evidence’ he had discovered.Footnote ⁵⁷

With the magisterial Life of Gladstone having dealt so superficially with its subject’s youthful conservatism, avenues of research were rechannelled and clues were missed. Neither D. C. Lathbury nor A. Tilney Bassett, for instance, suggested that Gladstone had published anything between his youthful Eton miscellany (1827) and The state in its relations with the church (1838).Footnote ⁵⁸ The one letter from Gladstone to Cole that Lathbury selected for inclusion in Correspondence on church and religion was a treatise on the will of God, and quite unlike most of the letters exchanged between the two friends.Footnote ⁵⁹ In 1924, Cole’s son published in Cornhill Magazine the previously unknown letter of 13 October 1834 from Gladstone to his father, in which Gladstone acknowledged authorship. But while the reference to an article on ‘the parliamentary prospects of the Irish Church’ is clear, the published letter failed to identify the periodical, and an ellipsis suggested some deliberate withholding of information (though the omission was in fact necessitated by a stain on the original letter paper). Cole’s son, moreover, published the letter under an inaccurate date – 1837 rather than 1834.Footnote ⁶⁰ J. L. Hammond’s Gladstone and the Irish nation was purportedly ‘a comprehensive study of Gladstone’s career in respect of his Irish policy’, but beyond citing an Eton letter in ‘defence of Catholic emancipation’, one is led to believe that Gladstone had no policy prior to 1845. Hammond did have access to a typescript copy of the diaries, but in attempting to portray a man looking through ‘very different eyes from his contemporaries’, he was not inclined to seek out early evidence of extreme Conservative attitudes.Footnote ⁶¹ In the context of Gladstone scholarship from the time of Morley until the publication of the Gladstone diaries, with its emphasis on his liberalism and with scholars enjoying only limited access to the diaries, it would have been remarkable, rather than otherwise, for anyone to have put the pieces together.

Scholars since the publication of the Gladstone diaries have had advantages, and might much sooner have discovered Gladstone’s authorship but for a number of foundational editorial mistakes. As editor of the first two volumes of the diaries, M. R. D. Foot was grappling with unprecedented challenges of both transcription and attribution that, in this case, worked against understanding. Isaac Butt’s first appearance in the index was indicated as 1840; and ‘Stanford’ was never recognised as the scholar and editor Charles Stuart Stanford, but instead as ‘John Frederick Stanford … M.P.’, and, in another place, ‘perhaps Major Stanford of Ballina’. Foot further muddied the waters by identifying the editor of the Dublin University Magazine as ‘Charles Stuart Strangford’, who consequently appears in the published Gladstone diaries to have been a correspondent on only one occasion.Footnote ⁶² Foot was confused, too, about the particular manuscripts Gladstone produced. He correctly recognised that Gladstone’s ‘Political article for the Dublin Univ. Magazine’ was written in May.Footnote ⁶³ However, though Gladstone noted that this paper was ‘finished’ on 17 May, Foot had him at work on the same essay again in September – when Gladstone was in fact composing ‘Parliamentary Doings’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Foot experienced similar problems with the June manuscript, ‘Irish church property’. In his footnote for the entry of 9 June he indicated that the paper was ‘untraced’; on 24 June he did not offer an identification; and on 28 June he correctly cited the paper.Footnote ⁶⁵ Attempting to follow Foot, Colin Matthew quoted from the May manuscript, referring to it as ‘an article written in 1834, but never published’. Matthew failed to discover ‘Parliamentary Doings’, misled by a combination of Foot’s confusion and Gladstone’s own evaluation of the earlier manuscript as ‘a sorry affair’.Footnote ⁶⁶ Given that Matthew had succeeded Foot in editing the Gladstone diaries, had developed more rigorous editorial standards for later volumes, and was widely regarded as the dean of Gladstone studies, his view in this case has been considered definitive by all subsequent scholars.

Finally, it would not have been unusual for someone researching the Dublin University Magazine to have discovered Gladstone’s lost contribution. The revival of interest in Victorian periodicals in the 1960s led to the publication of the magisterial Wellesley index, which set out to demonstrate the cultural and political importance of the Victorian periodical press, and to identify the authors of thousands of anonymously published articles. But just as scholars were misled on the political side by editorial mistakes, so too were those studying the D.U.M. In 1987 the editors of the Wellesley index incorrectly attributed ‘Parliamentary Doings with the Irish Church’ to Samuel O’Sullivan, a frequent contributor to the Magazine.Footnote ⁶⁷ Wayne E. Hall quickly raised concerns about the editors’ standards for attribution, which led to a number of disattributions, and to a more guarded approach in identifying the authors of anonymous articles.Footnote ⁶⁸ This caution may be seen in Joseph Spence’s article on ‘Isaac Butt, Irish nationality and the conditional defence of the Union, 1833–70’. Having examined evidence from the Gladstone diaries and the Wellesley index, as well as the correspondence between Gladstone and the editors of the Dublin University Magazine, Spence noted that ‘the young Gladstone submitted political articles to the DUM in 1834’, but concluded that ‘successive “able papers” were returned for alteration’. Spence hedged his bets here, refraining from any definitive statement about what happened to Gladstone’s submissions, but suggesting that they were left unpublished. In fact, comments from both Stanford and Butt appear to be related to ordinary editorial oversight, and not – as Spence concluded – to ‘the need for the English Conservative to alter his work for the Irish Tory market’.Footnote ⁶⁹

Indeed, ‘Parliamentary Doings with the Irish Church’ illustrates the depth of alarm felt by British and Irish Conservatives alike over the future of the Church of Ireland in 1834. The circumstances of its composition and the fact of its publication in the Dublin University Magazine underscore the manner in which personal relationships, epistolary networks, and print culture could facilitate Conservative cooperation across the Irish Sea, and could foster the perception that Tories throughout the United Kingdom shared a community of interest. The essay was also a landmark publication for Gladstone personally. It represented his first attempt to use the quarterly press to influence public opinion, anticipating his first book by four years, and what had previously been considered his first journal article by nine years. Most immediately, ‘Parliamentary Doings’ discloses the visceral foundations of Gladstone’s politics in the 1830s, exposing their emotional and partisan elements, and aligning the author closely with the right wing of the Tory party. In the broader context of Gladstone’s political and intellectual development, the article suggests both interesting continuities and significant disjunctures with his later career. It reveals the extent to which Gladstone’s preoccupation with Ireland and his deep suspicion of Roman Catholicism were enduring features of his politics, but it also provides evidence of arch-Conservative opinions respecting the confessional and oligarchic character of the Union state that he was eager to leave behind as a mature Liberal statesman.Footnote ⁷⁰

Parliamentary Doings with the Irish ChurchFootnote ⁷¹

In times of peculiar danger nothing is more important than that those who are assailed should have a clear apprehension both of the magnitude of the perils that threaten and the extent of the defensive resources upon which they have to depend. We do not covet the epithet of alarmists, but we confess we are no friends to that short-sighted policy which endeavours to keep up the spirit of a party by concealing the dangers to which their cause is exposed. This is treatment suited only for the timid and the weak – in the hour of the attack we may soothe into a false repose, the woman or the child – but it becomes the man to look the enemy in the face. Equally removed from true courage is the disposition to overlook the danger that it dares not meet, with the timorous apprehension of imaginary terrors. We look always with suspicion upon the cry that proclaims “peace! peace! where there is no peace.”Footnote ⁷² They are not the true friends of a cause who lull its supporters into a false security from which the presence, not of danger but ruin, must speedily awaken them. No, when we call on all for their services, all should be told honestly that they are indispensable – let every man be apprised of the necessity of exertion, and then we may expect that every man will do his duty.

The Church is in danger – how often has this been stigmatized as a Tory cry got up to influence the prejudices of the nation – it is now the watchword both of her enemies and her friends – when the one are no longer anxious to conceal their hostility, the other can have no motive for suppressing their apprehensions – when infidelity and popery, united in unholy and unnatural combination, have already raised the shout of prospective triumph at the anticipated downfall of our Christian institutions, it is time for the friends of religion to put forth the language of manly and unyielding determination in their defence. It is now impossible to conceal – it is madness to dissemble – that national Christianity is openly assailed by a numerous and influential party, and the struggle is at this moment going on, that must quickly decide whether religion is any more to have a place in our councils; or Christianity any longer a title to our respect.

In this struggle the friends of religion must depend upon the King, the people, and the Lords – in the King’s government and the House of Commons, they must place no confidence whatever. Thanks to the reform bill and the reform mania, the present House of Commons no more represents the feelings of the British nation than do the tenpound householdersFootnote ⁷³ the respectability of the country – and the King’s speech to the bishops leaves no question that the ministers do not represent the feelings of their royal master;Footnote ⁷⁴ and thus are we placed in the most anomalous position that has ever characterised any national crisis – with two of the great constitutional elements of the legislature in favour of religion and of our Protestant establishments, and yet their constitutional and recognised organs unequivocally opposed to the sanctions of religion and the support of our institutions. We have a king bound by the obligations of a most sacred official oathFootnote ⁷⁵ and by the tye of a voluntary declaration, the circumstances attending which made it sacred as an oath, to maintain and support the Church – we have a ministry wielding that King’s prerogative to destroy the Church. The people still look with affectionate veneration to the establishment that gives them the ordinances of religion and the word of God; but, alas, “the commons in parliament assembled are no longer one, and the same thing with the commons at large,”Footnote ⁷⁶ and the infidel representatives of a religious people are even outstripping a profligate government in their zeal for unhallowed spoliation. Seconded by the rabble shouts of the Destructives out of doors, whose noisy ruffianism they affect to mistake for the expression of the popular voice, the lower branch of legislature are pursuing their course of reckless and unprincipled aggression upon all that is venerated by the national heart. The peers alone remain true to their God, the nation, and themselves; and to the peers we must look for protection until, as on the ever-memorable occasion of 1783,Footnote ⁷⁷ the spirit of the constitution triumphs over its perverted forms, and the king and the people are again supported by the lords in crushing the attempted despotism of a profligate ministry and a corrupt House of Commons.

Our intention, at present, is to endeavour to show the utter madness of the confidence which rests, in ever so remote a degree upon either the ministry or the House of Commons. From neither must Protestants expect any countenance or support. By both the Irish Church is doomed to extinction; and this being the case, it is well that it should be understood; and we trust that we may not be altogether unprofitably employed in submitting to our readers the grounds upon which we have formed our opinion as to both.

Let every Irish Protestant be assured, that it would be extremely difficult to overestimate the hostility of the present House of Commons to the church established in this part of the united kingdom. In that assembly everything, humanly speaking, is against her. First, there is her presumed physical weakness, and accessibility to attack; for too long have the government mistaken the conscientious obedience of the Irish Protestants for the submission of cowardice, and imagined that they submit to their tyranny because they dare not resist; then the great amount of influence exercised by the Romanist party, through burnings and massacres out of doors, and that scarcely less iniquitous policy pursued by the leaders of that party within the walls of parliament, that skilful mixture of kicking and coaxing, by which Mr. O’ConnellFootnote ⁷⁸ knows he must defeat a feeble and unprincipled ministry; add to all this the ingrained habit of the English Whigs and Radicals, who have been taught, from their very infancy upwards, to make the Irish Church the butt of their patriotism – and in these several but converging causes, who does not see enough to be convinced that an immeasurable hatred has coalesced with an immeasurable cowardice for the destruction of the Protestant Church!

But another cause remains – the deep and general, though secret and unacknowledged, conviction in the minds of the reforming members, that the bill has not had its perfect work – that they have but inadequately served that ferocious and turbulent spirit, by whose agency they were summoned into political existence – that unless by some splendid and costly sacrifice they appease its voracity, they, individually, must be speedily discarded and disgraced. Terrors from behind urge them onward. They remember but too well – what, we believe, many of them would but too gladly forget – the words which they have spoken in the face of their supporters – words which they deemed to be spoken idly and to no purpose, save that of exalting them to stations which they were incompetent to fill, but which fell upon intent and eager ears and minds, where they dwell, as though graven with a pen of iron on a rock.Footnote ⁷⁹

Upon a deliberate estimate of all these causes, we deem it impossible to avoid the conviction that the zeal and hatred of the majority of the House of Commons is now fixedly concentrated upon the Irish establishment; and were it within the possibilities of things that that majority were compelled to choose one object, and one only, upon which to wreak its wrath, we verily believe that dear as is the work of demolition in its several departments – dear as is the ballot, for the deterioration of character which it would produce – dear as is the free trade in corn, for the overthrow of the landed interest – dear as is the project of a national education, in order that definite and effective religion may be excluded from it – dearer than all these, one enterprise still remains, for which, if it were necessary, every other would reluctantly, but infallibly, be sacrificed – and that one is, the destruction of the Protestant Church in Ireland. What is the actual position of the House of Commons, and how far are its intentions matter, not of probable conjecture, but of positive and unequivocal testimony? By two votes of last session, one upon the Church Temporalities Act Amendment Bill, the other upon the Tithe Bill, it stands distinctly committed. By the first it appropriated the Perpetuity Purchase Fund in aid of the deficiency in tithe;Footnote ⁸⁰ by the second it took forty per cent. from the clergy and gave it to the landlords.Footnote ⁸¹ Now we have to observe, in the first place, on the baseness of that large party in the House of Commons, including the ministers, who have heretofore said, “We are friends to the right of parliament over church property; but we will as strictly secure the integrity of tithe as the most rigid Conservative, leaving open, for posterior discussion, the question of appropriation; because it is quite clear that the tithe belongs to the state if not to the church, the landlords and occupiers have no claim upon it;” and on this principle Lord AlthorpFootnote ⁸² and Lord John RussellFootnote ⁸³ cooperated with Lord RiponFootnote ⁸⁴ and Mr. StanleyFootnote ⁸⁵ in the promotion of a bill which went to secure the whole tithe property, for the time being, to the church.Footnote ⁸⁶

The “State” appears to be with the radicals, a convenient pretext for all kinds of robbery and spoliation. “The public good” is to be the talismanic watch-word that legalises every grade and every species of private wrong. Is privilege to be destroyed, or charter to be interfered with? the compendious justification of the iniquity is to be found in the little words, “the state,” and “the public good.” Is property to be taken away? are the most ancient prescriptions to be disregarded, and the most solemn engagements to be trampled on? the same magic words become the manual of spoliation, and their employment consecrates, as by the repetition of some mystic ritual, the commission of all perfidy, and the disregard of all right. The state is represented as if it were like the fabled devourer of his own children, a monster that is to swallow up all the rights which it has itself created, and which look to it, as to a parent, for protection and support. The public good is an ignis fatuus, never to be grasped, and only leading those who follow it through sloughs and quagmires, where there is no sure footing. Observe how the state is employed in this doctrine about Irish tithes – if the tithes do not belong to the clergy, they do to the state. And yet their appropriation to the clergy is a hardship to the tithe payers. How much will they be relieved by the alternative? They now find in the Protestant clergyman a resident gentleman, a friend at hand to minister to their necessities, their sickness, and their wants; but we will leave these temporal considerations apart, and, in the name of the God of truth, we ask, is it nothing that the poor benighted peasantry should have the blessings of the Gospel of truth? Will those who believe that Popery is error, do justice even to the Roman Catholics of Ireland, if they consign them exclusively to her teaching? The moral midnight of popery spreads the curtain of its darkness over the country; and is it justice to that country, to take with unholy hand, from the altar of God, the lamp of truth that sheds its ray upon the gloom, and dash it in sacrilegious frenzy on the ground, that all may be the blackness of darkness for ever? and this for no better reason than that there are some who love darkness rather than light, and who, therefore, are offended by its brightness?Footnote ⁸⁷

These doctrines may be ridiculed as folly and enthusiasm; but while we believe truth to be that which is of the greatest importance to every child of man, we cannot believe that we do our duty, if we neglect every means of propagating that truth; and upon these principles, we ask, is there no hardship in taking away the proceeds of Irish tithe, now devoted to purposes exclusively Irish, and handing them over into the grasping hands of the state, which now claims the right of its absolute disposal, so that it may, if it please, divert money raised in Ireland for the completion of the Rideau canal, in Canada, or the repair of the fortifications of Malta and Gibraltar?

But oppressive as this now popular doctrine of the tenure of tithe thus appears to be, did its adherents act in conformity with it? How was its integrity preserved for the benefit of the state? By sacrificing forty per cent. of the entire. And the same house which in 1833 and 1834 had affirmed, in its several stages, a measure, the essential principle of which was to secure (we do not say to appropriate) the tithe, by majorities of five, six, aye, even ten to one! also affirmed, in committee on the same bill, by a majority of above two to one, the sacrifice of two-fifths of its amount!!Footnote ⁸⁸

Had gentlemen changed their opinions? The idea is exploded by the immense proportions of members who supported the government against Mr. O’Connell’s repeated attempts to overthrow the bill. Then no conclusion remains but this: that the temporary pacification of the agitator was so material to the government, and the distinct affirmation of the spoliating principle so dear to the house, that it could not be purchased at too high a rate by the most shameless indecency, and the most precipitate tergiversation.

Let no one for a moment suppose that the change from twenty to forty per cent. was one merely of degree. A new principle was established by it. The deduction of twenty per cent. may have been griping and avaricious – it may have been an overcharge – it may have been intended, covertly, to insinuate the principle of spoliation; but, at all events, according to all the professions and admissions of rival parties, it was, in principle, distinctly and specifically a compensation to those who were to receive it, for charging them with a matter of trouble and loss – a fine upon those who were to pay it, for relief from care and expense. But not the most extravagant estimate of these disadvantages can conceal the glaring fact that forty per cent is utterly beyond the mark. The question is no longer left in doubt when such a provision has been adopted; spoliation is written here, so that he who runs may read.

So far, therefore, as the House of Commons is concerned, the Irish Church is not probably nor prospectively alone, but actually deprived of its property.

To conciliate the dreaded influence of the agitator, the ministry and the commons consented to the robbery of the church. Will that influence be diminished by the events that will certainly take place before parliament reassemble? Will the importance of purchasing the services of the man who puts himself forward as able to be the pacificator of Ireland, be diminished by the crimes and insurrections with which (because they now answer a political purpose,) we can certainly predict the winter will be marked. The government are afraid to exercise the authority of the law, and they have, therefore, entered on the insane course of purchasing, by the sacrifice of all principle, a temporary quiet from the lord of misrule. The black-mail is levied, through the government, off the Protestants of Ireland – our rights are the purchase money in the bargain. Will his force be diminished, or his temper mitigated by the accumulated triumphs of another campaign of outrage? No! the dark nights are his invaluable treasure – ministerial poltroonery is his best card – upon him, we can calculate free, at least, from the pains of uncertainty.

Further, what have we to expect from the ministry? From that ministry which introduced the reform bill to prolong its existence – which carried it by means alien to the constitution – which has traitorously tampered with every sound principle of our institutions, that they have not yet had the audacity to destroy? Who shall now maintain the side of moderation in cabinet battles? who shall vindicate the law? Lord Melbourne,Footnote ⁸⁹ who avowed his hostility to the principle of reform, while he supported the bill in October, 1832? Lord Lansdowne,Footnote ⁹⁰ who so gallantly upheld the establishment in a speech which a few days after he condemned by a commission? Lord PalmerstonFootnote ⁹¹ and Mr. Grant?Footnote ⁹² No! their Whiggery of four years’ standing is a plant of firmer and fuller growth than their Toryism of five-and-twenty; and while the former has Protestant Holland to insult, and Infidel France to caress, the latter is amiably busied in concerting with Mr. O’Connell how best to carry into effect that clause of the India bill, which gives the Governor-General power to allocate any sum of of [sic] money, at his discretion, in furtherance of any sect of religion complaisant enough to call itself Christian.Footnote ⁹³ We do not speak of the other ministers – where there is no hope, there can be no disappointment.

But will the House of Commons be better inclined than the ministry? A survey of its acts, and mature consideration of its character, convinces us that the present house will never stop short of any degree of radicalism to which the ministers may attain. It has been, from the first, (with the single exception of Baron Smith’s case,) a propelling power to the government.Footnote ⁹⁴ The difficulties of government, which have been manifold, have all been experienced in their attempts to check the impulse of the Commons; while, on the contrary, while they have cooperated with it, the temper of that assembly has been with them.

We have already given one example of the high value which the house sets upon an opportunity of wounding the Irish church – take another.

When the commission of inquiry was attacked in debate, it was vindicated as against the radicals, on the ground that it would be indecent and unjust to legislate in the dark, and to take away the property of the Irish Church before it was positively ascertained that its amount was larger than could be requisite for the purposes of its duties. And this was the answer made to Sir Robert PeelFootnote ⁹⁵ when he complained of the inquiry as a measure calculated to unsettle every thing, and afflicting us with the double pains of evil, at once certain and indefinite.Footnote ⁹⁶ A convenient argument; and re-echoed, pro more, with cheers. But what became of this approved reasoning when the tithe bill came into discussion? When the forty per cent. amendment was carried? Was it then decent to inquire before legislating? Was it then desirable to know by something more than mere rumour that the Irish Church could spare this sum? As much so as before, in truth, but not so in politics. An opportunity of wounding her was presented; and in spite of the formal recognition of preliminary enquiry and its indubitable approval by the house, that opportunity was too good to be thrown away, and the clause was passed, through the efforts of the government to be beaten, so that while his majesty’s commissioners were gravely inquiring into the sufficiency of the Irish Church property, the ministerial House of Commons had already voted its reduction!Footnote ⁹⁷

And yet, after all this, it is not enough that the Commons should escape the charge of profligate insincerity – that they should enjoy an impunity after such offences against their own declared laws of action; but the House of Lords, forsooth, is to be derided and reviled, because it has rejected the Irish tithe bill.Footnote ⁹⁸ We tender them our best thanks, in common with a portion of the community, neither small nor impotent, for that noble act: and God grant that they may persevere! It is a fit subject of prayer. If the safety of the union be bound up with that of the church – if the peace of the empire be involved in the maintenance of the union – if the propagation of sacred truth be an object for which the honest man ought to spend and be spent with alacrity and zeal – then, we say, well, indeed, may we, from day to day and from night to night, with one mind and voice, beseech the Almighty Father that he will give to “all the nobility, grace, wisdom, and understanding” to persevere in that faith which the light of conscience has already marked out for their feet.Footnote ⁹⁹

Let us look to the other alternative. What would have been their position if they had passed the bill?

As regards their own immediate reputation? Never again would they have been able to temper that hatred with which the Radicals regard them, by any involuntary admixture of fear. They must know that that hatred is deeply graven in the souls of an active and inexorable faction, and that there is no physical antipathy in the whole range of creation more determined, more bent upon action, more certain to work itself out, than that which obtains between the tendencies of modern radicalism, and the principle of an hereditary aristocracy.

“Lupis et agnis quanta sortitò obtigit

Tecum mihi discordia est.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰

We take that hatred to be the fixed and polar principle of the nature of radicalism in its relations to a peerage. But it may be modified and repressed: it will deal differently with a foe exhibiting virtue, consistency, and power, and with one which sues, as it were, to be scorned and exterminated. Had the Lords passed the tithe bill, their vote to that effect would have been, to all intents and purposes, a strong and a pressing invitation to the Commons for new trials of their patience, new attestations of their debasement. Scorn would have grown, but detestation would not have dwindled. They would have accelerated the approach of a conflict, and increased the probability, or rather insured the certainty of defeat.

But let us consider the position of the peers with respect to their royal master. In infringing (with the example of the lower house we admit) two principles of the commons – namely, that of the right of the state, if not the church, to the entire tithe, and that of preliminary inquiry, they would not only have bowed their own necks to this wanton and capricious despotism, but they would have insulted their sovereign. He had committed his august name by ordering an inquiry into the state of the Irish Church. Where was the peer of England who would have deigned or dared to send him a bill for its mutilation, while that inquiry was in actual progress? The minority on that bill, as we are firmly convinced, did not at all represent the numerical insignificance of that body of lords who would have proved so intensely unconscious of their station, its duties and demands. Some, we know, stated – many, we are convinced, entertained, the determination to restore the original bill in the teeth of the House of Commons, and fling upon them, and upon the government – that government which had framed it! – the heavy responsibility of its rejection. An immense majority of the House of Lords are determined to uphold the integrity of the Irish Church, and on the firmness of that majority, with God’s blessing, we confidently depend.

But what would have been the consequences of the tithe bill to the Irish Church? Peace and a competency, say the ministers and their friends. But that competency they were just about ascertaining, and that peace they do not seem over anxious to maintain. And Mr. Ellice,Footnote ¹⁰¹ the new cabinet minister, who assured us, in his first speech, that the safety of the Irish Church would to him be a coordinate object with the contentment of the people, further informed us, in his second, that he “hardly knew in what he differed from the honourable member,” which honourable member desires the destruction of the Irish Church as an essential instrument for the contentment of the people.Footnote ¹⁰² We have to deal with a sickening baseness in public men, and we live in a time when charity itself would be compelled to reverse its maxim, and to be suspecting, instead of believing all things.Footnote ¹⁰³

Read, then, those consequences in the announcement of Mr. O’Connell to his countrymen, “that they have already got two-fifths of the tithe, and next session they will get all.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Read them in the known and admitted feelings of the majority of the Commons: not one of those, we believe, who admit the parliamentary right of alienation, would stop short at the reduction of forty per cent; though, had it been fifty, some one or two have declared that that would satisfy them. But read them, above all, in this, that the entire principle upon which we stand would have been surrendered, and we must have fallen back upon that bastard position, neither possible nor desirable to be maintained, that the episcopal Protestant congregations are to be provided, according to their numbers, with a regiment of parliamentary clergy, drilled by some under secretary of state, and scarifiedFootnote ¹⁰⁵ year by year in the estimates.

It is, indeed, matter for thankfulness, that the false words of peace, spoken in the ear of the House of Lords, were not allowed to penetrate further. Had we been doomed to a bit-by-bit spoliation, the existence of the church would have been embittered, but not prolonged. Of all the dangers of the time, none, we apprehend, is so subtle and so fatal as the secret insinuations of weak and vacillating men, who cannot either affirm or deny, but whose conceptions of beauty, truth, virtue, valour, are all summed up in a tertium quid. By some oblique approach they gain their ground; by some restriction of the amount of mischief they veil the hideousness of its principles, as if the extent, and not the nature of the act, were the question. Having a first commission, they argue for a second; and now it is not the extent, but the nature, which is material; and the nature of the act once recognised and approved, its application is enlarged according to circumstances; and who does not see, that to stop at a certain degree, after having sanctioned the principle, not only requires an effort of tenfold courage, but exacts it from a nature enfeebled by its own internal struggles between duty and policy, and debased by a succession of dishonourable defeats?

Are we not now witnessing, in the current politics of the present day, fatal and mournful analogies to that false reasoning by which, in the lower classes of society, men are deluded through cupidity into crime? The wretch who is hanged upon the gallows, commenced by taking a little which would not be missed; the drunkard by risking a little more than moderation, which would not be felt; the gambler by staking a little, forgetful that the very atmosphere around him was tainted, that a thousand instruments of destruction were in activity, and that, with the confidence of his foes without, would progress the fainting of his heart within. How many are there now, in both houses of parliament, mild, and moderate, and well intentioned, thoroughly desirous of preserving the peace of the country, but who have suffered themselves to be terrified, first by one empty menace and then by another – to be enchained, first by one party consideration and then by another – to sacrifice principle after principle to that domination of circumstance over the mind of man, which, feeble and despicable in its first attempts on his dignity and freedom, heightens its demands and rivets its grasp as he sinks into worthlessness and servitude.

It is true that such men do not go all lengths, but they prepare the way for those who do. It is true that they repent, but it is equally true that they cannot repair. We readily believe that La Fayette repented in 1792, but he could not avert the catastrophes of 1793. It was his singular fate to be cheated and overreached by two successive revolutions. The one rushed over him into anarchy, the other stole past him into a government wanting of despotism little save the name. But we observe that in every great national crisis, as it advances towards its consummation, man after man, and section after section, desert the accelerating and join the resisting party – and uniformly in vain! The party of Lords Holland and Bedford: the Covenanters of Scotland: and the Presbyterians of England: each in succession detached itself from the cause of the revolution of 1640, but it proceeded upon its predestined path, with the impetus which they had communicated, and the King’s head rolled upon the scaffold. Even so it was in France. The party of Necker and the Anglicists: the party of Mirabeau and La Fayette: the party of Verguidud,Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Brissot, and Madame Roland – all seceded in turn, all were proscribed in turn, and social disorganization still progressed. Are we again to witness the revolution of these awful cycles? A single case we might have deemed should have been enough to instruct and warn a single world. But the process has commenced. From the year 1829, there were many instances of secession from what was then considered the liberal party. The Marquis of Bristol, the Lords Haddington and Dudley:Footnote ¹⁰⁷ more decided than these, Lord Caernarvon, Mr. Baring, the Knight of Kerry, Sir James Scarlett, Mr. Wynn, Lord Fortescue:Footnote ¹⁰⁸ again, in 1834 we have witnessed the separation of a larger mass – four cabinet ministers,Footnote ¹⁰⁹ with no small number of adherents in both houses. And even the few months which have since elapsed, have sufficed to force Lord GreyFootnote ¹¹⁰ and frighten Lord CarlisleFootnote ¹¹¹ out of office.

This is but the general rule of revolutions – the mild leaders of its commencement, are but the pioneers for the turbulent directors of its progress – those who sow the whirlwiud [sic], but rarely reap the storm – as the fury of the populace progresses, more furious leaders are required, and some bold spirit from the crowd usurps the place from which some lingering principle or fear had driven its last possessor – the more reckless the man, the more fitted to be a leader. Thus, for so far, it has been in England – a Grey has been succeeded by a Melbourne; and it is more than hinted that, if the Destructives have their way, my Lord Melbourne must give way to Lord Durham.Footnote ¹¹² When we have got this far, the rest will be intelligible enough. Lord Durham will do his work, and will then be discarded for some one still more unprincipled, and still more ready, unhesitatingly, to sacrifice his conscience and his honor at the shrine of popularity.

We still look for further and speedy desertions. Neither Lord Lansdown [sic] nor the premier will, we trust, accompany their colleagues to the lengths which some of them are prepared to go. But it is now not from the most interested motives that we express any solicitude of this kind. The transition of a powerful individual is of secondary consequence, at a period when all individual power is becoming from day to day less and less relatively to those forces which dwell in the consolidated masses of certain portions of the people, and are wielded by their leaders. But individual character is perhaps more important than ever: and character it is never wholly too late to retrieve. Would that all such would reflect, that even their personal separation, when that stern resolve is taken, brings away but a part of themselves! There still remains the substantial impression which their weight has contributed to make the credit which it has given to a cause in the eyes of the coarse judgers and loose reasoners – nay, the presumptive argument against themselves, drawn from their long cooperation with those from whom they secede.

A dreary succession of changes from evil to evil is opened to our view by that alternative of our future policy, which includes the destruction of the Irish Church. How is it possible that ministers can suppose the cause of repeal will be checked, and not advanced, by the surrender of the Church? What friend to repeal now will then have become its enemy? Why, it is not even stated by any one of that faction, from Mr. O’Connell and Mr. SheilFootnote ¹¹³ downwards, that such is the case: they do not even deign to insinuate the sufficiency of the destruction of the establishment, though they asseverate its necessity: they do not condescend to any profession bearing analogy, however remote, to that dastardly artifice which before the concession of the Catholic claims they and their friends incorporated into their tactics, the unhesitating declaration that the proposed concession would strengthen the rights of the church, and extinguish the very idea of repeal. Had they worn this mask, there would have been a primâ facie case in support of those Unionists who are church destroyers. It is true, it would have been only a primâ facie case. But now – how is it possible to comprehend the policy of those who invite us to make an immense sacrifice for the purpose of conciliating men who have plainly told us they will not be conciliated by it?

On the other hand, what enemy to repeal now, will then have become lukewarm in the advocacy of his favourite measure? The day may come when the English government will find the Protestants of Ireland more powerful than they could wish. If their constitution be overthrown, and their consciences violated, then, we speak not the language of idle menace, but of sober and sorrowful probability, when we say, it may be that they will shrink with horror from that imperial legislature where not merely their selfish interests have been invaded, but that great confraternity of principles, which formed the real basis of their union with Britain, will have been basely cast away. Who does not know that such are Mr. O’Connell’s calculations? The paltry sacrifice of the Irish Church is not commensurate with the largeness of his ultimate views. But he deigns to help it forward for its instrumental utility. Now let us put a case which is not improbable – the avowed establishment of popery in Ireland. All conscientious Protestants would deem such an establishment a gross violation not only of political but moral principle, an intolerable infringement of those relations which, as a Protestant nation, we are bound to maintain towards our God. Now, in this case it is obvious that conscience can only be saved by a complete separation. And are there not many English Protestants who would say, “dear as is the Irish connection, which gave the means at least of strengthening and consolidating the empire, and, more than this, of spreading a pure Christianity, we will not retain it only to be involved in the responsibility and guilt of lending a direct sanction to a Roman Catholic church establishment; we must add all our weight to the scale of those who are endeavouring to repeal a compact now in our eyes contaminated by sin?”

This, we may be told, is prejudice – it is a prejudice drawn from the Bible. But even admitting this to be foolish, it alters not the case; it is with the existence, and not the wisdom of the feeling that we are concerned. That such a feeling does exist in the minds of many of the most influential in rank and station there can be no doubt. If the maintenance of the union be an object with the ministers, it is madness to provoke even the religious prejudices of the English nation into hostility against it.

But another topic arises in connection with this subject. Will the partition of church revenues in Ireland, according to the numerical forces of the different sects, extend to England? No, say the ministers. Yes, says Mr. O’Connell, not as we believe from any peculiar honesty or simple frankness, but because, as he avows, he thinks the time is now come for declaring his hostility to a peerage and an established church. (It is not yet arrived, for denouncing the monarchy – but will the interval be long?)

We shall here, in elucidation of this part of the subject, draw a comparison which will probably surprise many of our readers.

Mr. WardFootnote ¹¹⁴ will not be suspected of an inclination to overrate the numbers of churchmen in Ireland. He takes them at 600,000.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Lord Althorp’s speech on introducing the Irish church bill in 1833, gave the tithe at £580,000.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Mr. Mahony, whose authority stands high among the Roman Catholic party, in his pamphlet of this year on the tithe bill, (p. 17,) declares that the clergy have not been in receipt of more than sixty per cent. of the gross amount.Footnote ¹¹⁷ We speak here, be it observed, not of their rights, but of their receipts; and not of their real and known receipts, but of their receipts as estimated by an authority opposed to us. Their amount will be, at this rate, £352,000, or about eleven shillings and sixpence a-head for the episcopal Protestants of Ireland.

Now, in England (including Wales) the audacity of some dissenters makes them to estimate the churchmen as low as four millions. But say they estimate them at six – we believe nine would be nearer the truth, and certainly not beyond it; but then we should also put a considerable augmentation on the estimate for Ireland; and we are now applying the same rule to both, that of liberal calculations.

In the first report of the English church revenue commissioners, printed at the end of the past session, we find the following passage: – “The total net income thereof (of the benefices,) will be three million two hundred and forty-eight thousand pounds.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ This statement is based upon actual returns from 10,498 benefices out of 10,701, with approximation for the rest. And thus we have for the English church, according to the same hostile estimate, an average expense per head in tithe, of about ten shillings and sixpence, one-eleventh less than in Ireland! How broad and tenable a ground for the Irish church destroyers to occupy as English church upholders!

A few words more on another point of interest, and we have done. It is, the probable manner in which the ministerial campaign of next year, as against the Irish church, will be conducted.

That portion of the warfare which is under the direction of Mr. O’Connell, and whose business it is to shake the foundation of all church property, will doubtless be, as it has heretofore been, in kind, though, probably, with increased fury. But a new engine will be put in operation. The results of the commission will have been known; and imposing phrases of astonishment will have been prepared to signalize the announcement of that which every body already knows, the numerical inferiority of the Irish Protestants. Although we have reason to be fully persuaded that if the clergy of Ireland do their duty, in placing before the commissioners correct evidence as to the number of their flocks, the report of their investigations will present a result that will surprise alike the friends and enemies of Protestantism, as to the amount of Protestant population in Ireland.

How will the government progress from the fable to its moral? for indeed their commission is as hypocritical and dishonest as fable is when it professes to be fact, and its purpose as manifest in the back ground as the maxims of Æsop under the fine texture of his fictions.

On the one hand we have the determination, the known determination, of the representatives of the British people to invade the Irish Church; on the other we have the often manifested antipathies of that British people to a Roman Catholic establishment, in whole or in part; the memorable and remembered struggles of their forefathers – and the suspicion of some, the hope of others, the exulting confidence of many more, that their character has not yet undergone so complete and bewildering a transmutation as to warrant the expectation that they will tolerate, without resistance, the reinstation of Romanism in its abused and forfeited ascendancy.

Take these opposite tendencies, neither of them little short of absolute certainty, as “equations of condition,” they will greatly restrict the limits of our problem and facilitate its solution. They reduce the question to this form, how shall the ministry satisfy the commons without incensing the people? And this, we have no doubt, has been the question which has sometimes hovered as a terrible apparition before the imagination of Lord John Russell, which has thickened yet more hopelessly the cloudy perceptions of Lord Althorp, when they have thought of the session and the hustings – of Mr. O’Connell in the front, and the farmers of Northamptonshire in the rere.Footnote ¹¹⁹

We believe further, that they have found the answer, and the only answer, to that perplexing question. It is this: that they must give to Romanism some covert but effective support: they must devise some plan, whose exterior shall be such as delude the people of England, viewing it from afar, by a specious name: while its internal construction shall give to the Roman Catholics, examining it on the spot, sufficient assurance that the propagation of their faith, of their faith too as professed in Ireland, is now an object dear to the consciences or necessary for the convenience of the Protestant administration of Great Britain!

We do not love to assume the character of prophets: but in the present instance it is of immense importance to the constitutional party, to to [sic] know, with some tolerable probability at least where they are to be assailed, and how. Now, combining those points we have already stated, with certain hints and intimations from Lord BroughamFootnote ¹²⁰ and Lord J. Russell, we cannot help entertaining a strong persuasion, that the charge against the Irish Church will be that it is of a partial and sectarian character, and the remedy proposed a comprehensive educational scheme, out of her funds, such as shall not avow the promotion of Popery for its object, but attain it as its result: most probably an extension of the present (misnamed) national education.Footnote ¹²¹

This has ever been the policy pursued by the enemies of Protestantism. Calculating upon the immeasurable credulity of her friends, they gravely tell us that every attack upon the integrity of national religion is designed to ensure its permanence and support its strength. All the safeguards of Protestantism have been removed, with the professed intention of rendering it more secure, and Popery has been strengthened and encouraged to prevent the church of England being injured by its power. It matters not that all past experience has shewn the utter folly of a system, the madness of which one would have thought was evident to common sense; there are still men who, in the face of all past experience – in the teeth of the experience which the melancholy history of the conciliation scheme presents for our instruction – still gravely tell us that the wisest way to maintain religion is to disregard its sanctions – the most prudent method of upholding the church, to confer power on its uncompromising foes; and still is Protestantism undermined in the name of friendship – every blow is prefaced with new and more extravagant professions of regard, and confiscation itself is represented as an act of the most disinterested love. There is a measure to human credulity, there is also a limit to human endurance – there may have been a time when the weak may have been deluded by the hypocrisy of religion’s pretended friends; but that time is gone by for ever; the man who now affects not to see that modern liberality, “like the daughter of the house leech, will cry, give! give! and be not satisfied”Footnote ¹²² – that every concession is but a provocative to fresh demands – that the hope of satisfying Popery by any thing short of Roman Catholic ascendancy is utterly vain – the man, we say, who now affects not to see this, is not a fool – no! such simplicity is beyond the bounds of human folly – he is a knave.

But the ministers will propose their plan for diverting the revenues of the Church of Ireland to the purposes of an unscriptural, that is, an infidel education board,Footnote ¹²³ and the House of Commons will hail the scheme with the reckless plaudits of unprincipled folly; And what will the Lords do? We know what they ought to do. They will throw out the bill – they will protect the church – they will maintain religion.

But is it not foolish in the House of Peers to link themselves to a falling cause and provoke the Commons to a collision? Dark hints have been thrown out of what may then be done, and the fate of the convocation has been held up as a warning to their lordships’ house.Footnote ¹²⁴ We have no patience with those who speak thus. Are the peers of England to purchase a continuance of their rights by a renunciation of their exercise? – to continue to have the title of legislators by a virtual compact that they should never express an opinion? and preserve their existence by sacrificing their independence? Our able contemporary of [sic] the Standard (a journal to whose high talents and undeviating integrity the Protestants of Ireland owe a debt of gratitude that they never can repay) has dealt with this silly argument as it deserves.Footnote ¹²⁵ Who will care to preserve the House of Peers when they have become but a registering chamber for the decrees of the Commons? Let their lordships not be deceived – a servile dereliction from principle will alienate the affections of their friends, but never will disarm the hostility of their foes; they will gather fresh confidence from the cowardice of such conduct; they will know well the motive to which to assign this abandonment of duty; they will not mistake submission for conciliation; hating the peers as much as ever for their principles, they will despise them for the compromise.

And let not the peers imagine that even the Conservatives desire to see them maintained in their peculiar privileges one moment longer than they use those privileges in independence. No! we attach no talismanic influence to a coronet or a title – we venerate an hereditary legislature for its uses, not its name – and when by yielding avowedly to dictation that legislature vote themselves useless, we will not raise a murmur of disapprobation if any other body should see fit to vote them a nuisance. Away then for ever with the idea that the peers can even continue to bear the name of nobles by becoming slaves – to them, as to every one, honesty is the best policy – the path of duty is the place of safety – and expediency itself proclaims the madness of the course which would preserve the fortification by surrendering everything that it had been built to defend – and, to secure privilege, would give up all that makes privilege worth possessing.

“Propter vitam vivendi perdere causas.”Footnote ¹²⁶

But all this the peers of England feel – and upon this feeling they will act – they will assert their own independence while they maintain the cause of God – and, in that God, whose providence has hitherto marked England a chosen nation, and has so often preserved her in the hour of danger, of foreign invasion or domestic convulsion, do we place an honest and an unshaken trust – that he will crown their efforts with success. HE, whose prerogative it is to still the noise of the waves and the raging of the people,Footnote ¹²⁷ will overrule to his church’s good the plans of those who now take counsel together against her – and though infidelity and popery go hand and hand – though a union be formed between those who reject Christianity and those who pervert it – though hatred to the truth be the common rallying point of those who have almost no other principle in common – yet truth shall triumph over every unholy combination that has been formed against it – the energies of a religious nation shall awake to preserve the institutions which their ancestors purchased with their blood – and the madness of revolutionary fury and the threats of revolutionary menace shall be remembered by our children, but as a cause of gratitude to the God who controlled the phrenzy of the one and brought to nought the vauntings of the other.