15 OCTOBER 1870, Page 8

THE IRISH EPISCOPALIANS.

THE Episcopalians in Ireland are greatly annoyed by the failure of their effort to raise a Sustentation Fund, the total sum subscribed being scarcely sufficient to endow the Sees alone, and their journals offer a varietyof very insufficient excuses, —absenteeism and the like. The true explanation, however, we conceive, is to be sought in the exceptional form which Pro- testantism has assumed in Ireland, a form which has been con- cealed from Englishmen by the existence of a great establish- ment kept up by imperial rather than local power. It is scarcely too much to say that beyond the clergy, the great proprietors, and a few professional men, no such person as a Protestant Episcopalian exists in Ireland,—that the entire body of Protestants is at heart either Presbyterian or Congregation- alist. The historic circumstances of the country have modified both the ecclesiastical and the religious tone of Churchmen in a manner which is perceptible even to ordinary travellers. Originally mere settlers in a conquered country, half of them Presbyterians and all of them inspired with a strong Mission- ary spirit, the Irish Churchmen have for two centuries lived face to face with Catholicism under circumstances which added to religious differences all the bitterness of international hatred and all the permanence of social hostility. It was and is the instinctive effort of the Churchman, who saw that his system had some relation to that of Rome, to mark and deepen the points of difference, whether real or formal ; to sharpen the edges of his religious protests, and to intensify the " particularismus" of his ecclesiastical organization. Rome had a priesthood, consequently sacerdotalism was detested, and less reverence paid to the clerical caste as a caste than in any Protes- tant country in the world. Rome was sacramental, consequently the sacramental side of the Anglican theory was studiously ignored, and the High-Church party held up to an odium of which even in England we have few examples, Rome sets little store by the Bible unexplained ; so Irish Protestants exag- gerate biliolatry into a mania. Rome affirms the damnation of schismatics, and the schismatics in revenge parade their certainty of hell for the Catholics. Insular, Protestant, and brave, the caste urged its distinctive doctrines with haughty violence, and to this day parades them with a kind of ferocious pride which not only displeases English observers, but raises in them a sensation of surprise. Why should men who care so little about their neighbours' present care so very much about their neighbours' future ? The tracts circulated seem to

them to be written by men whose enjoyment is as much in insulting as convincing their opponents. The placards are of the kind which Continental Governments prohibit as tending

to civil strife, while the cries have actually to be made punish- able by law. "To hell with the Pope I" shrieks the

Protestant tailor, anxious to make the Catholic bricklayer perceive the error of his ways ; while " God hates idolators " is scrawled up, if possible, wherever Catholics

will specially be irritated by the inscription. We doubt if it would be possible for a regular Irish Protestant to write a tract without the use of that word "idolatrous," and it is a favourite, we suspect, mainly for the irritation it excites. It is a fixed idea with Catholics that the Virgin had but one son. It is a matter of no importance to Protestants whether she had or not, but as the assertion touches Catholics to the quick, this non-important question in England becomes in Ireland a dogma of the faith. Of all developments of Pro- testantism, the one most hostile to Catholicism is the "Evan- gelical," and consequently, nineteen-twentieths of all lay Pro- testants in Ireland are Evangelicals of so pronounced a type that they will most assuredly, when once the Church is free, completely remodel the Prayer-Book in the Genevese sense ; that they deeply distrust the clergy, and that the clergy, to keep any vestige of independence in their parishes, are compelled to refuse to commute their stipends, and do refuse. It follows naturally that men thus penetrated with dislike of Catholicism should learn to undervalue, or even to despise, its Church polity. They bore with Episcopacy because, being supported by the State, it helped to increase the dignity of their own position as the garrison of Ireland ; but, except as English standard-bearers, they did not believe in Bishops, do not like them, and will, in the end, only tolerate them on condition of their effacing themselves. The remarkable proposal in the Convention that the Bishops should have no authority at all,—should, that is, merely vote with the other clergy, was supported by all really representative laymen, whose leaders, but for their fear of a total collapse in the whole movement, would have created a single Assembly with divines and laymen voting together, and thus have reduced the Bishops to functionaries authorized to confirm and to ordain. Even now it is extremely doubtful whether, when obliged to subscribe for their ministers' support, the congre- gations will not insist on their right of control over the ser- vices, under menace of secession to the body to which in sentiment they belong, the Irish Presbyterian Church. Tradi- tion, the liking for the Church Service, and a latent feeling of economy at present keep them from this course ; but reverence for episcopacy as a special form of Christian Church govern- ment is in Protestant Ireland absolutely dead. It never had the smallest value for them, except as an expression of ascendancy, and with the disappearance of ascendancy the indifference is openly announced.

It is, of course, vain to prophesy the future of Protestantism in Ireland, depending, as it does, so greatly on the future of Catholicism in the same country, which for the first time in many centuries is becoming obscure. The reflex effect of the emigration to America, combined with some intellectual im- pulse not so perceptible, seriously affects the authority of that Church, and helps with the new legislation to drive the priesthood into loyalty. Should Catholicism become less vigorous, Protestantism will become less bitter ; but it would not surprise us if affairs took a different course, and Protes- tantism in Ireland organized itself under entirely new forms. The history of the revival movement reveals a deep restless- ness and discontent with the existing methods of religious life, while we seem to detect, or fancy we detect, in Irish Protes- tants a strong tendency to dispense with a Ministry altogether, a latent desire for an organization under which no set-apart caste should be absolutely required, while faith should be developed by strong excitements, and life regulated by very inflexible rules. The sentence will read a little absurd, but our meaning is exactly expressed when we say that the Protestants of Ireland seem to us to have a strong tendency to develop into fighting Quakers.