The Committee on the Welsh Church Disestablishment Bill made a
modicum of progress on Monday and Tuesday, but the debate on it in the Upper House of Convocation was much more important, as the new Bishop of Hereford (Dr. Percival) delivered a very candid and important speech in defence of the Bill, which was the subject of almost every subsequent speech. With regard to Disestablishment, he treated the majority of 31 to 3 Members in the House of Commons as decisive of the will of the Welsh people, and he treated the history, language, and literature of Wales as sufficient to show that Wales is a separate national entity entitled to pronounce separately for itself on such a question. But he disapproved the Bill on two important points. He wished to put back the epoch at which to begin reckoning the private endowments, from 1703 to the date of the passing of the Act of Uniformity (1662), and more important still, he wished to have the earlier endowments divided between the Church and the various Dissenting sects ; in short, he advo- cated concurrent endowment, for which there is no chance whatever. This was insisted on by those who replied to him, while the Archbishop of Canterbury especially insisted that the dream of restoring social harmony in Wales by Disestab- lishment and Disendowment was utterly baseless, seeing that in Ireland the Act for Disestablishing and Disendowing the Irish Church had utterly failed in fulfilling any hope of this kind. Even the argument for the justice of the Bill has more plausibility than the argument for its expediency as a mode of reconciling the Churchmen to the Dissenters.
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