"THE WRONG AND RIGHT WAY OF DEFENDING THE WELSH CHURCH."
[To THE EDITOR Or THE " $PECTATOR.") SIR,—In your article under this heading, in the Spectator of April 15th, it seems to me you scarcely make the best of what you name the arguments of impiety and injustice. You say : "The whole theory [of sacrilege] rests on the assumption that the Church of England is the true Church, and that money given to the Church of England is, in a peculiar sense, given to God." Even so, the argument should appeal to a great number who, as professing members of the Church of England, may be supposed to con- sider it the true Church. But religious people even outside her fold may surely be expected to see something of sacrilege in the diversion of property from uses which, whether they altogether approve of them or not, they at least recognise as sacred, to other uses wholly secular.
Then the argument of robbery, you say, needs for its validity not only the legal, but the moral, identity of the corporation at all times of its history ; and you consider it a matter of absolute uncertainty whether a donor of the four- teenth century would have wished his endowment to be inherited by Romanists or Reformed. Quite so ; that is the rightful choice ; but is it proposed to take away the possessions of the Welsh Church in order that they may be banded over to the Roman Community in that country P The one thing quite certain, I suppose, is that the mediaival donor did not intend his property to go to drainage or to atheistic education ; nor even to the promotion of undenomi- national Protestantism.—I am, Sir, &c., G. H. T.
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