MR. MULL'S DEFEAT.
THE prospect of a dissolution has had a somewhat depress- ing influence on Mr. Miall's "favourers." No doubt last year his demand for inquiry was supported by a few votes,— Lord Arthur Russell's, for instance,—avowedly given in the conviction that inquiry would strengthen the Church, and not weaken it, so that it is not fair to compare the number of Mr. Miall's minority last session, when he only proposed investiga- tion, with the number this session, when everyone included in it was pledged to the rather sweeping statement that "the establishment by law of the Churches of England and Scotland involves a violation of religious equality, deprives those Churches of the right of self-government, imposes on Parlia- ment duties which it is not qualified to discharge, and is hurt- ful to the religious and political sentiments of the community, and therefore ought no longer to be maintained." How- ever, the number who voted for his resolution of last year, even if we include the pairs, has been reduced from 109 to 95, while the number who resisted it, again including the pairs, has risen from 310 to 387. And though it would be very unfair to regard this great diminution as due entirely either to change of conviction or to the fear of electoral disapprobation, no one will doubt that these causes, so far as they have operated at all during the last year, have operated unfavourably to Mr. Miall. Even as compared with the division on his motion in 1871, which was more strictly analogous to the present motion than that of 1872, Mr. Miall has rather lost than gained ground. If we again include the pairs, the number of his supporters has been diminished by one, the number of his opponents has been increased by six. But there is more than this. The tone of the House was far more peremptory, and quite opposed even to the continuance of the discussion. Again, Mr. Gladstone's own tone since he last spoke upon this subject had altered materially, and altered in the direction of a more strenuous resistance to Mr. Miall's motion,—not, of course, that he has ever favoured it, but that there is almost always visible in Mr. Gladstone's manner, when he discusses abstract politics, a variable element which may be taken as involuntary and strictly barometric of the state of feeling manifested around him ; and this variable element assumed this year the form of far deeper assurance than ever before that Mr. Miall's political imagination is possessed by a pure chimwra. Little more than a fortnight ago, in resist- ing an amendment to Mr. Fawcett's Bill for abolishing tests in Trinity College, Dublin, Mr. Gladstone denied, as we under- stood him, that the Irish Protestant Church was disestablished and disendowed out of deference for Irish ideas at all. He appeared to maintain that it was on Imperial principles that the Church was disestablished and disendowed, and we confess we felt some alarm, when we heard that, for the National Church in England. If the Irish Protestant Episcopal Church were disestablished and disendowed on Imperial principles, we certainly did fear that Mr. Miall would come in for his share of the validity of those principles in relation to the Churches of England and Scotland ; for, different as the local grievances are, no one can Amy that in some infinitesimal degree the grievances of the Roman Catholics who disapproved of the application of Irish national property to an Irish Protestant Church, may be felt by Nonconformists who disapprove of the application of British national property to a British National Church. But Mr. Gladstone has now apparently surrendered this hasty view in favour of what we believe to be the fairer, more deliberate, and more natural view of
the question. He now tells us that "the apparent similarity of the cases could not long conceal their essential difference," and points out to Mr. Miall that even those who, in 1869, were. most eager to show that the fall of the English Establishment must logically follow that of the Irish Establishment, are now most desirous to refute their own allegation by defeating the Anti-State Church movement. That which they were quite disposed to maintain seriously as a reason for leaving the Irish Church alone, they are not now willing to repeat as a reason against leaving the English Church alone. On the contrary, they now retreat upon the reasonableness of recog- nising a real difference, of which they were then dis- posed to make light. And Mr. Gladstone himself evidently agrees with them more cordially than ever. He sees more distinctly than ever the strongly-marked local features of the two cases, and also that in relation to England those strongly- marked local features are as unfavourable to disestablishment and disendowment, as, in relation to Ireland, they were favour- able to it. If there were imperial reasons for the disestablish- ment of the Irish Church, they were, at least, imperial reasons applicable to Ireland only ; if there be imperial reasons for retaining the English and Scotch Establishments, they are imperial reasons which derive all their force from the special state of English and Scotch feelings and habits. And no one feels more keenly than Mr. Gladstone, not only that, in England at least, there is no disposition to meddle with the Church, but that there has been within the year a very considerable access of hostility towards the policy of disestablishment and disendowment. If disestablishment and disendowment are really necessary to religious equality,' there has been a posi- tive growth in the preference for religious inequality ; if not, then there has been a positive growth in the conviction that there may be more religious equality with an Establishment, than there could be without one.
And is not this last perhaps the real cause of the new-
disinclination felt to Mr. motion Englishmen are, we suspect, beginning to see that absolute religious equality, like almost every other kind of absolute equality, is a dream. If there were not and never had been any establishment or endowment of religion at all, still there could be no real religious equality in Mr. Allan's sense ; there would still be- differences in fashion, and differences in wealth, and differ- ences in worldly prestige,—in short, differences in the strength of external motives for the adhesion to different creeds, which would prevent anything like real equality of advantage for making known the purely spiritual, and moral, and intellectual aspects of the various forms of faith. Is the fact that the State favours a particular Church a more unspiritoal reason for belonging to it, than the fact that it has in it a larger number of people belonging to good society ? or than the fact that it has in it a larger opening for popular agitation and the promotion of democratic. policy ? It will be said that the worldly motives for adhesion furnished by State support are- worldly motives provided at the expense of all, both those who approve and who do not approve the religion of the State,—but that the worldly motives which spring out of the character of a voluntary Church, however unworthy they may be, are not provided at the cost of those who disapprove the religion so assisted. And this is true. But then, to balance the disadvant- ages to some forms of faith created by the State assistance to other forms of faith, there are undoubtedly a large class of serious inequalities redressed by that assistance. If it be creat- ing an inequality to take from one man his minute share in certain public property and apply it to aid a faith he disapproves, what shall we say of the inequality between the lot of those millions who, having also their rightful share in the public property devoted to religious purposes, will not, if it be otherwise appropriated, even be in a position to judge whether they have been defrauded or not, and the lot of those who are already sufficiently well instructed in religious matters to know what they approve and what they disapprove? Is there no gross inequality there ? And is it not an inequality which the foundation of a State Church was expressly intended to diminish It seems to us that now-a-days a great deal too exclusive attention is paid to the injustices suffered by those who are fully conscious of the injustice and fully equal to the statement of their own case, and a great deal too little to the often far more grievous injustices inflicted on classes not even so far capable of obtaining redress for them- selves as to know whether or not they have been wronged. All great national trusts, like the trust of the Church pro- perty, are really meant to attenuate the latter and worse kind of inequality, an inequality far greater than any between. possible. The inequality between those and these is to our dauntlessly dragged to light have long been notorious. apprehension far greater, and far more worthy of such redress Not only have they been for years matters of common converse- as is possible, than the inequality between the owners of tion in the seaport towns, they have been well known to officials different kinds of religious scruples. in high places, as well as to Members of Parliament of standing been defeated, but has been defeated by a majority of he risked comfort, peace of mind, and perhaps fortune, by doing nearly two to one of the Liberal party taken alone ; that this, in the effort to protect a class of men from whom he Scotland has defeated him by three to one, and England could expect in return nothing more substantial than gratitude.
by six to one. And when Mr. Gladstone said very justly And from the very nature of the case, it is manifestly unreason- that the conditions of the question as to Establishment are so able to expect much carefulness of proof or soberness of extremely different in England and Ireland as to render it im- statement from a man of such generous impulse. Were his possible to draw any inference from the latter case to the former, disposition cautious, calculating, and prudent, he most certainly he said what applies especially to the argument we have just would never have devoted himself to a holy war against the insisted upon. Great masses of persons who would have been class who, whether deliberately or self-deceived, set them- in a state of religious destitution but for the then-Established selves to make money by sending their servants to sea in what Church, were not to be found in Ireland. Moreover, it was have been expressively called "floating coffins." Far from not true in Ireland that the National-Church teaching formed, being of such a disposition, he is an enthusiast in philanthropy, as it were, the basis for the criticisms and controversial so strongly possessed by horror of the inhuman practices he statements of the opponents of the National Church. Neither has exposed, that he has come to regard moderation as a corn- was the Parochial system of the Established Church of Ireland promise with crime. Were he less in earnest, less filled with the mainstay of religion in the rural districts of Ireland, nor an all-absorbing passion to right this great wrong, he could not was it the point of departure for the more popular religious have acquired the hold upon the mind of the country which bodies. The great majority of the Irish people stood apart by his book and his speeches he has undoubtedly won. If from the Church erroneously termed National, and the Roman it is but natural that politicians should hesitate to follow such Catholic Church had not enough in common with it to base a guide, it would be equally irrational and deplorable to refuse its teaching in any way, even for converts, on the religious to consider a measure recommended by him, simply because he ground-work which the Establishment had laid. Thus had failed to give evidence of a cautious and sober judg- the trust for the nation was in no respect really held or ad- ment. ministered on behalf of the nation, while in England it is It is not necessary to inform our readers that the object quite otherwise. Here even Dissenters would mostly admit of Mr. Plimsoll's Bill is to secure sound ships and prevent that the National Church is better than No-Church, and that, Overloading and Deck-loading. It is objected that the whole though they themselves, of course, teach what is, in their subject of Unseaworthiness has been referred to a Royal Corn- own estimation, higher and purer truth, yet they can start mission, and that until that body has reported it is not desirable from the beginnings made by the National Church. This to legislate. To this Mr. Plimsoll replies that deck-loading is the reason why Mr. Miall finds so few adherents for his and overloading are everywhere admitted to be dangerous ; attempt to apply to England a principle which was never that Lloyd's and the Liverpool Underwriters, as well as the applied to Ireland, and which, had it been applicable to respectable provincial insurance clubs, prescribe rules respect- Ireland only in the same sense in which it is applicable to ing them ; and that all respectable shipowners condemn them. England, would never have been applied at all. He contends, therefore, that to wait for the Commissioners re-
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