Mr. Cowen took the chair at a breakfast of the
friends of "religious equality," held at the Cannon-Street Hotel on Tuesday, and spoke with justice of the Nonconformists as "if not the majority, at least the most trusted wing of the Liberal party, —like Cromwell's Ironsides, who were never beaten." But though almost every speaker assumed that Establishments are inconsistent with religious equality, the drift of opinion seemed to be rather against pressing on that phase of the principle at present, and in favour of turning the attention of Parliament to the religious inequalities involved in the Law of Burial, in the number of Clerical Fellowships held at the Uni- versitiea, and in side-endowments like the ecclesiastical endow- ments in Ceylon. The speech of the morning was Mr. Goldwin Smith's, who suggested the latest Canadian solution of the burial law as the proper one for England. The Dissenters should be allowed to bury in consecrated ground with their own rites, but the Bishop, if aggrieved, should follow the example of the Bishop of Montreal, and deconsecrate the ground in which Dissenters were thus buried, so that you would have a cemetery of consecrated ground, sprinkled over with Wands of deconsecrated ground where Dissenters had been laid. That is not a bad proposal, as a stroke of humour, but considered seri ously,—which, of course,
was not intended,—it would make the "sentimental grievance worse than ever.
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