The jubilee of the Liberation Society was celebrated on Tuesday
by a breakfast and a public meeting. At the break- fast Mr. Illingworth, M.P., who presided, declared that the Society's career had been a series of unbroken triumphs. We wish he had enumerated them. The Disestablishment of the Irish Church would, we suppose, be regarded as the chief triumph ; but that was no triumph for the abstract principle that religion ought always and everywhere to be liberated " from State patronage and control," since probably the majority of Mr. Gladstone's followers voted for it only because they regarded it as an outrage on a predominantly Catholic people that a Protestant Church should be supported amongst them at the cost of a peasantry who rejected the Protestant faith. And we do not know a single instance in which the abstract principle that it is illegitimate for the State, under any circumstances, to interfere in the affairs of a religions body, or to lend any help to the religious teaching and training of a nation, has received the sanction of the Legislature. As for the " unholy alliance between Church and beer," which Mr. Illingworth thought it seemly to assume, we should like to know on what data he grounds that scandalous imputation. We suppose him to refer to the disinclination of the Bishops to restrict the right of the Parish Councils to meet where they find it most convenient to meet,—a disinclination shared by a great many of those who do not think it seemly to display profound distrust of the temperance of peasants to whom they are just consigning great public responsibilities.
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