TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE ARCHBISHOP OF DUBLIN ON THE EVIL EYE.
ARCHBISHOP TRENCH has discovered a few new argu- ments for the Irish Establishment,—or rather, we should say, for even his ingenuity is not quite so great as that,— a few new arguments against those who propose disestablish- ment. One of them is moral, and one of them is a com- bination of the moral and the arithmetical, and the others are nondescript. The moral one, to which the Archbishop evidently attaches the greater importance, must take precedence. It is to the effect that those who cry for disendowment and disestablishment are guilty of that which "the lips of Truth" have called " the evil eye,"—" which does not so much wish for more for itself, as for less for another." The Archbishop refers, we conclude, to the parable of the labourers in the vineyard, who murmured because those who had come in to labour only at the eleventh hour received every man his penny, just like those who had borne all " the burden and heat of the day ;" whereupon the good man of the house answers, " Friend, I do thee no wrong : didst not thou agree with me for a penny ? Take that thine is, and go thy way : I will give unto this last even as unto thee. Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own ? Is thine eye evil because I am good ? So the last shall be first, and the first last : for many be called, but few chosen." The Archbishop applies this to the attempt of the Liberals of this country, under the plea of justice, to take national Irish property which has hitherto been devoted to the use of a small sect, and insist on its application for the good of the whole nation. He conceives, if we understood him rightly,—and we must say it seems to us the most pro- fane abuse of a Scripture lesson that we can remember in our own day,—of " the lips of Truth" as saying to the Irish Catholics, who are five-sixths of the Irish nation,—' Friends, the State did you no wrong. Did you not agree with it to have nothing,—and even to let your national property be applied to sectional uses ? Take the nothing that belongs to you, and go your way. It will give all to the Protestants, and nothing to you. Is it not lawful for one race to do what it will with the property of a subject race ? Is your eye evil because it is good ? So the last shall be first, and the first last ; for many be called, but few chosen." Such is the Archbishop's implied tra- vestie of the lesson given by our Lord against jealousy of the blessings of others. Can anything be more flagrantly profane V The " evil eye " to which he refers consists in indulging dis- content that those who are supposed to have laboured less pain- fully for God should receive equal love and blessing with those who, having contracted for a certain reward, had obtained that reward, and no more, though they had laboured longer and more painfully. The Archbishop wants to make it mean that those men are very wicked who, having made no agreement, and having never had any power to make any, having for centuries seen their national property applied by the strong hand of an alien Government to purposes of which they disap- proved, wish to redeem it for truly national purposes, and to divide equally now, what has been divided so unequally for ages back. Could a Jesuit of the most consummate unscrupu- lousness have twisted a truth to look like a falsehood more efficiently than this ? The ground on which the Archbishop believes, or seems to believe, that the Irish Catholics simply wish to take from others what they don't wish to have them- selves, is, that they have professed their intention not to apply the property of the Protestant Church to their own religious uses. He might precisely as well and as logically say that, because the manufacturers did not propose to transfer the pro- tective duties on corn to manufactures, but simply to give back the money they yielded to the nation at large, they were guilty of the evil eye,' in wishing others to have less without getting more for themselves ;—or that if a younger brother remonstrates against an elder spending half his father's income on pictures and statuary, to the great detriment of the rest of the family, he should be accused of the evil eye ' because his object is not to get some of the pictures and statues for himself, but only to increase the general fund at the disposal of the household. If the Archbishop did not see the utter sophistry of the whole argument,—and we con- clude he did not, or he would be indeed morally unfit for his high position,—we ought to learn from his use of it how the calmest and most lucid intellects may be contracted and dis- torted by the exigencies of an official position. The moral argument from the evil eye could only have been passed by either an evil eye,—which the Archbishop's is not,— or a very much blinded one, which on this subject Dr. Trench's. obviously is. But the second argument to which he refers,— the argument from the Protestant posterity which 40,000 Pro- testants, murdered, as he supposes, in the Irish revolution of 1641, would have had, had they not been murdered,—almost reads like a joke in disguise. Of course an Archbishop charging his clergy on a State occasion cannot be supposed guilty of the cynicism of cloaking a joke in the form of a. solemn protest against what he holds to be an injustice. But is it possible for a sensible man to go nearer to the verge of silliness than this?—" He did not desire to revive the memory of bygone persecution of the Protestant population, but when they were taunted with their fewness, he could not help remarking that the number of Protestants who were massacred by the Roman Catholics during the rebellion was by the most moderate estimate set down at 40,000, which, according to the rate of in- crease of the population in Ireland, would now have more than. quadrupled." Only conceive of careful counter-estimates by Pro- testants and Catholics of the additions to their families and clans and creeds which might conjecturally be assumed, had none of them ever been killed or driven out by the oppo- site sect,—and this as the basis of an adjustment of the rival claims to the property of the Irish Church I Dr. Trench. would find, we fear, his conjectural 40,000 conjecturally quad- rupled, rather more than balanced by pretty little statistical estimates, quite as reliable, on the opposite side of the account. But can a prelate be serious who proves the rights of a small party to national property by counting up the imaginary shades of unborn heirs,—not only children who have not yet been born, but who never can be born,—to his murdered Protestant Banquos Does he mean to suggest that the Irish Church. professes and wishes to consider itself a Church ministering to. purely imaginary beings ? If not, what did he mean by throw- ing 160,000 purely imaginary ghosts into the scale against the living people of Ireland ? Another rather more plausible, but equally sophistical argument the Irish Archbishop used against the Liberal move- ment. "Suppose," he said, "large sums had been left long; ago for setting forth the science of astronomy, and this when the Ptolemaic system, which Copernicus first and Newton afterwards, exploded, was still in vogue. Suppose, as is the fact, that these discoveries did not at once obtain universal assent, and that there were some who still clung to the vortices,. cycles, and epicycles of Ptolemy, while others went forward to the new paths which the reformers of the science had opened. Suppose these last, the Newtonians, to be in possession of the endowments left for the teaching of astronomy. The others remonstrate, and urge that the funds were left for the diffusion of the Ptolemaic system ; how unjust, then, for the Newtonians to retain them! Not at all,' might the actual holders of the fund reply ; the fund was bequeathed for the promotion of the science of astronomy. That was the central thought of those who bequeathed it, though science in their days was hampered with errors which it has since got rid of. Would not such an answer be sufficient in reason I" Possibly. The majority of the living astronomical trustees might be bound to teach what they thought true astronomy rather than what their fore- fathers thought so, and to apply funds intended to diffuse astronomy to the teaching of true astronomy. But how if the vast majority of the trustees sincerely held the false astronomy to be the true one, while the minority were enabled by an alliance with an external body of the opposite opinion; and of far greater power and resources, to snatch the funds originally provided by the kinsmen of the majority out of the hands of the majority, and administer them according to their own view ? Would that be right and just ?—and that is, we submit, the true analogy for the Archbishop, and not the case he has actually put. Finally, the Archbishop says, " When the Irish Church is said to be a badge of conquest, what was it but another way of saying that the past had bequeathed its results to the present " [quite another way, surely]. " The same thing was done everywhere in a thousand ways. There was no escaping the testimony of the past. If it be attempted to ignore its verdicts, to reverse its decisions, and to undo. what it had done, very much more would have to be under- taken than the destruction of the Irish Church Establishment.
The possession by Protestant landlords of seven-eighths of the soil of Ireland,—was not that a badge of conquest, far more impressive and with results immeasurably more significant than that of the Church ?" The Archbishop might just as well suggest to a thief, with the money he had transferred from his victim's pocket still in his own, to say,—that "if his possession of the money was a badge of the injury and humilia- tion of his victim, yet that was only another way of saying that the past had bequeathed its results to the present ; if it be attempted to ignore its verdicts, to reverse its decisions, and to undo what it had done, very much more would have to be undertaken than the mere re-transfer of the money to the pocket from which it had been taken. The possession by millions of persons of property inherited from and accumu- lated by freebooters, dishonest traders, and others,—was not that a badge of the injury and humiliation of the descendants of the persons cheated and robbed, and one far more impres- sive, with results immeasurably more significant, than the possession of a single purse of stolen money by himself ?" The truth is, as the Archbishop well knows, that the Irish national property which the English people chooses to take from the Irish 'nation and apply to purposes which the Irish nation disapproves, is not in any sense a bequest from the past, but an act of con- scious acquiescence in injustice in the present. A man might just as well wait to refund stolen property till the posterity of every thief that had ever lived had refunded the accumulations of property not stolen by him, but by his ancestors, as the Eng- lish Government gravely plead now that it will wait to devote Irish national property to Irish uses till the posterity of the Protestant landowners refund the land which their fathers xeceived through the forfeiture of Roman Catholic estates. The Archbishop reasons not like what he is, a clear-headed and thoughtful man, of great good sense and considerable imagina- tion, but like a cross between a special pleader and a goose. We hope, however, that it is only an amiable error of the Record's reporter to make the Archbishop attribute the movement against the Irish Church to "unprincipled statesmen,"—for we cannot find any such expression in the Times' report, and we -do not believe Dr. Trench would have used it. He is himself, we believe, a man of very high principle. But there is a far more plausible case for making out that he himself is an unprincipled statesman, on the face of this confused, foolish, and highly sophistical charge,—than he could find in any number of acts or words of Mr. Gladstone's to justify such -an accusation against him. We feel sure that Archbishop Trench never put forward so grossly calumnious and un- .Christian an imputation. His sophistry is, no doubt, hidden from himself. But he could not have said this, without a con- scious offence against his own conscience, alike as a Christian minister and a politician.
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