-TOPICS OF THE DAY
MR. WHITESIDE'S DEFENCE OF THE IRISH ESTABLISHMENT. THAT a subject like the Irish Church should have fallen to Mr. Dillwyn is, perhaps, proof sufficient that nothing of moment will be attempted in the matter this session. That is a week cry from Ireland which can find no more passionate exponent than the honourable member for Swansea but a faint feeling in England which no statesman can be induced to take up as guide to a line of action. The debate may possibly be protracted, but while the aggrieved Catholics despair too much to exert themselves, and the sympathizino.b Liberals are too languid to risk defeat only for "a matter of principle," the vested interests, which feel neither despair nor languor, are sure for the time to win.
The debate, however, was not without service. Facts like those brought out by Mr. Dillwyn, that under the "Missionary Church" Protestants have decreased a good deal faster than Protestant revenues, that there are parishes in which the rector, with a net income of 3301., has only twenty-four Protestants of any sect to instruct, —five or six such cases existing in one small district,—that Protestant Dissenters increase more rapidly than any other class of believers, sink deep into the popular mind. Religious men must ere long begin to doubt whether they would maintain the Irish establishment if its members sank to a hundred, and thence to question whether the number of teachers should not bear some proportion to the num- ber taught ; to ask themselves whether they really would tax Hindoos in order to endow societies for the des- truction of Hindooism, and if not, why they should tax all Irish Catholics for the destruction of Irish Catholicism. When they have arrived at that point, statesmen will gain the courage to express their long-matured conviction that Ireland never will be tranquil without religious freedom, that to compel the great majority to pay for propagating the faith of the small minority is not religious freedom, and that the Irish Establishment, if not swept away, ought to be restricted to those parishes only in which there is, at least, equality among the different faiths. Most Englishmen, willing usually to remove an injustice if it brings them no profit, still detest the trouble of looking into it, and it is only by forced debates like that raised by Mr. Dillwyn that they can be coerced into action. Drains must smell before the house- owners will bother themselves to clean them.
Above all, the debate, forced as it was, brought out Mr. Whiteside in defence of the Irish Church. At once a Protes- tant and an Irishman of the true type, a practised debater and mernIer for that stronghold of Protestant feeling the Univers:1-y of Dublin, the accomplished advocate might have been expected to say all that could be said for his ecclesias- tical client. We may assume, with fairness, that he has for- gotten nothing, left no right unasserted, suppressed no claim which could be pleaded to the forbearance of Parliament—and what does it all amount to ?—a speech so full of unconscious admissions that it almost reads as if the eloquent speaker bad, at some time or other, studied an onslaught on the Irish Established Church. He quoted, for example, the report of Mr. M'Mullen, the Roman Catholic agent, sent by the Catholic Primate to the United States, who averred that out of 3,970,000 Irishmen in America, 1,900,000 had been lost to the Catholic Church. That, said Mr. Whiteside, was a proof that the free circulation of the Bible in Ireland had prepared their minds for the truth. Doubtless, but is it not also a proof that it is under the American system that Catholics most readily change their faith, that the absence of establishments, the removal of badges of ascendancy, the extinction of the hourly sense of wrong created by the sight of the tithe-supported spire, are all friendly to healthy Protestantism ? There had not been, said Mr. Whiteside, a petition from Ireland on the subject of the Church. Does he mean to imply that Irishmen like it; or, if lie does not mean that, can he not see that Irish- men have eeased to petition, because they have ceased to hope for justice in this matter at the hands of the House of Commons, and are therefore quiescent ? Men do not pray without a lurking hope. Nobody importunes Fate, but then, to steal a simile from theology, it is the God who answers prayer, and not the inexorable Necessity who alone can excite lore in human beings. The Irish Presbyterians, six hundred thousand in number, do not, continued the speaker, join in re- questing the abolition of the Church. Certainly not, and what better proof could there be that devoted militant Pro- testantism, so devoted that it forgets sectional difference; so militant that it will tax itself for allies, if only its enemies \ may be defeated, is best fostered in a Catholic country with- out the assistance of tithe ? The "Protestant Church of Ireland, he affirmed, was the older, the true descendant of that Church which, ages before the English set foot in the country, maintained " ancient, pure, Catholic faith." If, then, the newer and less pure belief, !blinded on the Tridentine decrees, has without endowments beaten the older and purer creed, and multiplied itself till it is now the church of two-thirds of the Irish people, surely the church of right and antiquity may follow its successful example. Fas eat ab haste doeeri, even in matters of theological politics. The servants of Queen Elizabeth decided, proceeds Mr. Whiteside, that they would "connect the State with that church which at all times had been true to the monarchy, faithful to the principles of the constitution, and friendly to the well regulated liberty of the country." In other words, they acted on grounds of political expediency alone and as, if they consider political expediency alone, their successors will abolish the establishment, its defence is on the argument of precedent given up. Mr. Whiteside means to imply, and indeed, in a subsequent part of his speech, does say, that Catho- lics cannot be loyal. Are fines the manure with which he would cultivate that beautiful flower ?—for to tax a parish of Catholics for a man to teach them Protestantism is a fine. It is not a burden maintained, as in England, to keep up an organization which the majority of voters hold indis- pensable to the well-being of all, but a fine levied because the conquering country once deemed the faith of the conquered one out of which they ought perforce to be educated. Does any one believe in his heart that if Ireland had entered the Union as Scotland did, with the consent of the people as well as of a dominant class, the guarantees taken for the Scotch faith would not have been taken for the Irish ? Or does any one doubt in his heart that had the English Establishment been set up in Scotland, that country would have been to this day a half-conciliated province, instead of an integral portion of the Empire ? The Scotch have joined themselves to the Empire so cordially, that Englishmen quote Bannockburn as a national victory, because Scotland obtained instead of English ascendancy equal justice. Suppose the panacea so successful in the north were also tried in the west, and the churches of Ireland left to manage their own affairs as might to them seem best. Is it so certain in Mr. Whiteside's mind that error would overcome truth ? His argument about the estates of the Church is more sound, and, indeed, if the pre- mises are admitted, indefeasible. Only, if his premises are sound, if the Church really holds its estates as private pro- perty, and not in trust for the nation, if the Primate really enjoys his lands on the same tenure as "the descendants of that able engineer, Sir Henry Petty," why does not Mr. Whiteside more for the restoration of one-third of England back to the Roman Catholic Church ? They own it of right on his principles. The simple fact that a vicar can be deprived of his glebe for heresy or gross immorality seems to us to prove that he holds his land as wages for work done ; which work not being wanted, the pay may revert to the payer, sub- ject always to the tacit contract that the incumbent, once appointed, shall, except in certain cases laid down, enjoy a life interest in his benefice. That point, how- ever, is not worth fighting. Parliament has long since claimed the right now assumed in every Catholic coun- try of dealing with all Church property, and the only arguments ever addressed to Parliament which it is unneces- sary to answer are these which would limit its theoretical power. . If this is the best defence which can be put forward for the Irish Establishment, woe to it when the Liberal party awakes from its trance to perceive that there are abuses still unredressed!. . We will repay Mr. Whiteside for his criticism by giving him a new.brief—the solitary Argument we have ever heard for the Irish Establishment which might shake the conviction of English Liberals. Tithes are paid by property-owners, and they have some kind of right to dictate to whom these pay- ments shall go. The proportion between land in Protestant and Catholic hands is very different from the proportion between the members of the two faiths. The member who can induce Parliament to ascertain the precise facts upon that point, will have supplied a basis upon Which some compromise consistent with justice is, perhaps, a possibility.
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