THE ROMISH PLOT AGAINST IRISH EDUCATION.
IF we may believe the appearances reported to us from Ireland, a very serious political fault is in rapid progress towards eompletion, and the system of the National Schools, the best and purest triumph of English administration, is about to be sacrificed as a peace-offer- ing to the demons of sectarian partisanship. We had been prepared for this ; but, instead of being tranquillized by our foreknowledge, our apprehensions are only rendered the graver, by the fulfilment of that which now appears to be the result of a long-planned scheme, laid by the sectaries, and accomplished under the counte- nance of a branch of the Executive. The newly-reported proceeding at the Education Board—the proscription of the "Lessons on the Evidences of Christianity "—would excite suspicion if it were only for the fact that it is under the joint disapproval not only of the author of the book, Archbishop Whately, but of Mr. Blackburne the late Chancellor of Ireland, and of Mr. Baron Greene; as they are also opposed to the spirit of the administration which received the sanction of Archbishop Murray. When we find the proceedings by which that established regime is to be superseded favoured with the countenance of Archbishop Paul Cullen and of the high Orange religionists, our suspicion is increased ; still more when we learn that in proscribing the book, the Board is actually obeying the Index Expurgatorms of the Sovereign Pontiff; and yet more again when we learn that the new acts are of a kind so subversive in their tendency and so offensive that they are expected to pro- voke the retirement of Archbishop Whately from the Board. These are circumstances, unquestionably, which impart an ex- cessively ugly look to the affair ; and we await an authoritative explanation with some impatience. Abstract reasons might possibly be advanced tor secularizing the mixed schools still more than they have been, by eicluding even all Christian teaching; since there is none, even of the broad- est kind, which will not provoke the fres and enmities of sect. But it is not a case for abstract treatment. If there had been any deviation from abstract principle, it might have been well to make a concession, but only in the direction of adhering to a system which has worked so well. We do not consider it a point of small account that the authorship of the prohibited or prohibitable books is assigned to Archbishop Whately—a writer with not a local but an European reputation, one of the founders as he has been one of the most zealous and useful administrators of the system, and a man now advanced in years as he is in honour. It would have been well not lightly to touch any even of the furniture of the system which is marked with his name. But an unsectarian pretext may be made to serve the most sectarian of purposes. We have before alluded to a ease parallel with this, but it becomes more applicable as the Irish ease pro- ceeds. The Roman Catholic clergy—whose technical and profes- sional agitations must be kept distinct from the better opinion which is quietly gaining ground among the more intelligent of their flocks—have carried on this attempt to gain or regain possession of the public schools in other countries, more particularly in France, Switzerland, and the 'United States. They have triumphed in France ; they have been checked in Switzerland ; they have been foiled in America. The plan of action in the State of New York was more specious than that which has recently been frus- trated in Ohio, where there was an open attempt to get possession of the schools : in New York the plan was to discontinue the use of the Bible. Now there are many in that State who would not uphold the indiscriminate use of the sacred volume as a class-book—some on the score of consideration for sectarian differences others on other grounds ; but the abstract merits of that consideration were not the real question, and the Americans are not the men to be led off a tangible question by a theoretical one : the Roman Catholics
had made the Bible the battle-word of the contest;. and the movement for continuing its use, or not, was a form of the ques- tion whether the schools should continue practie.ally unsec- tarian, as they had been, or be placed under Roman Catholic dictation; and Archbishop Hughes, the Paul Cullen of that strug- gle, was hopelessly defeated. But all the moral of that case ap- plies with double force to the nnsectarian "Lessons" of the Irish Schools, and to the infinitely more domineering prelate who has been translated from a higher see to Dublin on purpose to conduet actions of this kind.
Even if there were not strong and palpable reasons for an
opposite course, there were all-sufficient grounds for remaining passive. There was no occasion for interference. The National system was one of the most striking and incontrovertible instances of success on a great scale, amid gigantic difficulties. Amid the storm of conflicts religious and political, amid the terrors of famine, and the eiflux of the population to an extent of two millions, the number of scholars was increasing, and stood at the highest point yet attained. Sir James Graham and his colleagues justly gloried in these facts when a motion indirectly tending to unsettle the system was made in Parliament. What does it all mean, but that the system had the sanction not only of the Murrays and Whatelys, of the Greenes and Blackburnes, but of the bulk of the nation—they all approved and used it; the Christian Evidences being no impedi- ment or offence to them. Nay, the very opposition is a test of this success a converse, and a reason against interference. In the National system, break- ing away from difference of race, political rancours, and sectarian extremes, the founders had succeeded in establishing a mezzo termine, with a degree of success rarely attained for a middle course; it was natural that the extremes should hate a success which at last promised, with other circumstances, positively to abolish the ground on which they stood and doom them to anni- hilation. The priests fell back upon Rome ; and, with a compro- mise of principle seldom witnessed, the high Protestants accepted the complicity of the priests in an ultra-Roman ultra-Protestant conspiracy to undermine that which was destroying them. But what reason did that conjunction afford for an official proceeding in the direction of obstructive intervention ? What need was there for meddling with a system which was so peacefully, so amply, so publicly marching on in success. We are for the ut- most freedom extended to all opinions, and we have no desire to secure special advantages for the Protestant. But if a system which thus diffused sound elementary information among the people, and helped to lay a solid foundation on which freed opinion can rest, also happened to prove favourable to the essentials of Protestantism and not favourable to the most dogmatic forms of Catholicism, is that a reason why we in England should regret its success, or why our Government should let the Romanists have their own way in undermining it ?
Indeed, the complicity of the Government, though always as- sumed in our intelligence from Ireland, appears to rest rather upon surmise and inference than upon any direct evidence. To us in England it has the shape of a mere suspicion, suggested pro- bably by the untoward aspect of the affair ; fostered by the hos- tile but too generally diffused feeling to which Lord Derby gave voice last night, when he accused Lord Aberdeen and his col- leagues of "a desire to carry on the government of Ireland through the priests and apparently strengthened by the part which the paid Commissioner has taken in these unhappy proceedings. Has the Government done nothing to prevent the present crisis ; or has it tried and been foiled ? As the suspicion exists, as the case itself is a bad one, and as it creates a new " difficulty " in Ireland, Mi- nisters, if they can, are bound to show at least that they stand clear, by a distinct explanation.
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