• REFORM OF THE CHURCH OF IRELAND.
THE PRESS.
GLORE—If the ecclesiastical revenues of Ireland had not been scandalously misapplied, five-sixths of the inhabitants of that country—probably one-sixth- would not be at this day Papists. Their conversion never was an honest object of ambition ; and indeed they were forced into the hands of the Catholics, as there were no Protestants to teach them. The natives were, we ber.eve, never addressed by Protestant teachers in their own language—at least not till ages after the zeal of the Reformation had passed away. If we consider the purpose of an establish- ment to be to teach religion to the mass of the people, the distribution of the revenues of the Irish church is about the absurdest that can be conceived. For such a purpose, of course, we should have expected to find in a poor but popu- lous country a priesthood, ample in number, but moderately provided for, who could bring religion home to the dwellings of the nmimerons inhabitants. In such a country a number of clergy of the higher ranks, small in corres- pondence with the small number of opulent inhabitants, would be sufficient. On the contrary, we find the Irish establishment overloaded with the richest dignitaries, while great districts are left destitute cf working clergy. The following may be taken as a general description, exact enough for our pre- sent purpose, of the Irish church. There are twenty-two prelates (four arch- bishops and eighteen bishops), with incomes on the al cmemee lar7er than those of the bishops )f England—two of them possessed of fee ' to 200,000 acres of
land, leased, like nearly all ecclesiastical property, on benelicial leases. There are several deans and other dignitaries with great Met-en:es, though certainly the number of the inferior dignitaries is not at all correspondent to time number of the prelates. The island is divided into between 2,200 and 2,300 parishes;
but somany of these are formed into unions, that there are in reality about 1,300 wags. Of these livings, again, there are some pluralities (though it is not true
that pluralities are as frequent as in England, where the smallness of many of
the livings makes pluralities necessary); so that there are in all about 900 bene- ficed clergymen. Now, whether we consider the size of the island or the number of its inhabitants, the number of bishops is preposterously large, and that of in- cumbents altogether inadequate. There are exactly as many prelates in Ireland as in England (putting Wales out of the account); while there are in England single dioceses which contain more parishes than all Ireland, and perhaps twice as many livings. But even this does not give a fair picture of the destitution in the greater part of Ireland of Protestant teachers. Of the beneficed clergy a large proportion compared with the population are to be found in the Northern dio- ceses—Armagh, Dromore, Derry, Clogher, and others ; while in the South there are large districts where numbers of large parishes are—(served, we were about to say)—held by single clergymen, who receive miserable pittances for doing nothing ; it being physically impossible, from the nature of the districts and the entire want of churches that they should do more. If the seventeen Irish bishops who poured out their sorrows to the King on tie passing of the Catholic Relief Bill will assist the attempt to make it possible • that Protestantism should be diffused in Ireland, they will do more service to the Establishment than by op- posing Ile progress of religious toleration. The Protestant religion has never had a fair chance in Ireland ; the persons who profess to support it sent penal laws instead of ministers of the gospel,—they pillaged the revenues of the church, while they stained it with the disgrace of persecution. The Establishment has been made in Ireland a job for the privileged party—not an instrument for the salvation or improvement of the people. Protestantism being a "good thing," the object was net to let in but keep out converts. The meeting at Cork is an earnest that a borer feeling is beginning to prevail. If there be a disposition among the Irish Protestants of influence to make their church efficient, nothing will be more easy thin to do so, without the slightest violation of the rights of property. All the biahopricks are in the disposal of the crown ; and again, the greater portion of the livings are in the gift of the Crown or the Bishops. The obstacles which the rights of advowson present to any extensive change in Eng- land, do not there exist to any thing like the same extent; the only obstacles can be iu the want of honesty or goodwill.
Srasioa en—The jealous censorial attention bestowed just now upon the Established Church, is the natural result of the conduct of too many of her Bishops in the" great apostacy,"—conduct which we admit blots her fame with a stigma which the martyrs of Smithfield, or the confessors of the reign of James the Second, can scarcely compensate by the splendour of their piety and faithfulness. But though it is natural that a falling away of so many of her mitred sons should draw disgrace upon the Church herself, and though it is just and wholesome that they should even, while in the body, receive so much of their punishment as will arise from knowing the disgrace they have drawn, upon the establishment that feeds them, is it just to the whole Protestant hierarchy to involve them in one common censure,—the faithful with the faithless, the Abdiels with the Belials ? That a reform might be advantageously prosecuted in the order and discipline of the church, we by no means deny ; that it might even be profitably made to extend to a totally new distribution of the church property, we admit; but we deny the rig/et and we would resist the attempt, to make any reform or change which shall not begin from the Church herself. We want no reform of ecclesiastical affairs by laymen, and least of all by such a layman as the Duke of Wellingtoni; who IRS shown by the part he has made her Bishops play, how much he feels for the
honour of the Church. The time seems to us by no means well calculated for pulling to pieces a complex establishment, which, though not wealthy in relation to the objects for which it is designed, and the laborious services it is to discharge, has still wealth enough to tempt rapacity or ambition. In all the wild schemes of change with which the public ear is assailed, the project of the spoliation of the Church holds the first place; and is it for the friends of the Church to choose this moment to expose the nakedness of the land? At other times and under different auspices, a plan of Church reform might be undertaken with safety; and, when such a time shall arrive, we trust that a Convocation, the proper authority to commence such a reform, may be summoned for the. pur-
pose. But Heaven protect us from a Church reform conducted by the Duke of Wellington in the House of Lords, aided by his apostate suffragans, and per- haps Lcrd King; and by Mr. Joseph Hume in the House of Commons, with the countenance and assistance of Mr. Peel,—all his recollections of the part played by the clergy at the late Oxford election, freshly sharpened for the occasion. hi the mean time, a great deal may be done towards reforming the Church by means already within our power, and without any invasion of rights which the slightest invasion will not merely wound but utterly extinguish. Let tis, in the first place, get rid of a ministry, which havingby its mouthpiece in the House of Com- mons, professed its abhorrence of any tenacity of the moral rule, and having con- verted so many prelates to the same or similar notions, seems scarcely qualified to administer patronage to the teachers of a christian society. Having done this, as, with patience and resolution (God willing) we shall do it, we need the less regret hat high birth and powerful connexion will still have a preference in the claim to episcopal promotion. It were no doubt a bad thing that poverty or humble origin should operate as a bar to advancement in the Church ; but we do not hesitate to say that it were still worse that rank and powerful connexion should operate as indelible disqualifications. Whatever dealers in commonplace may say, rank and powerful connexion do not in England render men either idle or irreligious The House of Lords, little as we are pleased with it, is, intellectually and morally, a very superior body to the House of Commons ; and decidedly the least re- spectable part of the noble branch of the Legislature, in every point of view, con- sists of its more recent acquisitions ; or, to come to the very order which is the subject of inquiry—who does not prefer Lord John George Beresford, the son of a Marquis, and of the highest blood in Europe, before Dr. Sumner, of Winchester; or Dr. Law, son and brother of a bishop, though he be, brother of a Lord Chief Justice and uncle of a Cabinet Minister, before Dr. Coplestone, who, like his tight reverend brethren of Winchester and Chester, vies with Melchizedech for dubiety of descent? No rule can be fixed with respect to the person to be selected for the mitre which must not eventually do mischief. If you prohibit men of rank, you exclude those who may,—as well as others,—be Christians and scholars, and who must be gentlemen ; while you leave the road as open as ever to those who need not be any of the three. And we do not see how the cause of religion or the Church will be served by tuning off all connexion between the aristocracy and the Establishment, while the back-door remains free for closet favourites or pamphleteering grubs, persons often as successful in pursuit of eclesiastical honours and emoluments as the best-born in the land.
MORNING CHRONICLE—Lord Mountcashel and his friends are part of the Church, are entitled to participate in the spiritual] advantages for which an esta- blishment is appointed ; and if, from the existence of abuses, they are denied these advantages, they have a right to call for the removal of the abuses. The property of the establishment is held in trust for the performance of certain duties;
and if, from the distribution of the property, the duties cannot be discharged aright, there must be a power somewhere to effect such an alteration in the distribution as shall remove the obstacles in the way of amelioration. " The reform shall begin from the Church herself." From the Church, certainly, but not from that part of the Church interested in the perpetuation of the abuses complained of. No one seeks an alteration in any of those particulars which give to the Church its distinctive cha- racter. No one seeks to put laymen in the place where ecclesiastics ought ta be, or ecclesiastics in the place of laymen. But there are points respecting which laymen are entitled to a voice as well as ecclesiastics, and all regulations respecting tempo- ralities are peculiarly of the number. If laymen are not to interfere with Church abuses, by what right does the Protestant Church enjoy the temporalities for- merly enjoyed by the Catholic Church ? It was not the Clergy in England that effected the reformation in the Church. On the contrary, the reformation was forced on the Clergy, just as reformation must always be forced on those elm are themselves the authors of the abuses complained of. Clergymen, like all other men, are naturally partial to those abuses by which they individually profit. In England, the State has interfered again and again, not merely with the property, but with the discipline of the Church.
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