TOPICS OF THE DAY.
rithl GREAT ECCLESIASTICAL DEBATE.
-1111 MIALL observed in the middle of the debate which closed with so great a majority for Government on Tuesday, that there had been an air of unreality about the speeches delivered in its progress which had in some respects paralyzed even his own mind. And those who beard him speak, seem to have been at least as much impressed with the influence of this feeling over him as was the speaker himself. His manner was constrained and artificial, not to say theatrical, and he seemed to be striving after novelty and originality, rather than the earnest expression of life-long convictions. That this bewildering feeling of unreality should have taken such hold upon a politician who has devoted his whole life to the propagation of principles far from popular, often, too, as he told the House truly enough, at very great personal cost to himself, is a remarkable evidence of the difficulty which has beset almost every speaker in this debate. Indeed, excepting only the speeches of Sir Roundell Palmer, Mr. Bright, and Mr. Gladstone, and those of one or two of the most vigorous of the new members,—especially Mr. Richard, the Baptist minister, who was returned for Merthyr Tydvil over the head of the Home Secretary, and the shrewd and thoughtful member for Bandon Bridge, Mr. Shaw,—the debate has, from its beginning to its close, been fought with regulation thrusts, like a trial of the foils between a fencing-master and his pupil. There has been scarcely any of that simplicity and sincerity which mark the House when it has to deal with practical matters, like the rights of neutrals to fit out Alabanias, or like the importation of mutton and beef. There has been an artificial and almost stilted air about the debate with the exceptions we have named, and perhaps one or two others,—like the outpouring of genuine Orange feeling on the part of the two Lords Hamilton, uncle and nephew, the Member for Londonderry and the Member for Middlesex. Those who were fighting for property wanted to give a religious air to their plea, and those who were fighting for religion tried to alarm the highly sensitive and delicate proprietary nervous system of the House. We scarcely remember any debate for years containing so little frankness and candour. Mr. Miall himself, whom one might have expected to confess freely his longcherished voluntaryist principles, and to put something of the momentum of a life's convictions into his speech, strove as fax as possible to keep in the abstract region of liberal generalization, descanting on the wound given by a Protestant Establishment to Ireland's religious susceptibilities, and the possibility of a much more hearty union between religion and politics after the tie of a religious establishment should have been dissolved,—truths, no doubt, and important truths, but not the special truths which it seemed natural for Mr. Miall to enforce at such a time, at the cost of suppressing those convictions which we have all so often read from his pen in relation to the injury which is done, as he believes, to religious truth, by giving any authoritative sanction or reward to those who embrace special aspects of it.
The unreality of the debate arose apparently from the effort of almost every speaker to say something more convincing than that of which he had himself become convinced. Mr. Disraeli started the debate in a falsetto note, but then Mr. Disraeli is artificial by nature, and natural only by art, so that in him the tone we speak of appeared rather less conventional than usual. Indeed, his prophecy of a new influx of religious ideas into political life,—that "we are on the eve of a period when the influence of religion on public affairs may be predominant," was, in its way, perfectly genuine, though it was a horoscope cast completely ab extra from that detached position which is the secret of Mr. Disraeli's peculiar strength, as well as of his peculiar weakness. Yet his studied unreality came out where he attempted to argue that you can create a "standard of toleration" as you do a standard of value ; not, however, by stamping the current coin of the religious realm, but by giving a special government endorsement to the notes issued by one small religious firm, which circulate amongst perhaps one-eighth of the whole population, and to none others. That this was a forced argument, —an ingenious piece of intellectual invention,— was obvious, and though it did not set duller men on any track of similar originality, because men who don't perceive subtle distinctions can't invent them, it did set the tone of half-sincerity in which so much of the subsequent debate was con ducted. After that, the Conservative statesmen, down to Mr. Hardy, fell back behind either religious earthworks erected to defend the right of property, or proprietary earthworks erected to defend a religious monopoly. And even so there was no candour. Not one Conservative speaker admitted the perplexities of which he must have been really conscious. Not one confessed himself to the House, or imparted the dfffi-culties and compunctions which beset him in taking up once more the cry of "Non possucaus." And on the Liberal side of the House, with the exceptions we have named, it was not much better. There was little appearance of the Liberal speakera having entered into and appreciated carefully the case of the Irish Church, of having realized to themselves how much true religion would gain by an ecclesiastical sacrifice,—in short, of such a review of the whole problem as would tend to satisfy opponents that they were not throwing a tub to the whale by command of their constituencies, but were deliberately discharging a painful duty on moral and religious grounds. Such speeches as Sir Stafford Northcote's and Mr. Lowe's,—though in one or two sentences of his harsh and somewhat arid speech Mr. Lowe did allow a deep personal conviction to flash out,—or as Mr. Walpole's and Sir Henry Bulwer's, or as Lord George Hamilton's and Mr. Moore's, nay, even such speeches as Sir J. D. Coleridge's, who for once disappointed every one, were only too well calculated to produce an impression that with both parties alike the battle was partizan and conventional, and had stirred no deep individual conviction,—which, on such a subject, is hardly one of good augury for the future.
It was very different with the three remarkable speeches we have named, Sir Roundell Palmer's, Mr. Bright's, and Mr.. Gladstone's. All of them bore the marks of the most anxious personal consideration, and the most characteristic and profound sense of heartfelt responsibility. Sir Roundell Palmer's speech was a most picturesque one in its portraiture of the struggles of a subtle and refined mind, equally balanced between the prepossessions of legal conservatism and of a benignant and generous charity, to reduce its legal prejudices to the standard of strict political equity, and even modify them, if possible, by the requirements of a generous political magnanimity. That Sir Roundell Palmer had made up his mind to give up the Establishment for the sake of religious equality in Ireland we all knew before. But for the many steps he was prepared to go with the Government in the direction of disendowment we were not prepared. Nothing could be more graphic than the picture he unconsciously gave us of his conflict with himself,—his eager desire to do full justice to the Irish feeling of grievance that national wealth should be lavished on an alien sect, and his imperious sense of obligation in relation to the claims of prescription and proprietary rights. The law and the gospel,—in quite another sense certainly than that of St. Paul,—were evidently wrestling within him in relation to this subject. He gave up all the revenues that seemed the mere appurtenances of an establishment, like the episcopal revenues and the capitular revenues of cathedrals. He went further, and gave up all revenues devoted to Protestants where there were no sufficient
number of Protestants to profit by them. But he could not convince himself that revenues devoted locally to a special religious object, for which object they were really needed and useful, are not the property of those who benefit by them in some much more than merely legal senie. There are many different gradations of public property, said Sir Roundel' Palmer ; "money belonging to a portion of the community ought not to be taken away by the whole community, unless good cause of forfeiture or proof of misuse be clearly made out. Now it seems to me that to apply this principle to the local parochial endowments in which the local communities have an interest, —to deprive them of that which they would either have to supply out of their own pockets, or worse still, go without, is much more unjust than if you apply it to any kind of corporation, which would cease to exist upon your taking away its means." Nothing can be more evident than that Sir Bounden Palmer had really sounded to the bottom his own convictions of the demands of pure justice, both as regards the Irish nation, and as regards the particular interests threatened by this attempt to do justice to the Irish nation ; and had satisfied himself that he could not go further than he did without committing a greater wrong than any he was endeavouring to remove. We believe he was wrong, we believe that as these local endowments were locally assigned for a national and not for a local reason, so it is only reasonable to assume that they may be resumed for a national and not for a local reason, and we think, moreover, that this attempt to establish the inalienable rights of local communities,—rights good even against the nation that gave them,—to special privileges, even though those privileges be injurious to the nation, is in effect setting up a cellular organization (like the cellular structure of the Great Eastern steamer) for a nation, and one fatal to all national life. The claim of a parish cannot be good against the co-ordinate claim of a nation, if there is to be a nation at
What is the answer to the Irish separatists except that, subject to the right of the most scrupulous and generous consideration of local needs and wishes, the good of the whole must override the good of the part ? And if we apply this doctrine where it is unfavourable to Ireland's special aspirations, we should surely apply it also where it is favourable to them. Moreover, there is something almost antagonistic to the religious spirit itself in this harsh assertion of the proprietary claims of a few, where they perpetuate a feeling of soreness on the part of the many. Still, whatever the error of Sir Roundell Palmer, there can be no doubt that his speech was a real and, in a certain sense, a most picturesque delineation of the tangle of claims and counter-claims in his own mind, and of the conclusion he had, after sitting in impartial judgment on his own perplexities, ultimately arrived at. In a very different sense, again, Mr. Bright's speech was a thoroughly real one. Mr. Bright never enters into his opponent's state of mind,—scarcely even knows what the process means. But no speaker in the House is so successful in giving a true picture of deep personal feeling in relation to political questions, partly because few really feel so deeply _about them, partly because still fewer have the art of painting what they feel so finely. Mr. Bright did get the House to realize adequately his horror of connecting a Christian Church at all with the inheritance of violence and conquest, his contempt for the preference evinced for men of birth and culture as preachers of the Gospel in a Church of which it was -once said that "not many noble, not many mighty are called," and his profound and vivid feeling that the application of the endowments to the support of the insane, the halt, and the blind, in a country where all the more refined charities are neglected on the ground of poverty, is an infinitely more Christian application of them than their application to any controversial purpose, or to any sectarian monopoly in a land -cursed by religious animosities. That it was Christian in the highest sense to strip away every sign of Protestant conquest, and to substitute a beneficence which knows no creed for any species of dogmatic partiality, he evidently felt to the bottom of his heart, and engraved that feeling by the most „glowing language on the somewhat obtuse perceptions of the House of Commons.
Mr. Gladstone's final reply, more even than the great and marvellous speech in which he moved the first reading of the Bill and which was necessarily taken up with administrative detail,—laid open his heart about the root of Irish disaffection. He shrinks from all conclusions which involve "an indictment against a nation' as malign, impossible, -and absurd. If the Irish are ungovernable by us, it is because the crimes or blunders of our Government have revolted them, not because they are intrinsically ungovernable. To assume that all the fault is in the people and all the reason in the Government is, as Mr. Gladstone holds, to suppose what is not only against all the laws of probability, but still more against that religious instinct which -assumes that all true national life tends to stimulate the nobler qualities, and to restrain the ignoble qualities common to those who make up the nation. Mr. Gladstone asserted the moral right of the nation to predominance over any of its parts, in answer to Sir Roundel Palmer, with a force which showed how deeply he had realized the authority of national sentiment ; and he asserted the moral right of the Irish section of the United Kingdom to be governed so as to make it clear that its life is not antagonistic, but supplementary to that of England and Scot land, against Mr. Gathome Hardy, with a force which showed how deeply he had realized that we must still be recklessly alienating Irish national sentiment in order to be hated asweare. The magnificent close of his speech, in which he boldly welcomed the accusation of robbery and bribery from an opponent usually so moderate as Sir Stafford Northcote, as showing that the Government had both thoroughly done their work, and yet done it in a sincerely conciliatory spirit, ganged his tenacity of purpose and the depth of his own religious conviction of the rectitude of his policy with a force that thrilled the House and produced an effect almost magical. It is curious that Mr. Disraeli's prediction that an era is at hand when religious faith will have a far greater influence on politics than hitherto, should have been partially fulfilled in the course of the very debate which he opened ;—but fulfilled only by a handful of men two of whom, at least, were adopting the policy which he branded as irreligious, and the third of whom took up an ambiguous poeition between the opposing ranks.
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