TOPICS OF THE DAY.
MR. GLADSTONE'S RESOLUTIONS.
THE three Resolutions upon the Irish Church which Mr. Gladstone will on Monday ask the House of Commons to affirm have been most ably drawn. As we tried to point out last week, the statesmen who drafted them were bound to secure a double object,—the expulsion of the Ministry, and the destruction of the Irish Establishment ; and the Resolutions, if passed, ought to ensure both. It is impossible for a Cabinet which contains Mr. Hardy and Lord Cairns to accept a resolution affirming that it is " necessary that the Established Church of Ireland should cease to exist as an Establishment," impos- sible for the House, if it agrees to the principle, to reject or whittle away the measures needful to carry it into effect. The House, by affirming the first resolution, stands pledged to a measure which shall make it effective, a measure which can only be prepared by a Government heartily in accord with the policy which the resolution embodies. The second and third are but the logical sequences of the first, and are indispensable even at this stage to convince Ireland that the Liberals are in earnest, that the resolutions have not been introduced for party purposes alone ; but that they, if victorious, intend to give their principles instant and full effect. If a Bishopric falls vacant on the day after the vote, the Bishopric is not to be filled up ; but disestablishment, so far as that diocese is concerned, is to commence at once. There may be any amount of controversy about details, but on the essential point that the Establishment cease to exist the party as a party claiming the Executive Government will have proclaimed its resolve, will have pledged its faith formally and unmistakably to the people of Ireland. A Bill disestablishing the Church must follow immediately on the Resolutions, and the new Parliament will be at once required to decide whether it will accept that, or whether it will resign itself to the guidance of Mr. Disraeli and the Conservative party ; whether, in fact, it will raise Ireland to its proper position of a division of the United Kingdom, or will continue to treat the island as a dependency entitled to every privilege except the one best worth having—equality of rights. Few Resolutions have ever been drawn so unmistakable in their tenor, or so binding on the political conscience of the party by which, if they are accepted, they must be carried out.
For the first time in the last ten years, the Liberal party is, we believe, in earnest on a great and an active policy, and we entertain little fear,—we may almost venture to say no fear, —of the ultimate result. The Resolutions will pass, and after, it may be, another dissolution, or even an application of constitutional force to the Upper House, the Irish Church will be condemned to the slow but painless execution which ought, for the honour of Liberal politicians, to have com- menced thirty-six years ago. There is strong reason to believe that, with the exception of one or two men whose morbid dread of Catholicism overpowers their judgment, the party will vote en masse; but we could wish for even a better result than this,—for an unanimous vote by a majority which had no latent scruples to overcome, which did not submit to a necessity, but voted with a will, with an ardent or, at least, a hearty desire that a gross injustice, a violent oppression, should at last come to an end. We believe that, apart from personal considerations and fears of a dissolution, there are three or four ideas, not exactly current, but latent among some minds otherwise honestly Liberal, which will make their possessors vote, if they vote at all, with little heartiness, as men accepting the inevitable, and not as men determined to fulfil a clear and an imperative obligation. Of these ideas the strongest may be shortly defined as the shewbread idea, the property idea, and the Protestant idea. The shewbread idea, little as some of our more extreme friends may believe it, is one which weighs very heavily with minds deserving of the highest respect, minds accustomed to decide their course on considerations other than those of pure expedi- ency. They do not like the idea of secularizing great properties now devoted to religious use, feel as if they were guilty of some- thing approaching sacrilege, as if theywere called on to vote for a retrograde step in civilization. We have, they say, after pro- tracted exertion, by the efforts of centuries, at the cost of im- mense suffering, and possibly of immense crime, rescued a tenth of the produce of the soil from purely secular purposes, have de- voted it to purposes indefinitely nobler and more important, the improvement of men's spiritual capacities. We may be wrong in the methods we have adopted,—though Irish Catholicism has many special excellences, probably evolved by its incessant con- flict with Protestantism, which ought to be carried to the credit of the Establishment—but granting the methods wrong, the end is right, and the rescued fund ought to be applied by new methods to the same end. " The Resolutions afford no guarantee that this will be done." They do not, but they also involve no pledge that this will not be done. It is their distinctive merit that they commit the House to no special disposition of the Church revenues, that they permit the nation to decide hereafter what shall be done with the tithe, whether it shall be devoted to the poor in supplement of the poor-rates, as Cardinal Cullen suggests ; or to the purchase of the right of eviction, as Archbishop Manning recommends in the very remarkable pamphlet in which he declares that should this be done the guilt of the original confiscation will be expiated ; or, as we should most urgently recommend, to the support of a special organization for diffusing high culture among Irishmen, an organization which should give to every Irishman a pos- sibility of good secondary as distinguished from primary education ; or to the conciliation of Irish landlords or Irish industrial interests. Nothing of that kind is decided except that this rescued fund, this tithe for civilization, shall no longer be expended in forcing an alien creed upon a reluctant people, in keeping up sectarian hostility, in interrupting the progress of Christianity by turning it into a religion of conquest. The advocates of the shewbread idea hold doubtless, as we also strongly hold, that Protestantism is a higher creed than Catholicism, draws man nearer to his Maker by dispensing with the intermediary priest, and they are therefore bound to admit that any great impediment to its spread is a great evil. Can there be any greater impediment than a system which makes the higher creed a badge of the conqueror, the lower that of the conquered ; which makes it disgraceful for a Catholic to become a Protestant, and impossible for a Catholic who is- also a patriot to announce a change of creed ? A man may change his creed and descend in the social scale with the full appreciation of his world—but to ascend ? We will ask those who deny this argument whether in their heart of hearts they- like a Jew for becoming a Christian, whether they do not suspect him,—most unjustly nowadays,—of wishing to belong- to the dominant caste, of confusing, at all events, his con- victions with his interests ? It is not the shewbread the English Liberals are about to abolish, but the use of the shew- bread as a bribe to the hungry.
Then there is the property idea, the notion that the seizure of corporate property without compensation endangers the secu- rity of individual property. This idea, which defeated the Ap- propriation clause thirty years ago, seems of late years to have become weaker; but it still exists, and has an especial influence among a class of men who have a secret doubt whether their own possessions are not too vast for the public weal. It is im- possible for a Duke of Sutherland, for example, to feel quite easy when the State assumes the proprietorship of the estate of the Irish Episcopate, an estate which, great as it is, is in area scarcely more than half his Grace's property in Sutherland- shire alone. This fear, however natural, is, nevertheless, ground- less. Without giving up the cardinal dogma that the State is ultimate owner of all property within it, that it might justifi- ably take any property essential to the well-being of the nation, all Liberals have agreed that it is not expedient to take it with- out full compensation. The security of property is worth more to the nation than the security of the State's prerogative. If, therefore, the advocates of the property idea will prove that the Church property belongs to a corporation, and will produce its heirs, they will have made good their claim to compensa- tion ; but they can perform neither condition. The Church is not owner, but merely trustee for the real owner, the State. It can neither alienate, nor waste, nor mortgage ; can do nothing except apply the trust fund to the purposes indicated by the donor, who, in abolishing the trust, merely resumes his own. Even if the Church were owner, which, we do not admit for a moment,—the State having repeatedly re-organized the Trust,—there are no heirs to compensate. On the death of the last incumbent, the Church property in that incumbency is in the position of any other estate without a claimant, that is, it lapses to the Crown as universal heir, and the Crown is prayed in these very resolutions to convey the property to Parliament. There is no confiscation, for nobody loses any- thing ; all that happens is that a Corporation of Trustees is not renewed by the owner who placed the property in trust. And finally, as to the Protestant idea. Somewhat, we con- fess, to our surprise, we find that this idea, hitherto powerful to persecution, is going to prove weak ; that the Scotch con-
stituencies, for example, which for centuries have never elected a Catholic, are heartily opposed to the continuance of the Irish Establishment. Still, this idea weighs with many very sensible people, who say the Irish Church is at once a bulwark against Rome, and an educational machinery for the propagation of a comparatively pure creed. The argument about the bulwark may, we think, be pretty summarily dismissed. If Protestantism in Ireland without endowments cannot hold its ground against Catholicism without endowments, we should say the quicker it disappears the better, no kingdom of God having ever yet been established by bribes ; but there is no necessity for so extreme an argument. We have the experience of two .countries to guide us, both filled by the people of the United Kingdom. In Great Britain, as it happens, Catholicism has to fight two sets of Churches, the one endowed and privileged, the other disendowed and unprivileged. From which has it made the most converts,—from the Anglicans or from the Dissenters ? In America all Churches are on an equality, and in America—which for half a century has absorbed a stream of Catholic emigrants, which is believed to contain eight millions of Irishmen and their descendants, and at least two of South-Germans—but four millions, according to a census taken this year, return themselves as Catholics, and this though Catholicism offers to the coloured population some very great advantages. As an educational machine, again, the Establish- ment has totally failed. Not only has it not made Ireland Protestant, but its existence has prevented the growth of that liberal Catholicism which has many of the advantages of Pro- testantism, and which in every Catholic country is waging a successful war with the Ultramontane idea. So intense has sacerdotalism been made in Ireland by the annealing process to which the Establishment has subjected it, that the British Parliament, which can do anything, dare not to-morrow 'establish a perfect registration of marriages. It is not Protestantism which the Establishment propagates, but tiltramontanism, sacerdotalism in its worst and most extreme form, the regime of a priesthood which, whatever it for- bids or whatever it commands, can always say, " We represent your native Church, and are fighting your spiritual battle against an alien ascendancy. The Catholic priest is the priest of the people, the Protestant pastor the paid agent of a heretical State." To disestablish the Establishment is in Ireland to restore, not to subvert, its missionary character,—to make it once more, what its rival has so long exclusively been, the Church of the common millions whom Irish landlords despise, but for whom Christ died.
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