Protestantism and St. Patrick
History of the Church of Ireland. Edited by Walter Alison Phillips. Three volumes. (Oxford University Press. 31s. 6d.)
THESE three finely produced volumes originated in a resolution of the Church of Ireland, passed in 1929 at the general Synod. The date, 1929, is significant Outside the Synod, a popular Celebration, under Government patronage, of the centenary of the downfall of Church of Ireland ascendancy (otherwise called Catholic Emancipation) was the order of the day. The Synod felt the need of defending the Church of Ussher, Bram- hall, Berkeley and Jeremy Taylor as a " national institution " and a contributor to the intellectual and religious life of Erin, past and present. The book was not intended to be propa- ganda ; and yet it should constitute a reasoned defence placing the Church of Ireland beyond reach of the reproach of having been an institution confined to an alien and socially exclusive minority. The work was entrusted to Mr. Alison Phillips, Leeky Professor in the University of Dublin, and to a body of other historians, mostly Irish clergymen.
But for some bellicose pages hi the first volume, the tone of the work is scrupulously fair. In original and interesting scholarship the chapters by a northern rector,'the Rev. Gough Meissener (whose statement that Patrick landed in Wicklow and not in Ulster will attract attention a on the rise of Celtic Christianity, and those on Anglo-Norman influence by Mr. Goddard_ Orpen and on the mediaeval Church in Ireland by Arehdeacon Seymour, are notable. The " reasoned claim " of the Church of Ireland to be, both institutionally and in its articles, the successor of the primitive Church is, however, based on a view of the " purity " of early Christianity which Protestant scholarship elsewhere has now abandoned. St. Patrick's Protestantism, understood as the religion of the adherents of the Church of Ireland in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, has become not easier but harder to credit. 'As to the Roman assimilation after the Norman Conquest, there is, of course, no doubt whatever. Divisions there were in the Irish Church duririg the period of mediaeval Christianity ; but their nature was almost wholly due to racial enmities between Celtic and Anglo-Norman clergy, neither of whom contributed anything serious to speculative theology. Archdeacon Seymour's pages are excellent, and constitute the first attempt yet made to construct out of an intractable and (especially since the burning of the Four Courts) none too plentiful material a scientific picture of the mediaeval Irish Church.
In regard to the native character claimed by Irish Pro- testantism, despite the failure of the Reformation, the remark of one contributor should be borne in mind. Although we are forced, he says, to speak of the native Irish, meaning thereby the population of Celtic origin, yet residence in a country must also confer the right to be called native—that is, if any persons can adjudge themselves citizens of any land on earth ! The best answer to the question, Why did the Irish people fail to accept the Reformation ? is that the question should not be asked. There was no " Irish people," but only, as Canon Jourdan puts it, a confusion of human interests," arising out of the existence side by side of Anglo-Irish communities, of English conditions, and of an amalgam of Irish and English interests. Ireland had no slightest interest in doctrinal dispute, nor was there any outcry for moral uplift. On the other hand, the feeling against the royal supremacy " was not nearly as strong as might be imagined. The majority of the Bishops (Celtic as well as Anglo-Irish names) between 1537 and the death of Queen Mary were papal appointments ; and yet a majority of these appointments were on the Royal side during the period : the succession " in the Church of Ireland is very well established. Henry VIII's success was even more marked among the lay leaders : FitzGeralds, O'Don- nells, O'Neills, Kavanaghs not only acknowledged the royal authority, but publicly " denied and forsook " the Bishop of Rome, without, of course, embracing Protestantism or knowing anything of the tenets of Continental reformers. Under Catholic Mary it is said that the " Irish might have become the most violent Calvinists in Europe " ; for whereas under Henry VIII, Irish and old English were treated as equals, Mary caused a renewed discrimination against the Irish to accompany the restoration of the Roman power : " Nothing is farther from the truth (than that all Irishmen were Roman Catholics and all Englishmen Protestants). The men who in the latter days of Elizabeth, had done most to advance the Roman Catholic faith in Ireland . . . the modern founders of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, were of English descent."
This Roman Catholic aristocracy of the Plunketts, Barnc- walls, Nugents survives in Ireland to this day, carrying however even less weight in national politics than members of the former ascendancy. Irish history is a more complicated affair than Mr. de Valera's categories indicate.
When all is said, however, the Church of Ireland—at least since the time of the learned Ussher—had been Protestant ; and Protestantism would hardly have survived in Ireland had it not been for the support of the later plantations of James and Cromwell. The anxiety of Irish Protestantism to feel roots in a distant Irish past probably dates from the opening of the eighteenth century when it was necessary for the ascendancy (under Molyneux and Swift) to protest against the colonial appellation so as to escape restraints upon its trade. In the eighteenth century the Church of Ireland, like the Anglican Church, was mainly Eraistian and latitu- dinarian; the Penal Laws sustained themselves on political grounds, and were modified in application, but this did not prevent them from having disastrous effects on national character. Perhaps the happiest period in the Church's history has been the last hundred years during which, every pledge broken, all its privileges were filched from it by English legislation. Stress is laid in the final chapters of this Work On the Church's loyal acceptance of the 1921 settlement ;
and it may justly be said that in the matter of Christian duty to established authority the heads of the Church of Ireland, in the last fifty years at -least, have less often fallen to the level of politicians than the Bishops of the Roman
Catholic Church, who have even found it convenient at times to justify resistance to authority on the (theologically) very doubtful ground of " no legitimate sovereignty without the
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