Mr. Planket and Mr. George Russell were the heroes of
Tuesday night. Mr. Plunket was very eloquent, especially in attacking the scheme of Disendowment, which he declared appeared to him to have resulted from a very careful study of the Irish Disetablishment Act made with the intention of weeding out all those provisions which had enabled the Irish Church to recover itself after the heavy blow it had received. The plan for commutation of life-interests, whieb was so useful to the Irish Church, was excluded from this Bill, and for the curates of the Welsh Church no pro- vision was to be made at all. The Welsh Church was intended to die out parish by parish. The Bill was a strange illus- tration of the old saying that if "Love is as strong as death,' "Jealousy is as cruel as the grave." The peroration of Mr, Plunket's speech was a very fine piece of rhetoric. Mr. George Russell replied in a speech of remarkable adroitness and wit. Without mentioning his own family, he taunted them with enjoying the fruits of a former Disendowment of the Church, and yet protesting with something of Pharisaic indignation against this new Disendowment by which no individual was to be enriched. He was remarkably happy, too, in his quotation of the first scene in Shakespeare's Henry V., in which the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Ely discuss a Disendowment Bill of the eleventh year of Henry 1V., of which they feared the renewal, by which they would have lost "the better half of their possession," in language singularly applicable to the present crisis. They staved off the danger by plunging the Kingdom into war with France. But even Mr. George Russell did not venture te suggest that our present ecclesiastics, endowed and established though they be, would be equally unscrupulous. For the rest, Mr. Russell regarded Disestablishment and Disendowment as "making for righteousness" and for High Church doctrine.
Previous page
