The Bishop of St. David's (Dr. Thirlwall) has been delivering
this week a remarkable charge to his clergy, chiefly occupied with the recent great Church measure in Ireland and its probable conse- quences. He insisted on the justice of the Irish measure, and on the very different circumstances of the Establishment in Ireland and Wales. In Wales, he pointed out not only that the Church is not dreaded by a great proportion of the Dissenters, but that popular Church preachers are attended in crowds by the Dissenters themselves. Welsh Nonconformity is of recent origin ; it has in a great degree arisen through the efforts of clergymen who did not intend to break off from the Church, but only to in- fuse new life into it ; and it has drawn much hetp from Dissent as well as given new life to Dissent,—various clergymen having been ordained by the Bishop himself who were previously Nog- conformist ministers, but who felt satisfied that the sectarian divisions of \Vales were mischievous. Hence, there is no such chasm between Welsh Dissent and the Welsh Established Church as between Irish Catholicism and the late Irish Established Church, and no sufficient ground for the jealousy and souse of wrong bred in Ireland by the latter. In speaking later of the English Establishment, Dr. Thirlwall went so far as to predict its speedy disruption into "two or three parts, one of which would be merged, sooner or later, into the Church of Rome." That, as the reporter seems to say, the Bishop "looked upon as inevitable." It seemed to him " hardly possible to doubt it."
