The Church Congress opened on Wednesday in Dublin, under the
presidency of Archbishop Trench, with a sermon from the Dean of Cork, powerful, imaginative, eloquent, as Dr. Magee's sermons usually are, but also, we must own, a little Irish in its text. The Dean preached from Luke v., 6, 7. " And when they had this done they enclosed a great multitude of fishes : and their net brake. And they beckoned unto their partners, which were in the other ship, that they should come and help them." Of course the net was the Church, and the " partners in the other ship " were the English Churchmen. And the "great multitude o ffishes" which caused the net to break,—were they the Church converts in Ireland ? The Dean perceived the difficulty, however, and commenced by taking the net as containing the whole world for which Christ died, deferring till the end of his sermon, when the memory of " the great multitude of fishes" had been forgotten, the application to the situation of the Irish Church,—who is calling for aid to her English allies. We have commented on one objec- tionable and very prejudiced passage of the sermon elsewhere, but we are bound to say that its spirit was, in general, large, catholic, and profoundly Christian.
