one might lay a wager it is so. How Europe will be knocked about! They say his niece has died in her confinement: the happier she, though I am not envious of her lot. As I have always been extremely curious, I should like to see the end of this Revolution. Yet if the days of persecution for the faith were to return, ah! I would ask Heaven to release me from the world first, for I don't feel I have at all the courage to support it. It is true that there is an old proverb which says "God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb," and I doubt not that we should experience it, if the time came. You will think me rather mad. For fear you should find out that you are not erring in thinking so, I leave you and embrace you with all my heart.' (Vol. i. p. 313.) These touches must suffice to give an impression of the Princess's character--ardent, intolerant sometimes, resolute in opposing danger, dauntless in exposing deceit, foreseeing more clearly than others the track that lay before her, shrinking at times from the shadows that crossed it, but pursuing it at last to the bitter end, in faith and love not unworthy of her Divine Master. Whatever may have been the errors of judgment and the defects of character of the members of the Royal Family of France-and, as we have seen, they are unreservedly laid bare, by themselves, in these confidential letters to their nearest connexions-it can never be forgotten that their unparalleled misfortunes plead like angels' tongues in their favour. No doubt it may be easy to trace even those misfortunes, in part, to the singular want of tact and resolution exhibited by the King in all the important emergencies of his life-to the wilfulness of the Queen, her inexperience of politics, and her foreign extraction-to the total want of intelligence of the time and of the Revolution, from which even the acuteness of Madame Elisabeth did not exempt her. But with the whole evidence now before the world, which enables us to follow them into the recesses of their thoughts and feelings, we rise from the perusal of these papers with increased sympathy with sufferings, borne in so noble and Christian a spirit. ART. V.-1. The Irish Church: its History, with Statistics. By WILLIAM SHEE, Serjeant-at-Law, M.P. for the County of Kilkenny. Second edition. 1863. 2. Remarks on the Irish Church Temporalities. By MAZIERE BRADY, D.D. Dublin: 1865. 3. Facts respecting the Present State of the Church in Ireland. By the Rev. ALFRED T. LEE. London: 1865. 4. The Irish Church; an Historical and Statistical Review. By HERBERT S. SKEATS. London: 1865. 5. The Income and Requirements of the Irish Church, being a Reply to Serjeant Shee. By Archdeacon STOPFORD. Dublin 1863. IR RELAND occupied in the sixteenth century a position without parallel in European history. While the Reformation was affecting the whole breadth of society in other nations, altering political and social relations, correcting theological doctrines, and going hand in hand with literary and scientific advancement, the most western country of Europe, isolated for centuries from all the liberalising culture of the Continent, and steeped in inconceivable misery and degradation, felt no quickening within, not even a sympathetic movement in connexion with Protestant impulse. Unlike other nations, it had no period of religious inquiry, no spiritual insurrection against the corrupt formalism of Rome, no Celtic Luther to give voice, direction, and triumph to the principles of a new movement. In the utter absence of that rising and vigorous middle class, with its compact force, its self-consistency, and its hardihood of character, to which England and Scotland owed their reforming activity, the sister country remained a stranger to all the new social forces that were then stamping themselves upon the expanding civilisation of Britain. The Reformation which was imported in the middle of the sixteenth century was an entirely foreign and artificial system, which at once arrayed itself against the strong nationalism of the island, and never at any period exhibited that social expansiveness which was so much needed for moulding into religious unity races so widely different in all their traditions and training. The new hierarchy merely displaced the old, but proposed to itself no quiet career of diffusion and growth, and devised no wise and proper methods for the conversion of the native population. Thus it came to pass that the mass of the people kept to their old dogmatic pathways, and followed from generation to generation the guidance of the old proscribed hierarchy, which still remained the chief political and social agency in the country(even when banished working still by the most dexterous disguised communications)-touching the life of the nation at every point, and binding it together in all its relations; while the new hierarchy, though strongly entrenched behind the guardianship of English law, was confronted at every step in countless forms, and found itself spiritually powerless before the organising and commanding spirit of Rome. It is idle now to speculate on what might have been the religious and political destiny of Ireland at the present hour, if the new Protestant Church, so amply endowed with the spoils of the ancient establishment, had at once devised a bold and liberal measure for the education of the natives-for people must be taught to read before they can be taught to think, and they must learn to think before they can discern truth from error-if she had prosecuted her evangelising work in such a spirit as to disarm the exasperation of an oppressed people-if she had given them the Scriptures in their own tongue, and made the Irish language a vehicle of secular as well as religious instruction-if she had placed herself as a mediating power between an injured people and their foreign rulers, disregarding herself the odious distinctions of race, with a view to their ultimate assimilation-thus, by the creation of one law of opinion, drawing the conflicting elements of Irish life into all the beauty and strength of a homogeneous national existence. If the Established Church has signally and admittedly failed in these various aspects of her responsible mission, the blame must, no doubt, largely fall upon those statesmen, royal and ministerial, who made her in a subject-country the instrument of political exclusion and the symbol of a hated domination; who equipped her too formidably for her work, and surrounded her with safeguards which incapacitated her from exercising her powers of usefulness; so that for centuries she was in the condition of King James I. in his armour, when he said of himself, Now, nobody 'can hurt me, and I can hurt nobody.' But we are far from believing that the Irish Church herself has been wholly blameless in this matter, or that she has even now wholly reversed the leading principles of her ancient ecclesiastical policy. If she had done her duty three hundred years ago, or had even shown a disposition in more modern times to recognise the altered relations of Irish society, to throw her energies into national education in a way that the activity and expansiveness of the age so imperatively demanded, and in accordance with the only plan that was possible in a country religiously divided, and had ceased to be the political engine of a party and the consistent enemy of every liberal enactment that could raise the Catholic people in the scale of social well-being, politicians and journalists would not now be discussing the question of her disendowment, and she herself would not be lamenting her hard fortune that for thirty years past she has been deserted by the Tories, condemned by the Whigs, threatened by the Radicals, hated by the Roman Catholics, and envied by the Dissenters. No doubt, if a fair calculation were made of her advantages and disadvantages, as compared with those of her English sister, it would be found that she has had a considerable preponderance of the latter, though we must ever lament that she seems to have possessed at no period sufficient wisdom or courage to turn her opportunities to account, or to neutralise the force of those unquestionable difficulties which surrounded her from her first establishment. There can be no question that, notwithstanding the revived vigour of the last thirty years, her numerical inferiority is but the sign of her moral weakness in the country—a weakness of which she seems to be hardly conscious herself, but for which she is really in a very large degree responsible. Let us view her present position. This weakness has sprung in a measure from her geographical distribution. Episcopacy does not lie in a compact dense mass, like Presbyterianism in Ulster, but stretches its meagre and starving length over the whole island, appearing here and there in a series of detached outposts and unconnected fragments, while the enveloping mass is intensely Romish. The consequence has been that, while the active and enterprising Presbyterianism of the North has written its character on the broad acres of its peculiar province, and is strong in that peculiar element of strength-a territorial existence-Episcopacy, with its far more extended area and its greater tenuity, has not only been more exposed to the proselytising inroads of Romanism at a thousand ill-guarded points, but has never been sufficiently strong, at any one point, to give a Protestant tone to the community, or to create an atmosphere of Protestant opinion such as pervades the society of Ulster. The social atmosphere of the South is unmistakeably Catholic; that of the North is Presbyterian, for nowhere, out of Scotland itself, is the discharge of religious duty so fully recognised as a condition of social existence, and nowhere else is there a greater amount of active conviction upon religious questions. Episcopacy, though strong in the vantage-ground of law, with absolute possession of the churches, the university, and the endowed schools, and though secured, by its external points of contact with the people, in the command of the leading avenues to public office and distinction, has had the disadvantage of comprising in its membership that large neutral mass which subsists in the composition of all communities, and which gives them little or no portion of their form, cohesion, or strength. Except in Dublin-and even there to a comparatively insignificant extent-it has given no commanding tone to the public morality of the country. The Irish Church has also laboured under the singular disadvantage of never having been confronted, except in Ulster, by a strong and vigorous branch of Protestant Dissent, such as in England and Scotland has quickened the zeal and stimulated the energies of the Established clergy. The consequence has been that, in the three southern provinces, the clergy, contented to lead quiet and unimpressive lives, with relaxed vigilance and diminished ardour, have been totally unfit to grapple with men displaying all that untiring energy and transcendent zeal which distinguish the Catholic priesthood. The Establishment has never suffered from either disruption or secession, such as often gives a powerful impetus to religious communities, for the Presbyterians are no more Dissenters from the Church of Ireland than the Church of Ireland is from them. They made no breach or rent in a Church of which they were members, like the Dissenters of England, for they were but a branch of the Scottish Establishment. It is almost needless to refer for the thousandth time to the odious tithe-system which, by making the clergy the reluctant instruments of endless litigation and implacable animosities, utterly destroyed their moral influence in the community. We all know how it often set the duty and the interest of kind-hearted clergymen in opposition to each other; so that, as Grattan tersely remarked, It made the clergyman's income to fall with his virtues and to rise with 'his bad qualities, just as it made the parishioner to lose by 'being ingenuous and to save by dishonesty.' The clergy trusted to the power of England to maintain them in possession of their tithes, and often looked upon the people, either as avowed and dangerous enemies whom they had grievously wronged, or as semi-savages whom it was hopeless to attempt to civilise. The system inflicted more injury upon their office than the efforts of all the infidels and sectaries in the kingdom could have done. 6 It is equally needless to do more than allude to the politics of the Church, as illustrating the decline of its influence, for it has been uniformly identified with that party in the State which deemed it just and politic to deprive an individual or VOL. CXXIII. NO. CCLII. H H |