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gether in his name, there should he be in the midst of them. If religious principle be thus abandoned--if numbers be made the standard of right: if Britain declare herself indifferent to the diffusion of Protestantism: if confiscation of ecclesiastical revenues be no longer deemed a violation of the nights of property if the instruction of the rising generation in the errors popery be deemed a justifiable appropriation of the Church's funds, and if all this be done, simply because the Romish hierarchy demand it, then, we ask, what principle survives the adoption of this measure that could supply the shadow of reason against the establishment of popery?

of

The bill of Lord Morpeth includes two distinct and separate measures : one for the securing of the revenues of the church the other for their appropriation. Sir Robert Peel has given notice of a motion, that it be divided into two. The first 57 clauses of the bill are occupied in making provision for the realization of ecclesiastical property. There are many, very many objectionable enactments in the clauses, bat upon these we will not now stop to comment. It is with the confisca tion of church property that we are now concerned. Ministers secure the property of the Church only that the gains of their plunder may be certain. Like Judas' charitable anxiety for the poor, their concern for her interests is but with a view to spoliation. And it is against this iniquitous, this ungodly poliation, that, in the name of the Protestants of Ireland, we protest. In every parish where there are less than fifty Protestants, the revenues of the Church are to be sequestrated. In every parish in which, at any future period, the number of Protestants may be reduced to less than fifty, such reduction is to be followed by the suppression of the benefice. Was there ever adopted a criterion so arbitrary and absurd? Parishes may differ in extent; parishes of the same extent may differ very widely in population; but none of these things are taken into account with stern and undeviating regularity, the one unaccommodating standard is applied; and where there are fifty Protestants, the benefice remains; where there are forty-nine, it is suppressed. It is in sad and sober seriousness we

say, that in parishes where the number of Protestants but a little exceeds the magic fifty, the lives of Protestants are endangered by this clause. The man is utterly ignorant of the state of Ireland, who does not know that in the minds of her popish population there rankles a deep and inveterate hatred of Protestantism. Their hatred of a Protestant establishment is the very feeling which this bill professes to conciliate. Let, then, the establishment be altogether suppressed; let her whole revenues be offered up at once by infidel legislation, a costly sacrifice upon the shrine of popish bigotry. But let not the legislature dare to adopt a clause which will hold out to a people proverbial for their disregard of the value of human life, a direct premium upon assassination. Protestant extirpation has been proceeding rapidly enough. Insult and persecution are every day driving Protestants to foreign lands. Within the last ten years 200,000 Protestants have left Ireland; and every year the number of emigrants is increasing in a fearfully accelerating ratio. Need we go over again the melancholy detail of murdered Protestant ministers, whose profession was their only crime? Need we tell of the good, and pious, and charitable clergyman, barbarously murdered by the very people to whose wants his benevolence had administered? Need we appeal to the sanguinary records of Irish crime to testify how the dark influence of a baleful superstition can fling its deadly shadow across the human soul, until the heart becomes black as the cloud that rests upon it. How the poison of religious bigotry can be absorbed in the moral constitution, until, as it circles with the life-blood, the whole man is vitiated, and the whole heart depraved, and the kindliest feelings of human nature are checked in their source, and the most generous emotions of the human breast are perverted in their application. And what, if national pride and hereditary hatred— the proud patriotism that ill can brook the fancied humiliation of a conquered country, and the indignant sense of imaginary wrongs that burns to avenge a persecuted ancestry-what, if these feelings add their influence to the rancour of religious hate, acquiring from bigotry a darker tinge, and lending to bigotry

powerful and eloquent passage-a passage to which it is but fair to acknowledge our attention has been called by quotation in the Standard :—

Now, in attempting to ascertain what shall or shall not be considered a sinecure, we strongly object to the sole adoption of a numerical line. We wish that the line should be indistinct; and would infinitely prefer a complicated standard, incapable of exhibition in 3 tabular form, and founded on a comprehensive consideration not only of numbers and proportions, but of distance, situation, and such local and other circumstances as can be justly taken into the account. We object to a numerical line, because its effect would be decidedly injurious to that religious harmony and Christian spirit of liberality and good-will, which it is desirable to promote among the various sects in Ireland. We fear that the exclusive adoption of such a standand would aggravate the spirit of secarian bitterness, and lend new impulse to proselytizing zeal. It would raise the importance of numerical majorities. It would establish number as the criteon of strength. It would stimulate the priest to such interested exertions for the sake of increasing the number of his flock, as genuine piety never ald approve. The slow safe course of conscientious conviction would be handoned for the easier method of taining a proselyte through a direct peal to his interests or his passions. The meaus would be disregarded for he sake of the end; and religious version would be perpetually deed by the odious characteristics of a pitical canvass. It would have even verse effects. If it were established, that because a benefice was found to ttain less than a stated number of comunicants, it should on that sole unt cease to be a separate benefice, ht be incorporated with some other

the most explicit understanding this were made a rule of action, though at it was applicable only to present mstances, and would never be relied in future-if Protestant benees were to be dealt with by this measure, would not a standard be petually afforded, open to the comhensions of the most ignorant and asoning, by which they might ever dards be able to ascertain what rices ought to be extinct, or how

nearly they were trembling on the verge of that numerical line which had been once ruled to justify their dissolution?

"Not alone for the sake of the Protestant minority, but equally for the sake of the Roman Catholic, do we deprecate the notion of an arrangement which would engender feelings of the worst description, and be fraught with temptations to violence and crime. We would not that in that ill-fated land of bloody brotherhoods-where the bonds of law have been as flax, and the bonds of crime as iron-the Roman Catholic people should be tempted to think that they might do good service to God and their country, if, by intimi dation, or by whatever means a secret league might ruthlessly enjoin, they could reduce the number of Protestants in any benefice below that number which had been once ruled to justify its dissolution. It is also a valid objection against a numerical line, that it would occasion a cry for perpetual re-adjustment. There would be perpetual clamour for the fresh application of a principle which had once been sanctioned, whenever circumstances, necessarily fluctuating, appeared to render such a re-application favourable to the wishes of the clamourers.

"Not only might the Roman Catholic point out benefices in which the Protestant population had declined, and contend that those should be benefices no longer, but with equal reason might the Protestant contend, that, wherever increase of numbers had raised what was once a benefice above the former line of proscription, such original benefice should be now restored. Thus, from each contending sect there would be ever and anon repeated calls for a fresh census and a fresh adjustment; and the result would be, that restless spirit of agitation and contention, which, if not unfavourable to the growth of sects, is fatal to the growth and spirit of true religion. We are not pleading the cause of a sect; we are not contending for the ascendancy of any church; we address these remarks to all denominations of Christians; we hold forth reasons which ought to weigh with the Roman Catholic as well as with the Protestant; we would not only protect the Protestants against the Catholics, but the Catholics against themselves."

We have alluded first to this provision of the bill, because it is the establishment of a numerical criterion which strikes with the most deadly certainty at the peace of Ireland. We feel, however, that upon this point, we can add nothing to the force of the reasonings contained in the splendid passage we have quoted from the Edinburgh Review. Bad, however, as is this provision, it forms but a small part of the evils and dangers of the bill. The alienation of church revenues from church purposes is a direct and unholy violation of the rights of the Protestants of Ireland-it is an undisguised and unpalliated breach of the articles of union-it is an interference with the rights of property that renders the tenure of all property insecure, and it is an abandonment of the principle of national Protestanism-and an iniquitous consignment of whole districts of Ireland to the dark and unmitigated tyranny of the church of Rome.

So many considerations press upon us in relation to this measure that we can but glance at topics upon which it is far more difficult to be brief than to enlarge. We have said that the confiscation of church property is a violation of the rights of Protestants. We have been, perhaps, too much accustomed to speak of ecclesiastical property until in our minds we have confounded it with the property of ecclesiastics. But of the property of the church, the clergy are but trustees, and they hold it in trust for the benefit of their flocks. To the people, the Protestant people of Ireland, the church property belongs, and for their benefit it has been laid apart. To provide for their instruction, and to secure to them the blessings of religious ministration, the wisdom of our ancestors consecrated to their use and to the glory of God, a certain portion of that wealth, which would have been otherwise absorbed in some of the accumulated masses which pander to the pride and minister to the luxuries of the great ones of the earth. To give spiritual consolation to the poor manto provide him with a friend in the hour of his distress, a counsellor in his difficulty, an instructor in every time of his doubt and his perplexity-a small portion of those revenues were retained which would otherwise have been

Own

squandered by their hereditary owner perhaps upon the vices of a foreign land. And why should this property be taken from us? No one has asserted any claim to its possession-it is ours-ours by the unbroken prescription of upwards of 300 years-ours by the solemn declaration of our ancient legislature, and of the parliament of the united kingdom-by the national compact of the act of union unalienably ours. When you confiscate these revenues, you rob us. Tell us not that you are taking away the property of the church, as if this was a matter in which we had no concern. We, the Protestant laity of Ireland, are the church, and it is our property you are taking away-property, it is true, with which, as individuals, we have no right to meddle, but which belongs to us as a body-and of which our clergy are the trustees-to procure for us the ministrations of the Gospel of our God.

And if we were, for a moment, to descend from these high and holy considerations, and contemplate in another point of view, the interest of laymen in church property, we shall find that they have even a temporal interest in these possessions which are appropriated to the maintenance of the clergy, The clergy, be it remembered, are no peculiar caste-they are supplied from time to time from among the laityand long has the church, maintained as an independent profession, offered to the members of the laity not a reward but a provision for piety and talent. While our University extends, with liberal hand, the means of educa tion to the very poorest who can show talent to entitle them to her favourthe humblest Protestant in the land is not below the possibility of seeing his child an ornament to that churchderiving from her revenues that competence which no one has a right to grudge him. Well may we say that church property is the poor man's fund-a sacred deposit, in which the humblest Protestant might assert his vested rights-the poor man's fund, not only as it is set apart to provide for him the ministration of that Gospel which was originally preached to the poor, and those consolations of religion which wealth may sometimes despise, but which poverty always

needs—but also the poor man's fund as it offers to talent and piety of the humblest origin an honorable station and a respectable competence. Far be it from us to put forward any argument that might seem to secularise the profession of the minister of God, or ever so remotely to countenance the notion that worldly views should influence its adoption-but yet we are bold to say, that it has been, although not the chief good, yet a beautiful feature of our church establishment, that the child of poor and humble parents has often taken his place among her ministers, ay, and among her prelates. Many instances there are within our own knowledge, of useful and respectable ministers-men whose origin was humble, but whose worth was great-respected and looked up to by the gentry in the very districts where their relatives, it may be, are still moving in a lowly sphere. In more ways than this, too, the church has been the link that connected together the poor and thegreat. No matter what differences of rank might exist in a parish, there was one man in it who was of none. The equal of the greatest, and yet the friend of the meanest of his flock-the clergyman, as he authoritatively rebuked the vices of the peer, and sympathised as a friend with all the distresses of the peasant, appeared without disturbing any of the just gradations of rank, to infuse into all the necessary inequalities of society a portion of the spirit of another and a better world in which there shall be no respect of persons. But all this must be destroyed-we say all-for no one is mad enough to believe that their present victory will satisfy the enemies of the church. No! the church will be destroyed-the poor man's fund will be confiscatedand both rich and poor will be left without any institution to remind them of the hopes or the terrors of another world-the one to indulge their haughtiness without the restraint, the other to endure their distresses without the consolations of religion.

And if church property be confiscated, what property is secure? It is always unsafe to send the minds of men back to the origin of possession; it is dangerous to disturb even the prejudice of its inviolability, and accustom the minds of those who have not

to speculations that may lead them to question the right of those who have. Upon what principle that permits the confiscation of church property to purposes of general utility, can the holder of vast hereditary estates be permitted to retain his? They may have been the gift of some ancient monarch; but when you confiscate church property you have made nought of a title as ancient as the monarchy itself-certainly as ancient as the constitution of 1688. Long prescription, uninterrupted possession is no more of any avail. Why should the Duke of Bedford retain his property while that of the Irish church is taken away-Church property may be confiscated! Have the lands of Woburn or Covent Garden become exempt from the liability in passing into the hands of a usurper? Has spoliation cured the defect of title? Why should the Duke of Bedford batten on his thousands per annum, while thousands of human beings are starving in Connaught? In confiscating the revenues of the church, you give up the principle of all possession

you disturb the inviolability of property-you send men back to grants that can be no longer valid, to titles that will not bear examination. You have destroyed the principle of prescription, you have abandoned the sanctions of national faith, and then you put men upon the inquiry into the principles of property: you take away from property the only solid ground upon which its claims can for a moment rest, and then you call our attention to the nakedness of its foundation.

If the oldest prescription can confer a title-if the charters of monarchs can either give or confirm the right of possession-if the usage of centuries can add to its strength--if uninterrupted possession can give the right to retain

if the solemnly pledged faith of the nation be a security, the property of the church can never be taken away. If all these concurrent principles be insufficient to preserve property from confiscation, the sooner we apply to national purposes all the estates in the empire the better. Let all who have property look well to the case we put. Has not the church prescription in her favour? has she not the grants and charters of kings? has she not the