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 rights of property: if the instruction of the rising generation in the errors of 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?

:

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, but 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 spoliation, 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 hatredthe 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

a more ardent motive-who can calculate the effect of the combination? who can calculate the change that it will produce in the most amiable man, the direction that it will give to the most generous impulses of the mind? Virtue will be devotion to prejudice, justice will shape itself into the desire for revenge, and religion itself will become the sanction for the darkest deeds, the excuse for the most iniquitous attempts. Ireland is the country where all these fearful elements are at work; the people believe themselves a conquered people, and they hate their conquerors; they identify Protestants with their oppressors, and with these they deem themselves at war. The priests cherish this feeling, and teach them to look forward to a time when the Saxon and the Sassenach will be extirpated from the land. And in such a country-what is the responsibility of the statesman who comes forward and says, to a people governed by such motives, "You look upon the Protestant church as a grievance. I will relieve you of it; but I can only do so where there are less than fifty Protestants in a parish. Poor people, you have been very badly treated-I wish it was in my power altogether to relieve you, but I can only do so partially-but as Protestants diminish (for, be it remembered, the bill makes provision for the prospective diminution of Protestantism) you will gradually get rid of your oppression." Have we misrepresented the language of the bill?-this certainly is the sense in which it will be understood by these to whom it is addressed. And need we ask the awful question, what will be the conse

quence? As they value the peace of Ireland, as they care for the lives of Protestants-let ministers abandon this clause. Let them not tell the murderers of Mr. Whitty, the ruthless actors in the tragedy of Carrickshock-that the lives of Protestants are the only obstacle to their deliverance from that which they teach them to call oppression. Let them follow the natural inclination of modern liberality, and confiscate that property which is not the property of the church but of the Protestants of Ireland-the men who have been the only steady friends of British connexion. Let then, our attachment be rewarded with spoliation -let them make a disgraceful alliance with treason, and reserve all their compassion for traitors-but let them pause before they imitate the murderous policy by which David got rid of the inconvenience of Uriah-let them not place the Protestant inhabitants of remote districts "in the front of the hottest battle, that they may fall."

"Quia BONA ALIENA LARGIRI LIBERALITAS sint sane quoniam ita se mores habent liberales ex sociorum fortunis-sint misericordes in furibus—ne illis nostrum sanguinem largiantur."

Perhaps we shall be told that this is merely Tory declamation-for with the radical prints, every argument that they cannot answer is Toryism, and every appeal to justice or to generosity is declamation. Fortunately we have authority that will certainly shield us from the imputation of Toryism, although it may not protect us from the charge of declamation. Let us hear the Edinburgh Review upon the subject. In the number of that periodical for last January, there is the following

powerful and eloquent passage-a passage to which it is but fair to acknowledge our attention has been called by qauotation 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 a 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 so desirable to promote among the various sects in Ireland. We fear that the exclusive adoption of such a standard would aggravate the spirit of sectarian bitterness, and lend new impulse to proselytizing zeal. It would raise the importance of numerical majorities. It would establish number as the criterion 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 could approve. The slow safe course of conscientious conviction would be abandoned for the easier method of obtaining a proselyte through a direct appeal to his interests or his passions. The means would be disregarded for the sake of the end; and religious conversion would be perpetually defiled by the odious characteristics of a political canvass. It would have even worse effects. If it were established, that because a benefice was found to contain less than a stated number of communicants, it should on that sole account cease to be a separate benefice, but be incorporated with some other with the most explicit understanding if this were made a rule of action, though that it was applicable only to present circumstances, and would never be reapplied in future-if Protestant benefices were to be dealt with by this sole measure, would not a standard be perpetually afforded, open to the comprehensions of the most ignorant and unreasoning, by which they might ever afterwards be able to ascertain what benefices ought to be extinct, or how

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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 intimidation, 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 cla

mourers.

"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

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 own 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 vs. 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 laity— and 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 education 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