never can, there might, apparently, be very little harm in it. Nothing can be more natural than that a Protestant king should desire to be fully assured of the state of Protestantism among his subjects, and to know something of the "moral and political relations of the Church Establishment," and it is very proper that, to gratify this laudable curiosity, he should give charitable employment to five or six briefless barristers, without either information or brains; but who, by the magic influence of the royal commission, are to be qualified for a task whose due execution would require a college of philosophers. Of course, "our right, trusty, and well-beloved cousins and councillors," Lords Brougham and Melbourne, or Edward John Littleton, will not go upon the itinerary voyage of discovery with the "dearly beloved" vagrants with whom their names are associated; the vagabond part of the business will be left to such gentlemen as Edward Carleton Tufnell, Acheson Lyle, Thomas N. Lister, and Co., and these are the persons who are to go from parish to parish-the knight errants of spoliation-the pioneers of sacrilege-to find out in some incredibly short space of time, information which it would require years of labour from sensible men, to collect; and then, on that information, to condense into a quarto report, the concentrated wisdom of all political philosophy. We do not mean to speak disrespectfully of the six acting commissioners; they may, for aught we know, be very respectable. We take his Majesty's word that they are barristers, and we have so much of old habits as, therefore, to presume that they are gentlemen; but beyond the information which the commission has graciously vouchsafed of their calling, and the inference (perhaps in these days an unwarrantable one) which we have drawn-with respect to five we have been able to ascertain nothing, although we have made very general in quiries, both in the hall of the Four Courts and through all other possible channels; of the sixth, Mr. Acheson Lyle, we accidentally heard that he is a radical barrister, who is accustomed to go the north-west circuit, and is generally considered, by those who know him, very competent to make a motion of course in the Com

mon Pleas, or open the pleadings in a trial at Nisi Prius. We cannot, however, learn that he has as yet, manifested those talents for business which will enable him to perform the miracles enjoined by his Majesty's commission, nor yet the depth of intellect which will qualify him to understand "the moral and political relations of the church establishment, and the religious institutions of other sects," and to "bring clearly into view their bearing on the general condition of the people of Ireland."

Were the subject less sacred we would smile at the folly and presumption of the Whigs. It is true, it is very true," that those who have no respect for the wisdom of others, generally pay it off by a very full measure of confidence in their own." The Irish Church is an establishment which the lapse of ages has interwoven with all the institutions, and all the property of the land-the prescription of centuries has conferred on it the most sacred of all claims-all the statesmen who have spoken on the subject, including even Lord Plunkett, have left on record the declaration of their opinion, that it is the bond of union between the two countries; like a tree long planted in the soil, it has struck out its roots in directions which it may well baffle political sagacity to trace. One would have thought that to "bring clearly into view" all the multiplied relations of an establishment so ancient, so venerable, and so vast, would have been a work of no ordinary difficulty, and requiring no ordinary mind. The problem was one that would require a philosopher, and its perfect solution would have been sufficient to confer immortality on a philosopher. Years of labour, and of thought-of labour, expended in collecting his materials, and of thought employed in their arrangement, would do little more than place the inquirer at the commencement of his calculations

calculations in which no maxim of political wisdom would be useless, no precept of political morality should be disregarded-calculations that were not merely to depend upon the vulgar arithmetic of a numerical census, but were to be regulated with a view to all those conflicting interests, and all those opposing principles by which they

were liable to be disturbed. It might not, indeed, be long before he would discover that the church establishment was the only barrier against the domination of Popery, the only preventive of the worst tyranny, civil or religious, that ever trampled upon the slaves of superstition; and to every honest man this consideration alone is sufficient to secure for it support. But this would be very far from the requirements of the new commission. All the moral and political bearings of the church establishment must be brought clearly into view, and not only this, but all the religious institutions of all sects (nunneries we hope included) must be examined as to their bearing on the condition of the country. And all is to be done by six young gentlemen, just such as we meet every day, made by their very appointment to this arduous office perfectly fit for its discharge.

Now, leaving out of the question the absurdity of the means taken to procure the desired information, and remembering that this commission has been issued by the sovereign of a Protestant state-it seems very strange that there is no direction given to enquire into the religious relations of the Irish church. "Moral and Political" seems very like the language of those who regard religion, merely, as an instrument of government, and not as that in which we have an eternal interest. The new commission puts the Irish Church upon her trial, and "our most religious king" has been counselled to try her, not by her efficiency in maintaining "the true profession of the gospel," among a people given over to the idolatries and the corruptions of Popery-not by her faithfulness in teaching Christian truth, or her zeal in opposing anti-Christian error, but by the convenience or inconvenience of her political relations-by the narrow considerations of unprincipled expediency and the blind calculations of selfish economy. The days are gone bye when truth was valued for its own sake-when religion was honoured as a matter of duty, not of convenience; and the antiquated doctrine held that rulers and statesmen were not absolved from their allegiance to their God. It is the duty of every Christian, no matter in what station he

Lord

may be placed, to employ his every power to advance the cause of truth; and the state that requires of her ministers, in their ministerial capacity, to forget this plain duty, is not a Christian state; and no believer in Christianity can conscientiously be her servant. There were days when Britain was not guilty of such tyranny as to demand it of her servants to discard the service of their Creator and call upon her magistrates to obey men rather than God. But the 'spirit of the age" is infidel-religion is tolerated, not encouraged, by the march of intellect; and those governors who will worship that " spirit" must leave their religion at the portals of its temple, and in entering on duties where the sanctions of Christianity are most necessary to guide them, must become practical Atheists and forget all responsibility, unless that which they owe to the will of the multitude. Brougham, as an individual, may be a devout Christian of the Church of England; but Lord Brougham, as Chancellor, must be an infidel. It matters not that the constitution appears to teach a different doctrine when it makes his communion with the national church an essential requisite for admission to his high office; but who, in these days, would place the constitution in opposition to "the spirit of the age?" The magic spells of Whig necromancy have evoked this grim phantom from its hiding place, and all its commands must be obeyed, and all its maxims be revered as oracles-and what says it—“ Away with religion from the state and statesmen; these latter may, in private, be very anxious for all religion; but woe to them if, in public, they confess any: they may, in the church, believe, and be firmly persuaded, that Protestantism is true and that Popery is false; but in the cabinet they must, they shall, be equally persuaded that this is a theological question as yet undetermined."" This "spirit of the age" is an awful being-the grisly head that haunts the premier's guilty conscience is not half so appalling or tremendous. "Tis true, the phantom has neither form nor substance, at least, that is discernible to common eyes; but terrible in its indistinctness, it has scared away even Lord Brougham's regard for religion, and Lord Grey's attachment to the

church; and, believe the noble lords, it disputes with Wellington the glory of the conquest of Napoleon. It was this mighty power that imprisoned the despot in St. Helena-it guarded him (perhaps in the shape of Sir Hudson Lowe); and having laid its mighty captive in his lonely grave, the fiend has wandered over the earth, seeking rest and finding none, until, at length, it has found its way to Britain, to shock the vision of the Premier and the Chancellor, and "fright the isle from its propriety."

It is, unquestionably, this spirit of the age that has indited the church commission, and in every line of it the traces of its pen are legible enough. There is all that ignorant presumption, that imagines itself fully capable of solving the difficulties of a great question, simply because it is not sagacious enough to see them-there is all that passion for experiment, and all that contempt of experience, that marks the self-confidence of folly, and might justly give to our age the epithet of the age of brass in impudence, how ever it may be the age of iron in crime. There is quite manifest, too, the desire to decide all questions by the philosophy of the counting-house, and drag into legislation the principles of the ledger. Utility is to be estimated by cheapness; and even into the balance of the sanctuary, in which are to be weighed the most sacred principles of eternal truth, must be thrown the same sordid weights, which men employ in the transactions of worldly gain and perishable pelf. Mammon is the god of the present day and before this golden calf is the present generation bowing down, with one consent, in an unholy and degrading idolatry; and they rise from his worship with the infection of gold having entered into their soul; and they set up, as the standard of all national good, and the measure of all political right, the sordid calculations of mercantile avarice, and the griping niggardliness of mercantile parsimony. And thus it is that the church of Ireland is to be tried. It avails her not that she has kept alive the profession of true religion, and given to Ireland a succession of able and holy men who ministered at her altars it matters not that she has borne the word of God to many a

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cottage fireside, and that, by her means, the sound of the Gospel has been heard in many a lonely valley-that she has trained up many a generation of peaceable and Christian men, who made their bible the rule of their lives, and found it their stay and consolation in death. All this is not to be taken into consideration. The ministers look upon religious instruction as a material, of which they must supply a certain quantity to the prejudices of men; and they are determined to contract for it at the cheapest rate, and, provided that it be supplied at a moderate cost, they are not anxious as to the quality. These are just the principles that are to guide the commissioners in their inquirythey are the principles which the ministers have avowed as their actuating motives; but the moment those principles are sanctioned by the legislature of Britain, or admitted to regulate her councils, farewell-a long farewell-to England's greatness! the temple of our constitution is then indeed polluted by the tables of the money changers; and the spirit of social order of dignified freedom, which we had enshrined, is gone for ever-indignant at the desecration.

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This commission is, after all, only the form of a trial-the mockery of inquiry. It is avowedly sent out, not to furnish ministers with information on which they may make up their minds, but to search for information that may justify the decision to which they have already come. It is, in fact, very difficult to know what are the intentions of the cabinet-it is more than questionable whether they know them themselves. Ever since the evil hour when they took the reins of government, they appear to have had no principle to guide them but a determined and tenacious adherence to office; and their whole course presents no instance of decision-no unity of purpose-nothing but a dull uniformity in continual vacillation and temporary expedient. But yet, as far as Lord Althorp's blundering explanations are intelligible, the new commission was intended to embody the principle of Mr. Ward's resolution, and thus furnish ministers with a convenient excuse for getting rid of that resolution altogether!! The conduct of ministers was, indeed, most extra

ordinary-compared with their declarations it was most unaccountable. If they approved of Mr. Ward's resolution, why did they not adopt it, and thus obtain the sanction of the House of Commons for their measures? If they disapproved of it, why issue a commission that was to carry its principle into effect? Was their conduct the blundering of stupidity or the stratagem of deceit ? Certainly nothing could be more like the duplicity of the knave, who adds cowardice to guilt, and voluntarily chooses hypocrisy as the avenue to crime. But no Tory should nave lent himself to such a manœuvre. No Tory should have consented to a motion that implied that a proposition for robbery could, under any circumstances, be entertained in a British House of Commons. The Tories should have joined with the Radicals, and with every Whig that set any value upon consistency of principle or manliness of conduct; and negatived the previous question. The ministers would thus have been forced into some determined line of policy; they must have either voted for Mr. Ward's resolution, and so shown themselves to the people of England, in their true character, or else given it a direct negative, and so been pledged, (as far as honour can pledge a Whig) to the defence of the Church. But the Tories threw a cloak over their imbecile vacillation, and charitably permitted them to escape in the dark. Of the Irish Protestant members, Sir Edmond Hayes was the only one who voted in the minority, and with all due deference, to many whom we respect, he was the only one who voted right.* The truth, is the commission, was merely an artifice for gaining time-an

expedient taken up without reflection and arranged without system. Ward's resolution was the little pebble that sufficed to break asunder the ill-assorted cabinet; and the secession of Stanley and Graham has left them literally, as well as metaphorically, at their wit's end. Without talent to form, or energy to adhere to any course of action, they were just on the point of being dismissed in disgrace as the Incapables; but a drowning man will catch at a straw, and so in a lucky hour they bethought, themselves, of a commission of inquiry. It would, at least, put off the evil day and leave them, for a little longer, their beloved places and perquisites-and so having determined on the commission they then invented a necessity for it, and reckless of pledges, and utterly regardless of consequences, they declare it their intention to cut down the Church Establishment to what they believe to be the wants of the people. They hunt folly through all the mazes of a labyrinth of absurdity-they issue a commission for the purpose of gaining time!-they decide on measures that will look like plausible excuses for the commission on which they are to be based!! They get rid of a resolution simply because they approve of its principle!!! and they declare the commission is to enable them to decide on the propriety of measures which they previously inform us it is their settled determination to adopt !!!!

But let us pass over all this prelude of blunders, and imagine ourselves fairly arrived at what is to follow: let us forgive the doubly preposterous character of this arrangement-the boldness of the political figure, the Whig ύστερον πρότερον, upon which they have ventured; and coolly consider what they

mean by the proposal to cut down (for this is the cant term of the day) the Irish Church Establishment to the wants of the people. That is-in every parish where the members of the Established Church shall not bear a certain arbitrary, and as yet indefinite proportion to the population, they have determined to do away with the Church Establishment altogether, and apply its revenues to purposes other than ecclesiastical. The incomes of the suppressed benefices are to be appropriated to the paying of the priests and to the education of the people—not a moral and religious education, according to the principles of the Church of England, but an education based upon the infidel system of the Irish Education Board. This is their scheme of sacrilege, and from this scheme we cannot separate their recent commission of inquiry. Apart from this, that commission is but a prodigal and profligate expenditure of the public money, without either the pretext of an object or the semblance of an excuse. In connection with these measures we must regard it as a declaration of hostility against the Irish Church; a declaration which the ministers have counselled their king to make not, be it remembered, in his legislative, BUT IN HIS EXECUTIVE CAPACITY. But more of that hereafter-for the present, let us confine our remarks to the probable, nay, the certain effects of the measures which they contemplate.

Mr. Stanley laid it down, in the House of Commons, as the principle of a church establishment, that the state should furnish religious instruction to all the members of that church; no matter in what circumstance they might be placed-no matter whether chance, or, to speak more correctly, Providence should fix their lot in districts where they could hold communion with many of their brethren, or in districts when all around them were of a different persuasion. And if the reality of religion be admitted, it seems hard to object to the reason of this principle. The Protestant whose residence, necessity or duty has fixed in a Roman Catholic district, has surely a claim upon the state for spiritual instruction, or, as Lord Morpeth would say, "spiritual edification." He is not to be left to pass his days in

practical heathenism-in virtual excommunication from the national church, because those around him are dissenters from the national faith. There was once a promise given by the Author of our holy religion that "where two or three were gathered together in his name there should He be in the midst of them." One would think, that to men who believed these words to be the words of their God, they would be a sufficient warrant for maintaining his pure worship wherever worshippers could be found. But our infidel rulers can see no beauty in the service of a little flock. They will go with religion when she is attended with a crowd; but they will desert her when her cause is supported but by a few. They know nothing of that exalted principle, that high and generous sense of right, that supports truth simply because it is true, and scorns to make the opinions of the multitude the rule of its conduct. Either let the church establishment be altogether given up, or let it be maintained in all its efficiency; but never let a sensible and reflecting nation adopt the absurdity of establishing an arbitrary numerical proportion as the criterion of the necessity of spiritual instruction; and as if to complete the anomaly, deprive the Protestants of the benefits of pastoral instruction, precisely in those cases in which it is impossible for them to supply the deficiency by voluntary contribution.

Now, this is merely considering the question in relation to Mr. Stanley's principle; and we are anxious that it should be so considered; because his is a principle which we cannot conceive how any believer, in the doctrines of the Church of England, can deny. But, for our own parts, we think the right honourable gentleman takes far too low a view of the duties of an established church, and certainly is altogether mistaken as to the spirit and character of the Irish Church. That spirit and character are essentially missionary. She is not content with merely attending to the spiritual interests of those who are attached to her communion, but she binds her bishops and her clergy by all her institutes and ordinances, to endeavour to bring back those who are wandering in the paths of error. A national