CHAPTER XII

DISESTABLISHMENT OF THE IRISH CHURCH, 1869

As a

"You call it a Missionary Church; if so, its mission is unfulfilled. Missionary Church it has failed utterly. Like some exotic brought from a far country with infinite pains and useless trouble, it has kept alive in an ungrateful climate and ungenial soil. The curse of barrenness is upon it-it has no leaves, it bears no blossoms, it yields no fruit. 'Cut it down; why cumbereth it the ground ?'”ROBERT LOWE, in the House of Commons.

“In England people altogether under-rate the potency of the old hatred of the Saxon. Can anything be more disheartening or unsatisfactory? The heart of the people is against us, and I see no prospect of any improvement within any time that can be calculated. You will say, 'What is the use of this jeremiad?' I think it is of this use the next best thing to curing a disease is fairly to look the evil in the face, and not deceive oneself into crying 'peace' where there is no peace.""-LORD KIMBERLEY to Lord Clarendon, November 27, 1865.

THE Established Church in Ireland may be said to have finally started upon its inglorious career in the year 1560, when a packed and obsequious Parliament was convened by Elizabeth in Dublin for the purpose of declaring her pious Majesty the Supreme Head of the Irish Church. During the reign of James I a considerable portion of the confiscated lands of the Irish chiefs were bestowed upon this new nurseling, and thus feathered it strutted forth, to the great delight of Catholichating men, the endowed Protestant Establishment. The state of this Church after its digestion of unearned revenue for over two centuries, had it not been desperately significant of a lamentable absence of statesmanship in the rulers of Ireland and the sense of what was expedient and just in the government of men, would have been exquisitely humorous, worthy of the pen of Cervantes, or Rabelais, or Voltaire, or the great author of the Provincial Letters, or of any other writer who could have relished the jest and handed down to posterity the inimitable foolery of the ludicrous, hypocritical, incurably barren Established Church in Ireland.

Whilst the population of that country was declared to be 5,788,415 by the Census Commissioners of 1861, the members of the Established Church numbered but 693,357, or less than oneeighth of the total roll of human units; the number of the Roman Catholics being 4,505,265, or about ten out of every thirteen of the whole Irish people. But to make up for lack of number the

Irish Church determined to show its zeal. Thus there were 114 benefices, with a grand revenue of £18,735, in none of which did the Church membership exceed twenty-five, whilst five of the benefices had only one member apiece. Moreover, in 199 out of 2,424 parishes there was not a single Churchman, respectable or otherwise, to fall upon his knees and wish himself out of Ireland. In 1861, in the united dioceses of Cashel, Emly, Waterford, and Lismore the total population was 370,978; but of these only 3.7 per cent. were Anglicans, whilst the Catholics were 95'6 per cent. of the whole. In the same diocese of Cashel various benefices offered a fair example of the unconcealed anomalies of the Established Church. That of Fethard had an annual value of £1,065 a year, but there were only 197 Anglicans, whilst the Catholics numbered 5,754; that of Thurles had an annual value of £950, with 207 Anglicans and 7,334 Catholics; that of Ballinlanders one of £397, with only 28 Anglicans and 4,300 Catholics; that of Tipperary one of £908, with 229 Anglicans and 7,611 Catholics; that of Killenaule one of £845, with 155 Anglicans and 4,730 Catholics; and that of Athassell one of £674, with 3,226 Catholics and only 117 Anglicans. Sixteen other benefices in the same diocese had no church at all; such, for instance, as Killardy, with an annual value of £202, and with only seven Protestant inhabitants, the incumbent being an absentee, who paid a curate £10 a year for performing the duties; Kilmacleague, attached to the Chancellorship of Waterford, with an annual value of £380 10s. 5d., with seventeen Protestants, the incumbent being an absentee; Reisk, with an annual value of £63, with but one Protestant, the incumbent being an absentee; Modeligo, with one of £112 10s., with six Protestants, the incumbent being an absentee; Lisgenan, with one of £150, with thirteen Protestants, the incumbent being an absentee; Templemichael, with one of £98 9s., with only three Protestants, the incumbent being an absentee; Fenoagh, with one of £145 7s. 9d., with twelve Protestants, the incumbent being an absentee; and Mora, with one of £195, with only three Protestants, the incumbent again being an absentee, who paid a curate £15 a year, or £5 a head, for performing the ungrateful duty of coaxing the devil out of these three unprofitable churchmen. Year after year did these prelates of the Pale tax the patience of their Creator, and year after year lay claim to a monopoly of grace with this increasing load of sin.

In seventy-three out of the 143 parishes in the diocese of Ossory there were only 330 Anglicans, twenty-five of the seventythree having actually none at all, six of them only one each, five of them only two each, one with only three, five with only four each, six with only five each, three with only six each, two with only seven each, and so on with the remainder in the same

easy gamut of admirable uniformity. In the dioceses of Tuam, Killala, and Achonry in 1866 the percentage of Anglicans was only 3'37, whilst that of Catholics was 9607 of the population. In the dioceses of Limerick, Ardfert, and Aghadoe the Anglican percentage was 3'5, whilst the percentage of Catholics was 95.6 In the diocese of Limerick in 1860 there were twentytwo parishes with no Anglican at all, four with only one each, four with two each, the same number with three each, five with four each, four with six each, one with eight, six with nine each, three with ten each, four with eleven each, six with thirteen each, two with fourteen each, and three with fifteen Anglicans each; making a total of only 360 Anglicans for sixty-eight parishes, or an average of 53 Anglicans for every parish. In the diocese of Dublin in 1866, out of seventy-eight parishes, nineteen were without a single churchman, one boasted of one Churchman, two had two each, two had four each, six had five each, four had six each, three had seven each, two had eight. each, two had nine each, two had ten each, three had eleven each, one had twelve, five had thirteen each, three had fourteen each, one had fifteen, four had sixteen each, two had seventeen each, three had eighteen each, five had nineteen each, one had twentyone, two had twenty-two each, three had twenty-four Churchmen each, and one, particularly favoured by the vigilance of Providence, had a quarter of a hundred. That is to say, in seventyeight parishes in the diocese of the great capital of the Pale there were only 719 Anglicans, or on the average a little over nine. Anglicans to a parish. And yet this was the Church of the Establishment. For this over-fed skeleton the education and progress of the majority were to starve. For these priestly absentees four and a half million Catholics were asked to change their creed.

During the terrible years of 1845-7 great efforts had been made, as we have seen, to convert the Catholics to the rival faith. Bread and Protestantism were offered to the starving in the same hand. Mad with hunger, they must take both, or die of famine. But in spite of this the proselytes made very little headway. In 1672 the Protestants were to the Catholics as 45 to 120; in 1730 as 60 to 120; in 1784 in the same proportion as in 1730. By 1801 the Protestants had dropped to the proportion of 40 to 120; in 1834 they were as 30 to 120; and in 1861, after the fearful visitation of 1845-7, when the peasantry had gone down like reeds before a gale, and the famine had decimated the Catholic population, but practically left unscathed the prosperous members of the Established Church, the proportion of Protestants to Papists remained the same as in 1834-namely, as 30 to 120. Again, in 1834, when the religious census was taken, the members of the Established Church were found to be a little

less than a ninth of the population; and in 1861 they were a little less than an eighth; whilst in several parishes in the latter year the total number of Anglicans was actually found to be less than that of the alleged converts to the Protestant faith. Moreover, when it is considered that emigration followed on the heels of the famine of 1847, and that the Catholics left their native land in far greater proportion than the Protestants, the progress from a ninth to an eighth between the years 1834 and 1861 will be seen to be evidence of much greater progress on the part of the Roman Catholic religion and of decline in the advance of Protestantism, than might have been imagined under ordinary circumstances; for had these two anti-Catholic elements been absent, the proportion of Protestants to Catholics would not only not have risen, but most certainly have sunk.

The anomalies of the Irish Church had impressed themselves upon a popular, if over-rated 1 writer and politician many years before. Speaking in 1844 Macaulay had said

"I, sir, think the Established Church of Ireland a bad institution, I will go farther. I am not speaking in anger, or with any wish to excite anger in others; I am calmly and deliberately expressing, in the most appropriate terms, an opinion which I formed many years ago, which all my observations and reflections have confirmed and which I am prepared to support by reasons, when I say that, of all the institutions of the civilized world, the Established Church of Ireland seems to me the most absurd. . . . Who ever heard any of her advocates say, 'I defend this institution because it is a good institution; the ends for which an Established Church exists are such and such; and I will show you that this Church attains those ends?' Nobody says this. Nobody has the hardihood to say it. What divine, what political speculator who has written in defence of ecclesiastical establishments, ever defended such establishments on grounds which will support the Church of Ireland? What panegyric has ever been pronounced on the Churches of England and Scotland, which is not a satire on the Church of Ireland? What traveller comes among us who is not moved to wonder and derision by the Church of Ireland? What foreign writer on British affairs, whether European or American, whether Protestant or Catholic, whether Conservative or Liberal, whether partial to England or prejudiced against England, ever mentions the Church of Ireland without expressing his amazement that such an establishment should exist among reasonable men? And those who speak thus of the Church speak justly.... In one country alone is to be seen the spectacle of a community of eight millions of human beings, with a Church which is the Church of only

1 Compare Macaulay's literary style with that of Burke, Junius, Swift, Newman, or Matthew Arnold, and the difference will be seen at once. De Quincey, Hazlitt, and Ruskin suffer from much the same fault as Macaulay. Their writings are a beautiful mosaic: they compel admiration, but are wanting in deep feeling. There is plenty of word-painting and ingenuity, but no soul or pregnancy. In fact, their work throughout leaves the impression of monstrously clever artifice, and very little

else.

eight hundred thousand. . . . All the arguments which incline us against the Church of England, and all the arguments which incline us in favour of the Church of England, are alike arguments against the Church of Ireland; against the Church of the few; against the Church of the wealthy; against the Church which, reversing every principle on which a Christian Church should be founded, fills the rich with its good things, and sends the hungry empty away. A Church exists to

be loved, to be reverenced, to be heard with docility, to reign in the understandings and hearts of men. A Church which is abhorred is useless or worse than useless; and to quarter a hostile Church on a conquered people, as you would quarter a soldiery, is therefore the most absurd of mistakes."

Macaulay and Lowe1 were not the only eminent men who thought so. Cobden had called the Irish Church in 1863 at Rochdale-" that great and glaring abuse of the system of religious equality"; whilst Brougham had denounced it with the unsparing force of his energetic phraseology-as the foulest abuse in any civilized country. But it still cumbered the ground.

In 1843 Ward, the member for Sheffield, had moved in the House of Commons to cut down the revenues of the Irish Establishment and to endow the Catholic Church, but his proposal had been rejected. The following year he moved for a Committee of the House upon the existing state of the temporalities of the Church of Ireland, but was again defeated. In 1846 and 1847 Lord John Russell, on being questioned, declared in the House that it was not the intention of the Government to disestablish the Irish Church or tamper with its privileges. In 1849 Bernal Osborne took up the question, and moved for a committee to consider the condition of the Establishment, but Ministers opposed the proposal and it was consequently beaten by a majority of 67. Feeling was still very bitter in Ireland between the followers of the two religions. The Catholics were unable to forget the persecutions of the past, which rankled in their bosoms like an unhealed wound; and the Orangemen, who still smarted from the loss of their former power, lost no opportunity of reviving the memory of their old supremacy. Thus altercation and hatred were the fruit of disappointed tyranny on the one side and the gnawing remembrance of insult and cruelty on the other; and the result again of these were frequent petty outbreaks between the two parties. Such a case occurred in July 1849. The so-called Battle of Dolly's Brae, that took place in that month, was a skirmish between Ribbonmen and Orangemen. The Orangemen of Down had arranged to pay their grand-master, Lord Roden, a visit at his seat, Tollymore Park. Their road ran through a defile known as Dolly's Brae, and the pass round which many

1 Robert Lowe, Viscount Sherbrooke (1811-1892).