Chapter of Autobiography

But I must venture to point out that, whatever be the sharpness of this contradiction, it is one from which I could not possibly escape by endeavouring to maintain the Established Church of Ireland on the principles on which it is now maintained. I challenge all my censors to impugn me when I affirm that, if the propositions of my work are in conflict (as they are) with an assault upon the existence of the Irish Establishment, they are at least as much, or even more, hostile to the grounds on which it is now attempted to maintain it. At no time of my life did I propound the maxim simpliciter that we were to maintain the Establishment. I appeal to the few who may have examined my work otherwise than for the purpose of culling from it passages which would tell in a quotation. I appeal to the famous article of Lord Macaulay,3 who says with truth —

"Mr. Gladstone's whole theory rests on this great fundamental proposition, that the propagation of religious truth is one of the principal ends of government, as government. If Mr. Gladstone has not proved this proposition, his system vanishes at once."

This was entirely just. In the protest I addressed to the distinguished Reviewer on a particular point, I took no exception to it whatever. My work had used (as far as I believe and remember) none of the stock arguments for maintaining the Church of Ireland. I did not say "maintain it, lest you should disturb the settlement of property." I did not say "maintain it, lest you should be driven to repeal the Union." I did not say "maintain it, lest you should offend and exasperate the Protestants." I did not say "maintain it, because the body known as the Irish Church has an indefeasible title to its property." I did not say "maintain it for the spiritual benefit of a small minority." Least of all did I say "maintain it, but establish religious equality, setting up at the public charge other establishments along with it, or by distributing a sop here and a sop there, to coax Roman Catholics and Presbyterians into a sort of acquiescence in its being maintained." These topics I never had made my own. Scarcely ever, in the first efforts of debate, had I referred to one of them. My trumpet, however shrill and feeble, had at least rung out its note clearly. And my ground, right or wrong it matters not for the present purpose, was this: the Church of Ireland must be maintained for the benefit of the whole people of Ireland, and must be maintained as the truth, or it cannot be maintained at all.

Accordingly my book contended that the principle of the Grant to Maynooth, unless as a simply covenanted obligation,4 and that of the Established Church of Ireland, could not stand together. In the House of Commons, on the question relating to the Grant, I am reported as having said in the year 1838,5 that I objected to the Grant because it was fatal to the main principle on which the Established Church was founded.

And further. The Liberal Government and party of that day proposed, in 1835 and the following years, the famous "Appropriation Clause." The principle of their measure was, that the surplus funds only of the Irish Church were to be applied to popular education, after adequate provision had been made for the spiritual wants of the Protestants. This principle, that adequate provision is to be made for the spiritual wants of the Protestants, before any other claim on the property of the Irish Church can be admitted, was the basis of the Appropriation Clause; and is, as I understand the matter, the very principle which is now maintained against the Liberal party of 1868, by the (so-called) defenders of the Irish Established Church. But this principle I denounced in 1836 as strongly as I could now do. I extract the following passage from a report in 'Hansard,' which, as I remember, I had myself corrected, of a speech on the Irish Tithe Bill with the Appropriation Clause: —6

"A Church Establishment is maintained either for the sake of its members or its doctrines; for those whom it teaches, or for that which it teaches. On the former ground it is not in equity tenable for a moment.

"Why should any preference be given to me over another fellow-subject, or what claim have I personally to have my religion supported, whilst another is disavowed by the State? No claim whatever in respect to myself. I concur entirely with gentlemen opposite, hostile to an Establishment, that no personal privilege ought in such a matter to be allowed.

"But if, on the contrary, I believe, as the great bulk of the British Legislature does believe, that the doctrine and system of the Establishment contain and exhibit truth in its purest and most effective form, and if we also believe truth to be good for the people universally, then we have a distinct and immovable ground for the maintenance of an Establishment; but it follows as a matter of course from the principle, that it must be maintained, not on a scale exactly and strictly adjusted to the present number of its own members, but on such a scale that it may also have the means of offering to others the benefits which it habitually administers to them.

"Therefore we wish to see the Establishment in Ireland upheld; not for the sake of the Protestants, but of the people at large, that the ministers may be enabled to use the influences of their station, of kindly offices and neighbourhood, of the various occasions which the daily intercourse and habits of social life present; aye, and I do not hesitate to add of persuasion itself, applied with a zeal tempered by knowledge and discretion, in the propagation of that which is true, and which, being true, is good as well for those who as yet have it not, as well for those who have it. It is the proposition of the noble Lord which is really open to the charge of bigotry, intolerance, and arbitrary selection; because, disavowing the maintenance and extension of truth, he continues by way of personal privilege to the Protestants the legal recognition of their Church, which he refuses to the Church of the Roman Catholic."

The negative part of this passage I adopt, except the censure it implies upon Earl Russell and his friends; who, whether their actual propositions were defensible or not, had the "root of the matter" in their hearts, and were far ahead of me in their political forethought, and in their desire to hold up at least the banner of a generous and a hopeful policy towards Ireland.

In this manner I prove that, while I was bound by the propositions of my work, I was not singly but doubly bound. I was bound to defend the Irish Church, as long as it could be defended on the ground of its truth. But when the day arrived on which that ground was definitively abandoned, on which a policy was to be adopted by the Imperial Parliament such as to destroy this plea for the Irish Establishment, I was equally bound in such case to adopt no other: I had shown that justice would fail to warrant the mere support of the Church of the minority; I was held, therefore, not to construct out of rags and tatters, shreds and patches, a new and different case for maintaining it on the ground of favour, or, as it is termed, justice, to Protestants; and, if I had done anything of this kind, I should not have escaped the responsibility of inconsistency, but should simply have added a second and (as I think) a less excusable inconsistency to the first.

The day for the adoption of such a policy as I have described was not far distant.

Scarcely had my work issued from the press when I became aware that there was no party, no section of a party, no individual person probably in the House of Commons, who was prepared to act upon it. I found myself the last man on the sinking ship. Exclusive support to the established religion of the country, with a limited and local exception for Scotland under the Treaty of Union with that country, had been up to that time the actual rule of our policy; the instances to the contrary being of equivocal construction, and of infinitesimal amount. But the attempt to give this rule a vitality other than that of sufferance was an anachronism in time and in place. When I bid it live, it was just about to die. It was really a quickened and not a deadened conscience in the country, which insisted on enlarging the circle of State support, even while it tended to restrain the range of political interference in religion. The condition of our poor, of our criminals, of our military and naval services, and the backward state of popular education, forced on us a group of questions, before the moral pressure of which the old rules properly gave way. At and about the same period, new attempts to obtain grants of public money for the building of churches in England and Scotland, I am thankful to say, failed. The powerful Government of 1843 also failed to carry a measure of Factory Education, because of the preference it was thought to give to the Established Church. I believe the very first opinion I ever was called upon to give in Cabinet was an opinion in favour of the withdrawal of that measure.

In this state of facts and feelings, notwithstanding the strength of anti-Roman opinion, it was impossible that Ireland should not assert her share, and that a large one, to consideration in these critical matters. The forces, which were now at work, brought speedily to the front and to the top that question of Maynooth College, which I had always (rightly or wrongly) treated as a testing question for the foundations of the Irish Established Church; as, in point of principle, the Articulus stantis aut cadentis Ecclesiæ.

In the course of the year 1844, when I was a member of the Cabinet of Sir Robert Peel, he made known to me his opinion that it was desirable to remodel and to increase the Grant to Maynooth. I was the youngest member of that Government, entirely bound up with it in policy, and warmly attached, by respect and even affection, to its head and to some of its leading members. Of association with what was termed ultra-Toryism in general politics I had never dreamed. I well knew that the words of Sir R. Peel were not merely tentative, but that, as it was right they should, they indicated a fixed intention. The choice before me, therefore, was, to support his measure, or to retire from his Government into a position of complete isolation, and what was more than this, subject to a grave and general imputation of political eccentricity. My retirement, I knew, could have no other warrant than this: that it would be a tribute to those laws which, as I have urged, must be upheld for the restraint of changes of opinion and conduct in public men. For I never entertained the idea of opposing the measure of Sir Robert Peel. I can scarcely be guilty of a breach of confidence when I mention that Lord Derby, to whom I had already been indebted for much personal kindness, was one of those colleagues who sought to dissuade me from resigning my office. He urged upon me that such an act must be followed by resistance to the measure of the Government, and that I should run the risk of being mixed with a fierce religious agitation. I replied that I must adhere to my purpose of retirement, but that I did not perceive the necessity of its being followed by resistance to the proposal. Overtures were, not unnaturally, made to me by some of those who resisted it; but they were at once declined. My whole purpose was to place myself in a position in which I should be free to consider my course without being liable to any just suspicion on the ground of personal interest. It is not profane if I say "with a great price obtained I this freedom." The political association in which I stood was to me at the time the alpha and omega of public life. The Government of Sir Robert Peel was believed to be of immovable strength. My place, as President of the Board of Trade, was at the very kernel of its most interesting operations; for it was in progress from year to year, with continually waxing courage, towards the emancipation of industry, and therein towards the accomplishment of another great and blessed work of public justice. Giving up what I highly prized, aware that

"malè sarta

Gratia nequicquam coit, et rescinditur,"7

I felt myself open to the charge of being opinionated, and wanting in deference to really great authorities; and I could not but know I should be regarded as fastidious and fanciful, fitter for a dreamer, or possibly a schoolman, than for the active purposes of public life in a busy and moving age. In effect so it was. In the month of January, 1845, if not sooner, the resolution of the Cabinet was taken; and I resigned. The public judgment, as might have been expected, did not favour the act. I remember that the 'Daily News,' then as now a journal greatly distinguished for an almost uniform impartiality, as well as for breadth of view and high discernment, remarked at the time or afterwards upon the case, as a rare one, in which a public man had injured himself with the public by an act which must in fairness be taken to be an act of self-denial. I hope that reference to this criticism will not be considered boastful. It can hardly be so; for an infirm judgment, exhibited in a practical indiscretion, is after all the theme of these pages. I do not claim acquittal upon any one of the counts of indictment which I have admitted may be brought against the conduct I pursued. One point only I plead, and plead with confidence. It proved that I was sensible of the gravity of any great change in political conduct or opinion, and desirous beyond all things of giving to the country such guarantees as I could give of my integrity, even at the expense of my judgment and fitness for affairs. If any man doubts this, I ask him to ask himself, what demand political honour could have made with which I failed to comply?

In the ensuing debate on the Address (February 4, 1845), Lord John Russell, in terms of courtesy and kindness which I had little deserved from him, called for an explanation of the cause of my retirement. In a statement which I corrected for 'Hansard's Debates,' I replied that it had reference to the intentions of the Government with respect to Maynooth; that those intentions pointed to a measure "at variance with the system which I had maintained," "in a form the most detailed and deliberate," "in a published treatise: " that although I had never set forth any theory of political affairs as "under all circumstances inflexible and immutable," yet I thought those who had borne such solemn testimony to a particular view of a great constitutional question, "ought not to be parties responsible for proposals which involved a material departure from it." And the purpose of my retirement was to "place myself, so far as in me lay, in a position to form not only an honest, but likewise an independent and an unsuspected judgment," on the plan likely to be submitted by the Government. I also spoke as follows, in more forms than one:

"I wish again and most distinctly to state, that I am not prepared to take part in any religious warfare against that measure, such as I believe it may be; or to draw a distinction between the Roman Catholics and other denominations of Christians, with reference to the religious opinions which each of them respectively may hold."

Now I respectfully submit that by this act my freedom was established; and that it has never since, during a period of nearly five-and-twenty years, been compromised.

Some may say that it is perfectly consistent to have endowed Maynooth anew, and yet to uphold on principle, as a part of the Constitution, the Established Church of Ireland. It may be consistent, for them; it was not consistent, as I have distinctly shown, for me. The moment that I admitted the validity of a claim by the Church of Rome for the gift, by the free act of the Imperial Parliament, of new funds for the education of its clergy, the true basis of the Established Church of Ireland for me was cut away. The one had always been treated by me as exclusive of the other. It is not now the question whether this way of looking at the question was a correct one. There are great authorities against it; while it seems at the same time to have some considerable hold on what may be termed the moral sense of portions, perhaps large portions, of the people. The present question is one of fact. It is enough for the present purpose, that such was my view. From that day forward, I have never to my knowledge said one word, in public or in private, which could pledge me on principle to the maintenance of the Irish Church. Nay, in a speech, delivered on the second reading of the Maynooth College Bill, I took occasion distinctly to convey, that the application of religious considerations to ecclesiastical questions in Ireland would be entirely altered by the passing of the measure: —

"The boon to which I for one have thus agreed, is a very great boon. I think it important, most of all important with regard to the principles it involves. I am very far, indeed, from saying that it virtually decides upon the payment of the Roman Catholic priests of Ireland by the State: but I do not deny that it disposes of the religious objections to that measure. I mean that we, who assent to this Bill, shall in my judgment no longer be in a condition to plead religious objections to such a project."8

True, I did not say that I was thenceforward prepared at any moment to vote for the removal of the Established Church in Ireland. And this for the best of all reasons: it would not have been true. It is one thing to lift the anchor; it is another to spread the sails. It may be a duty to be in readiness for departure, when departure itself would be an offence against public prudence and public principle. But I do not go so far even as this. On the contrary, I was willing and desirous9 that it should be permitted to continue. If its ground in logic was gone, yet it might have, in fact, like much besides, its day of grace. I do not now say that I leapt at once to the conclusion that the Established Church of Ireland must at any definite period "cease to exist as an Establishment." She had my sincere good will; I was not sorry, I was glad, that while Ireland seemed content to have it so, a longer time should be granted her to unfold her religious energies through the medium of an active and pious clergy, which until this our day she had never possessed. My mind recoiled then, as it recoils now, from the idea of worrying the Irish Church to death. I desired that it should remain even as it was, until the way should be opened, and the means at hand, for bringing about some better state of things.

Moreover, it was a duty, from my point of view, completely to exhaust every chance on behalf of the Irish Church. I have not been disposed, at any time of life, gratuitously to undertake agitation of the most difficult, and at times apparently the most hopeless questions. At the period of the Appropriation Clause, I represented to myself, and I believe to others, that the true power of the Church as a religious engine had never up to that period been fairly tried. In name a religious institution, her influences, her benefices, her sees, were commonly employed for purposes, which we must condemn as secular, even if they had not been utterly anti-national. Only within a few, a very few years, had her clergy even begun to bestir themselves; and they had forthwith found that, from the unsettled state of the law of tithe, they were in the midst of an agitation, both menacing to public order, and even perilous to life. I was desirous to see what, after person and property should have been rendered secure, and a peaceful atmosphere restored, a generation of pious and zealous men could accomplish in their actual position. I am still of the opinion that thirty-five years ago the religion of the Irish Church had not – to her and to our shame be it spoken – had fair play. From the days of Elizabeth downwards, with the rarest exceptions, the worldly element had entirely outweighed the religious one (whatever the intention may have been) in the actual working of the ecclesiastical institutions of Ireland. Mr. Burke has immortalised the burning shame and the hideous scandals of those penal laws which, perhaps for the first time in the history of Christendom if not of man, aimed at persecuting men out of one religion, but not at persecuting them into another. I will not be so rash as to enter on the field —

"Per quem magnus equos Auruncæ flexit alumnus."

But the time of awakening had come. The Irish Church had grown conscious that she had a Gospel to declare. Even with my present opinions I might feel a scruple as to the measures now proposed, but for the resistless and accumulated proof of impotence afforded by the experience of my life-time, and due, I believe, to a radically false position. For the Irish Church has, since the tithe war of 1830-2 came to an end, had not only fair play – that is such fair play as in Ireland the Establishment allows to the Church – but fair play and something more. She has enjoyed an opportunity, extending over a generation of men, with circumstances of favour such as can hardly be expected to recur. What has been her case? She has had ample endowments; perfect security; an almost unbroken freedom from the internal controversies which have chastened (though, in chastening, I believe improved) the Church of England. The knowledge of the Irish language has been extensively-attained by her clergy.10 She has had all the moral support that could be given her by the people of this country; for it was the people, and not a mere party, who, in 1835-8, repudiated and repelled the Appropriation Clause. Her rival, the Church of Rome, has seen its people borne down to the ground by famine; and then thinned from year to year, in hundreds of thousands, by the resistless force of emigration. And, last and most of all, in the midst of that awful visitation of 1847-8, her Protestant Clergy came to the Roman Catholic people clad in the garb of angels of light; for, besides their own bounty (most liberal, I believe, in proportion to their means), they became the grand almoners of the British nation. When, after all this, we arrive at a new census of religion in 1861, we find that only the faintest impression has been made upon the relative numbers of the two bodies; an impression much slighter, I apprehend, than would have been due to the comparative immunity of the Established Church from the drain of emigration; and, if so, representing in reality, not a gain, but a virtual loss of some part of the narrow ground which before was occupied by the favoured religion of the State.

Like others, I have watched with interest the results of those missionary operations in the West of Ireland which have, perhaps, been construed as of a greater ulterior significance than really belongs to them. They were, I understand, due not so much to the Established Church, as to religious bodies in this country, which expend large funds in Ireland for the purpose of making converts: an operation in which the Presbyterians and Protestant Dissenters lend their aid. Let them not be undervalued. But I, for one, recollect that this is not the first time when local and occasional inroads have been successfully effected by Protestants upon the serried phalanx of the Roman Church in Ireland, and have been mistaken for signs of permanent or a general conquest. More than forty years ago, Bishop Blomfield – no mean authority – prophesied or announced, in the House of Lords, that a second Reformation had then begun. And there had indeed taken place in Ireland at that time one, if not more than one, instance of conversions on a large scale to the Established Church, such as was well calculated to excite sanguine anticipations, though they were dispelled by subsequent experience. I think we ought now to perceive that the annexation of the warrant of civil authority to the religious embassy of the Irish Church, discredits in lieu of recommending it in the view of the Irish people. I do not mean that we are to put down the Establishment for the sake of a more effective propagandism. We must not for a moment forget that civil justice, an adaptation of the state of things in Ireland to the essential principles of political right, is that one broad and more than sufficient justification of the measure, in which all its advocates agree. But, over and above this, they may also agree in reflecting with satisfaction that the time is about to come when in Ireland, in lieu of a system which insults the religion of the majority and makes that of the minority powerless, creeds will compete upon the level, and will thrive according to their merits. Nor will they be offended with one another when, in the anticipation of such a state of things, each man who has faith in freedom, faith in justice, faith in truth, anticipates a harvest of benefit for his own.