however, had been fairly worked up from the stupor of ages, and had started in a career of improvement, acquiring accelerated speed as it advanced, which it was not possible by penal laws to arrest. By parliament and the press, a flood of light had been poured on the monopolies and abuses that nestled under the wing of the Church, a progeny too monstrous for even such a sanctuary to protect from the indignation of the public.

Meantime, a small leaven of piety was infused into the corrupt mass of Irish Protestantism. The Methodists, Independents, and Baptists, in the midst of odium and opposition, disseminated doctrines among the laity, which at once set them thinking and complaining of the inefficiency and immorality of their own proud and well-paid clergy. But some talented members of that body, in Dublin and elsewhere, discovered and honestly admitted that these doctrines were nothing less than the GOSPEL, of which the National Church had left the people in profound ignorance. The Evangelical clergy were at first very few, but they increased rapidly, chiefly through the energy of one or two accomplished Fellows of Trinity College, who paid particular attention to the theological students, though the professor of divinity was opposed to them; and also through the favour of the late Archbishop Magee. They soon opened free churches in Dublin, where the Gospel was supported on the voluntary principle, and in these, chiefly, the Evangelical faith has continued to flourish. In conjunction with Dissenters, they took up the cause of the Bible Society, of Sunday Schools, and Foreign Missions. They also established what was called the Reformation Society, in which was concentrated the virus of political bigotry, which unhappily tainted the piety of this band of zealous Churchmen. Politics were continually intermingled with their religious operations, and the whole aim of their attacks on the Church of Rome seemed to be, to prevent the passing of the emancipation act, and to keep down the Catholics.

In the crusade called the "New Reformation," fostered by the corrupting largesses of Lord Farnham, and led on by the Rev. W. Pope and Captain Gordon, this object was not even thinly disguised. But though this gallant defender of the faith did not succeed in "saving the constitution" from Daniel O'Connell, he obtained for a season the reward which his heart panted after he was returned by Lord Roden for his rotten borough of Dundalk. Far higher and holier were the aims of his reverend colleague, a man of splendid eloquence and burning zeal, tempered with a bland and genial charity, and guided by a noble independence of mind, and an ardent love of truth. His health broke down in consequence of the excessive labour of his celebrated discussion with Maguire, one speech of which is worth the whole of the ravings of fanaticism, with which Gregg lately polluted the ears of those who had the misfortune to hear him. But the honoured name

of Pope was suffered to fall into oblivion, because his genius was not consecrated to the High Church party. This forced and factitious "reformation" was abandoned as soon as the emancipation bill became the law of the land, as was Peter Dens by Mr. M'Ghee, when the appropriation clause was given up by the Whigs, who had pledged themselves to stand or fall by it.

Irish Protestantism, indeed, has never yet spoken the language of philanthropy and patriotism. It has never proclaimed glad tidings to the natives. It never gave the Gospel to Ireland. It is still the reli

gion of a colony of conquerors, selfish, distrustful, exclusive; nursing factious antipathies, sanctioning the hatred of its votaries towards those whom they have so deeply injured, and frowning as a barrier between a nation and its rights. Of course there are many exceptions to this rule,-lights shining the more brightly for the general gloom of bigotry that surrounds them; but what we say is true of the majority of Protestants in that unhappy land, and more especially of the Established Church, which is the mother of Irish intolerance, so far as it has stained the Protestant name.

A number of the Evangelical clergy in Dublin and its vicinity, anxious to redeem the character of their "Zion," to wipe off the disgrace of her failure as the national instructor, and to diffuse the light of the Gospel in her benighted parishes, instituted the Established Church Home Mission. This measure was devised more for the sake of the Church, than that of the country or the Gospel, its projectors avowing at the outset that it was designed to prevent the progress of Dissent. For a while this mission "ran well." The most popular preachers, rectors, and curates, travelled like apostles, but very unlike modern bishops, in truly primitive style, through the country, holding forth the word of life in town-halls, school-houses, and barns, regardless of canons, consecration, or diocesan boundaries. They preached plainly and practically, and endeavoured to conciliate and win the members of other churches. They toiled not in vain. The laity, high and low, hailed their visits with delight, as a relief from the monotony, dulness, or heathen morality of their parochial ministrations. Their meetings were generally well attended, and not without much profit, especially as they laid aside the surplice, liturgy, and manuscript, and preached and prayed extempore, as simple Dissenters.

Thus, for a time, the word of the Lord "had free course and was glorified." But the bishops, and most of the higher clergy, looked on its revolutionary progress with disapprobation and serious apprehension, and only waited for a favourable moment to bind its managers in their ecclesiastical fetters, or rather to catch them in their net. The latter adopted every precaution, and made every possible concession to appease the bench. They offered to put its operations under their control, and obstained from "intruding" into those parishes where

there was a "reclaiming" rector, (and the most useless reclaimed,) though the people were longing to receive them, and though these parishes were far the most numerous as well as the most destitute. All would not do: souls, it is true, were saved; but then the canous were violated, and the bishops' authority was endangered. It is true, the preachers were ordained, and licensed by the church, still they transgressed the boundaries of their respective parishes to do a needful work of mercy, and this, it seems, is one of the weightiest transgressions in the eye of an ecclesiastical judge, for the Rev. Mr. Nixon, a Dublin clergyman, was proceeded against in the court at Armagh, for preaching the Gospel in the town of Ardee, and being found guilty of the charge, he was suspended, and condemned to pay the costs of the suit, which amounted to nearly £1200! This sentence crushed the mission, and the crozier triumphed over the cross!

Great anxiety was now felt to see how the Evangelical party would act. They had often spoken of the bishops as anti-evangelical and secular, promoted for political purposes by the ministry of the day, and as much given to luxury and nepotism. Would they succumb to them now in their attempts to put down the Gospel? They had declared again and again, that they had taken up this mission in obedience to the command of Christ, and that they would obey Him rather than men-that they would never suffer the light of truth to be covered with a canonical bushel, or the Spirit to be quenched by those who should be the first to trim the lamp of life. Some of those who assumed this lofty tone of independence, talked of a secession from the church; and it was even whispered, that five hundred ministers were ready to come out in a body, if their right reverend fathers should persevere in their coercion. But they were not the men to make sacrifices to conscience and liberty. Had they done as they threatened, they would have taken a large body of the people with them, and been well supported. They would have won for themselves a name that would have gone down, with that of the Puritans, to the latest posterity. It was, alas! too much to expect from Churchmen of the aristocratical school! The Puritan clergy had sprung from the people-they were a sort of Congregational Presbyterians, and they had not been trained up in the slavish principle of canonical obedience to a bishop; neither had the sacerdotal spirit so affected their minds, as that they should consider the people made for the ministry, and not the ministry for the people. The Irish Puritans were not faithful in the day of trial, though neither bands nor imprisonment, nor loss of flocks, nor expatriation, awaited them. They passed under the prelatical yoke without an audible murmur,-sighing, no doubt, in secret, for the multitude of souls whom their recreancy left to perish for lack of knowledge!

Some important considerations, may, however, be urged in mitigation of this tame and silent surrender of principle at the bidding of an

unconverted and Puseyite hierarchy. As the voluntary controversy was raging at the time, they naturally shrank from the odious position of a voluntary church. They feared, besides, that an open rupture with the heads of the church would destroy the episcopal cause in Ireland. Pressed on one side by the Romish priests, and on the other by the Ulster Presbyterians, and their fellow dissenters, their pride of party would not suffer them to give a triumph to either. Let us add to these, the love of endowments, so natural to the carnal mind,-the dislike of popular influence, which follows episcopacy as the shadow the substance, and attachment to aristocratical connexions, no where stronger than in Ireland. Moreover, as the mission was established for the defence of the church, much more than for the salvation of the people, the thought could not be endured of its issuing in holy mother's dismemberment. Thus was the mitre put as an extinguisher on the home mission, while consecrated fingers turned Peter's key on the Gospel, and "shut the kingdom of heaven upon men."

No sooner was this done than the mitred heads were put together to devise some plan for the restoration of church discipline, and the advancement of episcopacy. Never dreaming that the "baptised inheritors of the kindom of heaven," as the Puseyites love to call the "children of the church, born unto her in the laver of regeneration,"could want any thing but their mother's ceremonies to make them grow in grace, they thought that new churches and additional curates would satisfy the spiritual wants of the people, crying not for sacraments but for the bread of life. The instrumentality which they had put down was not designed to be a supplement to the ministry of the church, but a substitute for it, in many places where the clergy were too ignorant, or worldly-minded to preach the Gospel. But this pretension was treated by the bishops as insufferably arrogant; and the Evangelical clergy were given to understand, that they must abandon their missionary projects, or give up all hopes of preferment. When the conscience is once violated on a vital point, subsequent concessions in the same direction become easy. It was no difficult matter to persuade the Evangelical party now, that their proceedings tended to dissent and and voluntaryism, and would issue in the subversion of the Catholic Church, meaning thereby the Church of England. They were told that they could stand neither against the Church of Rome nor the sectaries, without the aid of "church principles." This many of them had already powerfully felt. For when they encountered priests and attacked the tenets of Catholicism, their antagonists had only to quote a passage from the Book of Common Prayer, to show that the Scriptural argument bore against that, as forcibly as against them. This was sufficiently mortifying. With the Dissenters they found

they could not

get on at all without bringing in tradition and the authority of the Anti-Nicene Church.

Here, then, there was a dilemma: and how were they to get out of it? Seeing this perplexity, the prelates, archdeacons, and deans, began to speak out their sentiments more fully, and to commend to the "inferior clergy" the Oxford "Popery writ small." Absentee dignitaries, going over from the fashionable watering-places, descanted to their curates on the glories of ancient Christianity, and the disastrous consequences of the Reformation. Meantime their ladies are busy in circulating the Tracts for the Times, speaking awfully of the democratical and neological tendencies of "Ultra-Protestantism." Of course there is not much said yet about Praying for the Dead, Worshipping the Virgin, Celibacy, the Real Presence, and the excellence of the monastic life. Though to be consistent they should embrace all these, and become at once Catholics of the first water, or renounce their "church principles." To this alternative they are driven by the learned and philosophic author of Ancient Christianity-a work which gives a more thorough insight into the condition and mysteries of the primitive church than all our ecclesiastical historians put together, and which should be studied by every man who attempts to guide public opinion, at a time when the schemes of high-church ambition are perplexing senates, agitating nations, and subverting Christianity.

The polemical war against the Church of Rome was waged too long with scriptural weapons, to render the more offensive parts of the Oxford creed bearable yet in Ireland. In that war, " church principles" were trampled on by the Protestant champions. But the hierarchy, who, as a body, cherished most of those principles, did not deem it prudent to interfere, lest they should be taken for Jesuits in disguise. And yet we could name dignitaries who were promoted many years ago for their violent opposition to the Bible Society, and all the proceedings of the Evangelicals. The politic high churchmen, however, knew how to bide their time, and they have succeeded to their hearts' content. A theological revolution, more decided, sudden, and extensive, was never known in Christendom since the days of Mary and Elizabeth, than that which has taken place in Ireland during the last year or two. We are assured that nine out of ten of the clergy in the north and west of Ireland have already imbibed the leading tenets of the new divinity. The most unfledged theologian among them talks glibly of the "Popish additions to, and Protestant subtractions from, the Catholic faith," and of the Irish Establishment steering the middle course between them; as if there were a single principle worth having in the system of the modern church of Rome, which was not found bearing its appropriate fruit, ripe and rank, before the Council of Nice.

The laity were partly prepared for these changes by the vulgar and violent ranting of Mr. Gregg, in the late disgraceful discussion in Dublin, in which he talked of the Church of England as the Catholic Church in these kingdoms, and begged the question of her authority, which, in his