BISHOP SELWYN AND THE IRISH CHURCH BILL.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume IV, Issue 208, 4 September 1869, Page 2

BISHOP SELWYN AND THE IRISH CHURCH BILL.

In the House of Lords, when discussing the above bill, the Bishop of Lichfield said he was hardly likely to feel a bigoted prejudice for Established Churches, but he had discovered no reason for the disestablishment of the Irish church, forming as it did one integral body with the Church of England. All justice demanded could be that the part of the endowment of the Irish Church, which could be shown to have been taken by violence from the Roman Catholic Church, should be restored to that Church, and that . the rest should be left to the Protestant Church. That the Irish Church was a badge of conquest could be no ground for destroying it; for there was scarcely an institution in the empire which was not a badge of conquest. He saw no greater force in the arguments against the Irish Church that it was the Church of the minority, and that it had failed in its mission ; for mere numbers had never been accounted an essential of .an Established Church, and, as for the asserted failure in the mission of the Church, besides that the Bishop of Tuam bad proved it to have been exaggerated, it was, so far as it was a iact to all, traceable not to the .short comings of the Church but to the political disorder of Ireland. One part of its mission the Irish Church had certainly fulfilled, namely, the maintaining of the principle of religious liberty, and that part of its work no other Church which might be its successor could equally perform. But, besides his objections to the principle of the bill, he thought its details fraught with injustice both to the Irish clergy and bishops, and also still more clearly to the Protestant laity of Ireland. So far from its being a means of conciliating Ireland— which time itself would pacify, if only statesmen would abstain from the agitations of such questions — he rather feared it was but the commencement of war in Ireland and England.