The United Churches of England and Ireland, in Ireland [pp. 200-212]

The United Czhurches in Ireland.
before the union, of i i i years. It
was not found possible, so early as
the time of the two first Stuarts and
Elizabeth, to wholly exclude Catho lics, or, as they were then called,
"recusants," from membership in
either house in Ireland; and accord ingly we find them a formidable mi nority in those rarely occurring as semblies, such as the Irish parlia ments held in the iith and 25th of
Elizabeth, the ith James I., the
I4th Charles I., and the I12th of
Charles II. In the second James's
short-lived parliament of one session,
hastily adjourned to allow his lords
and gentlemen to follow their master
to the banks of the "ill-fated river,"
they were a majority; but with that
evanescent exception, the statutes of
Ireland are quite as exclusively Protestant authority on,all church matters as those of England previous to
the union of the legislatures and the
churches, and subsequently down to
i829.
The history of Protestantism in Ireland, from first to last, is a political
history. Its best record is to be found
in the parliamentary journals as well
in the reign of Henry VIII. as of
George III. And though we do
not propose to dwell, in the present
paper, in anything like detail on the
annals of that establishment previous to the present century, we
must condense into a short space
the main facts of its first appearance
on the scene, and its early parliamentary nurture and education, to
account for the facility with which it
ceased to be, even in pretence, a national church at the time of the legislative union. Political in its origin, its organization, and its government, from the first hour of its existence, it had neither will, nor wish,
nor ability, if it had either, to resist
the designs of the state, which included its incorporation into the im
perial system. As the lay represen tation of Ireland was recast, as the
seal and the standard were changed,
so the institution started by statute
and royal orders in council in the
sixteenth century came naturally to
have its individuality extinguished.
by other statutes and orders in coun cil in the nineteenth. If this so called "Church of Ireland" had real ly believed itself to be what its cham pions had so often asserted, the true
and ancient national church of the
kingdom, it would at all events have
made some show of patriotic resis tance before making its surrender.
Not only, however, was it not real ly national in its origin, but it was
then, and always, an eminently anti popular institution. There was not,
as in other countries during the re formation, even the pretext of what
is called a popular " movement
against Rome." No Luther had
arisen among the Celtic or the Anglo-Irish Catholics in that age of perturbation. The ancient faith was
received as implicitly by the burgesses of Dublin as by the clansmen of
Connaught, and the spiritual supremacy of the pope seemed a doctrine
as impossible of contradiction to the
descendants of Strongbow as to the
ch'ildren of Milesius. No internal
revolt against Roman discipline or
Roman doctrine had shown itself
within the western island. There
was no spiritual insurrection attempted from within to justify the
resort to external intervention. The
annalists of Donegal, who are
commonly called "The Four Masters," and who were old enough to
remember the first mention of Protestantism in their own province, thus
unconsciously express the amazement of the educated Irish mind of
those days at the new doctors and
doctrines:
"A.D. i537. A heresy and a new error
202