The Express.
London, England, 1851-05-17 00:00:00

To CORRESPONDENTi.

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LONDON, SATURDAY, MAY 17.

ANYTHING new, rational, and gentlemanly, in the
shape of oratory. on the Ecclesiastical Titles 11111,
cannot Is otherwise than welcome. We have therefore
read Mt. WHITE-snit with pleasure, much as we are
averse to the extreme towards which he tends. His
avail draws the veil from over the mysteries of
Irish administration, in order to bring down upon
them resentment and blame, and to represent Lord
CI-11(L] ISA as the gnat culpable. To an impartial,,
eye, Immever, Mr. Witeresifie merely reveals the
almost comical embarrassment* that beset every Irish!
viceroy.
We have written fur the maintenance of that dig-
nitary and his other. seeing that the Irish were of-
fenall at the iv al of their last symbol of local
empire. Ind )et we can find many reasons, for
desiring the abrogation of the Irish court, in the pro-
gn of the present debate. The tremendous stress'
laid upon title, dignity, and precedence in Ireland,
maintained us they are, by the existence of a court,
has leen • great cause of the Roman catholic% risk-
bet their compact, and their acknowledged privileges
in un effort to plate themselves in England, as in
Leland, on a !sooting not merely of parity, but
of superiority to protestant prelates. Thu whole fight
has hien fi,r the hie of your eminence and your Unice.
lord ClAiirstaiv gave these epithets as a compli-
ment to prelates, who really showed themselves
grateful for the efforts of the great liberal party in
the tmwire to raise Roman catholicism from the
inferiiw position to which it had fallen. But what
Dr. M a eta t% had won from the benevolence
of the English government and QUEEN.
tN %as dot • d to owe merely to the
1'401%. And what would have been the next move
of these pretenders to apostolical succession to esta-
blish tindul and territonul dignity upon the Bible,
Maven only knows; had not the unpudence of the
assumpt roused the most patient and pro-catholic
of English adt ll ill istrations to nsistanee.
(If the two schools, which will always exist in
every Roman catholic priesthood, the national and
the ultra-utnntanc sehOol, Mr. WIIITEsIDE depicts the
latter us the only dangerous one. The national
portion of the Irish Roman catholic ecclesiastics
he represents as favourable to education, and to
harmony with the lay spirit of the age: mid he at-
tributes, with some reason, the commencement and

Tit ohms. of the present religious quarrel to the emis-
lanes of limor. But the t.sol, is. that the national
school of Irish prelates and priestluxxl consists of
those 1., whom catholic Emancipation was grunted;
to them rank was imparted, dignity allowed; and,
considering the quantity of concession and soft sol-
der spent upon them, it is not to be won-
dered at if they are personally amenable. But,
why should their snecessors be so? Political gra-
Wide, we know, seldom outlives a generation. As
things go, we do not see how it is to be expected
that the national Roman catholic clergy of Ireland
are to he henceforth re favourable to the English
government and connexion than the clergy sent
direct from Rome.
As to Rome. or as to the Pore., his Holiness is
nothing else than a splendid cat's-paw iu the hands
of Austria to-day. of Frame to-morrow. And, con-
sidering the miserable political state of dependence
and ithintilvornee in which the Port: is and must re-
main, we do not see why Lord Joux Hiss-ELL might
not have treat influence with him and over him.
We arc quite confident, that the power of an English
minister. craftily and sagaciously applied, would
squeeze more out of the Purr., than all the soft
Golder of the Earl of CLAIIENIXitt could coax out of
a score of Irish prelates, be they ever so national.
The turn of European politics huts, indeed, for the
moment. made the Pore a puppet in the hands of
Austria. And SeitwarczExnEin; it was, not Plus,
w Ito sent us WIsESIAN, just to give us something to
do. and keep our heads from wool-gathering about
Hungary. But the Pore need not always be Austrian.
Lord P.itmEnstox has but to abandon constitution-
alism and to become a great stickler for the authority
of Jesuits and gaolers, and he will forthwith become as
gnat ti favourite at Rome as Lord SitnEwswiti.
And, however the Irish and English Roman catholic
laity and clergy consent to give up the independence
of tlnir church to Rome, as they arc fast doing. the
English minister will profit by it ; seeing he can inti-
midate and bamboozle an imbecile Ponta as well us
an Austrian can.
In another column will be found a remarkable
document, being a despatch or complaint of the
PorE's government to Austria. The papal ministers
say. they are in the hands of the French army and
generals, who seriously interfere with them. They
say. moreover, that a revolution is possible in France
on the renewal of the power of the PREsIDENT, and
it mat so happen that Rome and Paris at once full
into time hands of a red republican army. As for the
Romans, say the Pores ministers, they are noto-
riously ,orrapt awl imbued.. (what a character of the
subjects of one's own rearing and instructing), and
thereto' e Rome has really no hope for independence
and supremacy save in the bayonets of the Austrian
soldiery. So mean and scroundrelly a document,
maligning both French and Romans, and prostrating
itself before a military and a Croat government. is
certainly worthy of that model Rome, which Irish
orator.. adore.
Whilst. therefore, as public writers and lovers of
national independence and freedom, we vastly prefer•
a national clergy of the Roman catholic'', as of every
persuasion, still we cannot but be of the opinion that
the Roman catholics, by divesting themselves of a
national church, and placing their clergy in depend-I
eras: on a foreign potentate—called the Port:—
we cannot but think that by so doing. instead of
eventing. as they seek, from the control or influence of
an English government, they, on the contrary make
away their rights to a Pontiff, who is necessarily at the
mercy of the great temporal power of England, or of
other countries, and who, being at once the most igno-
rant and the most helpless of the class of princes,
is the very essence of subserviency and servile
motives. In past centuries, papal supremacy
may have been a protection against feudal violence
and brute force. In these times, which are and which
arise, the papal power, far from protecting,
can but mislead, weaken, and betray any thing,
creed, nation, or class, that trusts to it.
We juin, therefore, in some of Mr. WHITESIDE'S dis-
likes, but in none of his fears.

Iv nothing that has recently fallen from Lord
lotus RUSSELL will liberal opinion more heartily
concur, than in the objection he so forcibly took the

other day, at the snidsumartruseg of that excelkut
association, the British aistiForeignSchool Society,to
the constitution of the National Society, viz., that ib
" terms of union " are such as to limit the very
comprehensive title it has assumed, and to exclude a
very large proportion of the children of England and
Wales from its schools.
The objectionable parts of those terms consist, of
course, in the exclusive religious insfruction, I
which is obligatory on all children in national
schools ; in the compulsion they are under of
attending divine service in the church of England;
in the necessity for the teachers being members of the
establishment; and in the powers over the schools
conferred on the parochial clergy. These four defects
in the constitution of the society have from the first
operated not only to its disadvantage, but to that of
the progress of education, and have deprived the so-
, eiety of all just claim to that nati"nal character it
has so gratuitously and rather insolently assumed.
But to these the original drawbacks, other and
more serious defects have been recently added in the
, pretensions which it has been made to advance for'
the complete predominance of the priestly element
in the management of parochial schools, and for the
recognition of episcopal jurisdiction as the sole ap-
pellate resource in cases of all differences therein—
be they religious or secular. In the original consti-
tution of the society, and even in its existing " terms
of union," there arc no such pretensions as these. On
the contrary, provision still exists in those " terms "
for some exercise of lay authority in the manage-
ment ; and the appeal to the bishop is therein strictly
reserved for points connected with religious instruc-
tion. In the course pursued of late years by the
Committee of the National Society towards the. Co-
mmittee of Privy Council there has, therefore, been a
complete disregard of the society's own fundamental
rules; and the efforts now making by Mr. GIRDLE-
sToNE and his friends to induce the society to accept
the " management clauses" of the Privy Council are,
consequently, endeavours on their part to restore
the society to its original position, which, at all
events, was one of much greater usefulness, because
one of far less restriction, than its present attempt
to reduce all our parochial schools to complete de-
pendence on the parochial clergy and the bishops:
and, through them, to claim for the church and the
clergy a monopoly of the education of the poor.
The origin and the object of the " management
clauses" (about which so much has been said and so
little understood) are plain and simple. They are
meant to preserve the school-houses, no matter of
Iwhat religious denomination, to which pecuniary as-
sistance has been grunted by the state to the pur-
poses of their foundation, to save them from that
misappropriation and those abuses to which older
schools of old foundation have been subjected, to per-
petuate the legal descent of the freehold in self-acting
responsible persons; to place them under the guard-
ianship of local management; and to lay down defi•
site principles whereon both the civil and ecclesias-
tical authorities shall, in their respective and
easily distinguishable spheres, act. They aim,
lin short, at the permanency of the trust
and the efficiency of the management. They
claim no right of interference fur the State; they
linvolve 110 principle at variance with the Society's
1" terms of union ;" they do not form on church
schools any rules, ngulations, or conditions from
Iwhich other schools are free. They provide for the
,just authority of the clergy and for the legitimate
influence of the laity ; they place full power over re-
ligious and moral teaching in the Bishop of the
diocese ; in establishing an appellate jurisdiction on
other or secular matters, they give the ecclesiastical
authority a proper place therein; and in compliance
I with the foolish prejudices of the church, they
strictly exclude, by a test, dissenters from all share
in the. management.
%Vied more could " management clauses" do for
the church ? Nothing ; hut surrender the complete
control of parochial schools, assisted be the state, to
the spiritual power. And this it is which the Na-
tional Society has, with well-afticted humility, and
in the name of that religious liberty on which its
exclusive principles so flagrantly impinge. required
should be done; this is what Mr. DENisos and his
party claim us the indefeasible right of the church of
England. And this is exactly what the Privy
Council have refused alike to all sects, whether este-
tablishtsl, Romanist, or dissenting ; this it is that
Mr. ChItI)LF..TONE and his friends on the 4th of
June next will seek to disassociate the society from.
At all times so monstrous a pretension as this on
the part of the spaatuai pow,. would Lwisslzo to to
met with the most determined resistance. But at

present, when it is advanced and put forth as the
practical working of what arc called "church prin.
ciplcs ;" when it is handled by the tractarian leaders;
when it is made as evidence that there is in the esta-
blishment a priesthood, and that the education of the
poor is one of the exclusive duties of that sacerdotal
body ; when the share of the laity is reduced by it
to the burthen of furnishing these priestly educators
with the pecuniary means for schools wherein they
may teach and propagate their dangerous figments,
uncontrolled either by the state or the laity;
when, in the course of our ecclesiastical squab-
bles, such principles as these are at stake
in this pretension of the spiritual power, as advanced
by the committee of the National Society, to have
the sole control of parochial schools aided by the
state, the question that now agitates that society and
its cliff:mice with the Privy Council rise quite to
national importance.
Abandon, we hear it said, a society which acts
thus, which propounds such principles, which puts
forth such pretensions; cease to subscribe to its
funds; give your money to other and better institu-
tions. Under sonic circumstances this would be the
rational course to pursue, but in the existing state
of the whole ecclesiastical question this course of treat-
ment is rather more plausible than practical. For the -Va-
tiosot soeirty, however much we may dissent from its
" terms of union," is nevertheless and notwithstanding
a gnat and powerful corporation ; it is an association
which, if we would, we cannot starve to death. For
with the QuEEN at its head. with the episcopacy for
its patrons, with the parochial clergy. throughout the
country for its agents, and with a triennial QrEEN's
letter to aid its funds, the National Society is as yet
impregnable to assaults aiming at its overthrow.
And as we cannot accomplish that, it is worth at
least one great and united struggle by all its dissen•
tients to try to turn an instrument which must
remain powerful to a better sort of work than that
it is now engaged in ; for, who knows that out of
success a complete reformation and reconstruction of
its principles may not flow. •
At all events, the motive to make the effort is
strong; for just as the great Prapagathat if Christian
Kmacletlyr Seen ty has gradually become, in the
bands of Mr. ERNEAT ifItWKIN? a nest of high
churchmen, in which is reared a brood of bishops to
poison, with their ecclesiastical views, the whole
I globe; so is the National Society, in the hands of
Mr. G. A. Dexisos and his clique, likelv to corrupt
the minds of the youth of England by indoctrinating
them with all the dangerous notions they themselves
are enamoured of, about the church, the priesthood,
and ecclesiastical authority.
Sad and miserable enough is it to see all parties in
*the church refusing communion and co-operation with
dissenters and other religious bodies. But deplorable
as this is, and unaccountable as in this respect has
; been the conduct of the low church party, who have
! not only rejected their natural religious but also their
political allies viz., the liberal party : the
1 successful persistence of the National Society,
with which is associated the reputation of
,1 the church, in its present career, involves conse-
quences even more serious. For it is by its own
means that tractarianism and sacerdotalism are now
secretly working in our parochial schools. And with
this going on before our eyes, it is more than apathy,
it is stupidity, not to make at least one effort to
rescue the poor from the hands of such people.
That effort will be made on the 4th of lune next ;
and well it merits the support of all liberals.

AGRICULTURAL PROSPECTS IN PERTIISIIIRE.—We
have at length to report a highly favourable change in the
weather, which commenced on Thursday last with some
genial and heavy showers. Following the long•retarded
vegetation, the start which all nature took was in•tanta-
neous ; the plane and beech arc now in full leaf, and the
ash and oak nearly bunting. Wheat, which had begun to
show a yellow leaf; has quite recovered, and is a splendid
crop ; but the oat braird has suffered a little, and in some
instances has been mown. The early potatoes arepeeping
above ground, and look healthy and regular. The orchards
present the richest promise imaginable, in all sorts ; and if
we have no recurrence of the late sharp night frosts the
crops must be immense.