The Sun.
London, England, 1834-08-26 00:00:00

benefit which it was his object that it should accom-
plish.—Morning Herald.
The Ministerial or O'Connell party in Ireland are
attempting to get up two distinct movements in coun •
teraction of the late proceedings of the Protestants and
Conservatives of that country. One of these move-
ments is under the immediate inspection and control
of the great agitator himself. It is the Catholic move-
ment, by means of which the established system of re-
sistance to the law is to be rendered, if possible, more
perfect and universal than it has yet been ; by means
of which active is to be substituted for passive resis-
tance, wherever local circumstances appear to render
the former the more eligible of the two for the pur-
poses of the conspirators. The secondary and subor-
dinate movement is intended to promote the object of
the same party in a different way, that is, by effecting a
division of the Protestant Clergy and detaching a portion
of that suffering body from the Protestant cause. The
clergyman who is to be honoured by the subaltern
commission of leading the apostate churchmen in
their diversion in favour of the O'Connell faction,
and who is to act in all things of course in obedient
subordination to the great chief, is the Dean of Cloyne,
who, wise in his generation, thinks it more politie to
desert than to uphold the rights of a persecuted
Church. The mission which this dignitary of the
Protestant Church of Ireland has undertaken is equally
honourable and hopeful. Its success, we are per-
suaded, will be fully commensurate with its merits.
That the Roman Catholic faction in Ireland, with so
excellent a tactician as Mr. O'Connell at their head,
having fully succeeded in overawing and subjugating
the British Government, should find among the Pro-
testant clergy of Ireland, a few individuals ready to
accept the rich reward which it is now in their power
to present to apostates who will desert the cause of
the Church and the law—is precisely what might
have been expected. The Dean of Cloyne, and the
few clergymen who may join in the declaration which
he is about to bring forward, will no doubt share
among them the highest preferments that become va-
cant in the Protestant Church, so long as there is
a Protestant Church in Ireland ; and when the Pro-
testant Church shall no longer exist in that country,
the same men will be equally entitled and equally
ready to receive such honours and emoluments in the
Irish Church as the Vatican will then have to bestow.
The course they are about to pursue is the safer, if it
be not the more honourable, course. They will acquire
by it a strong claim to the powerful patronage of
Mr. O'Connell, to the powerful patronage of the Bri-
tish Administration, to the powerful patronage of the
See of Rome. In the present posture and aspect of
affairs, these are no slight temptations to apostasy.
Yet, notwithstanding the force of these temptations,
we are persuaded that the Dean of Cloyne will not
find many followers among the Protestant Clergy of
Ireland. The Protestant Clergy of Ireland have
proved by their conduct that they are an honourable
and conscientious body of men, willing rather to suffer
persecution in their own persons and families than
to betray the rights and principles of the church to
which they belong—rights and principles with the
support of which they rightly believe that the dearest
interests of the community are inseparably connected.
A large proportion of this excellent and venerable body
have for two years past been deprived of their whole
income by lawless violence or unprincipled chicane,
carried on under the direct sanction and patronage of
the British Government. In these trying_ circum-
stances they have had the virtue to resist a bribe offered
to them by Ministers, for the purpose of inducing
them to sacrifice the rights and permanent interests of
the Church ; for the. Irish Tithe Bill presented in
truth a bribe to the actual incumbents of Ireland,
which, by favouring that measure, they might probably
have secured. Nor did this measure offer them a bribe
of inconsiderable value. It would have given them, at
least for a time, in lieu of those rights of property
which a lawless faction and a lawless Govern-
ment had rendered unproductive, a definite and
accessible income. But it required on their part
the surrender of rights in which individually they
had no more than a life interest, and which
it was their duty to defend, as the honest trustees of
their successors and of the whole Protestant commu-
nity. It is to the immortal honour of the Irish clergy,
that when thus strongly tempted they never hesitated
for a moment between their interest and their duty.
From them the measure of Church robbery, by
which they were to be personally benefitted, never
received any sanction, although it is probable
that a petition in its favour, signed by any con-
siderable proportion of the Irish Clergy would
have prevented its rejection by the House of
Lords. They preferred to suffer in their own
persons and families rather than give up the just
inheritance of the Church to the enemies of the
Church. They feel how deeply the interests of so-
ciety are concerned in the maintenance of the authority
of the law, and they determined not to yield to a mea-
sure, in favour of which the single argument was, that
the law could not be enforced. They are faithful
Ministers of the altar, and loyal subjects of the
Crown, and they refused to participate in a system of
policy which makes ecclesiastical property its spoil,
and civil authority its sport. Threatened with star-
vation, they have braved the threat. Suffering the
extremity of distress, they have resolved still to endure,
rather than promote a. measure revolting to their sense
of honour, their ideas of probity, and their principles
of religion. Such are the men among whom the Dean
of Cloyne, we are told, is about to hoist the banner of
apostacy, and to seek recruits to the cause of illegal
and sacrilegious plunder. This new ally of Mr.
O'Connell will, we foresee, prove anything rather than
an efficient or successful coadjutor.--Morning Post.
After an examination of the tissue of error and false
reasoning which- the Chancellor wove with such un-
lucky ingenuity out of the partial evidence of the Poor
Law Commissioners, we feel most forcibly the truth of
one remark in his speech ;itis as follows Igno-
rance has no bounds. Unhappily, science has its
limits, and they are not hard to reach ; but ignorance
is endless, unconfined,inexhaustible. Ever new in in-
vention, though all its productions are wretched and
worthless—always surprising you, though mingling
pity and contempt with wonderment ; and never is it
more daring in its inroads upon our credulity—never
is it more strange in the antic feats it performs—
never more curious in the fantastic tricks it plays,
than when its gambols are performed in the persons of
men dressed in a little brief authority, or who would
fain be so attired, and who really are decked habi-
tually in presumption that almost passes belief."
We have never seen a remark so strongly supported
by example as in the speech before us. The speaker
has hit himself off with singular truth. Perhaps the
portrait may be a little strengthened in likeness by
substituting quackery for ignorance, though persons
acquainted with the furniture of Lord Brougham's
mind know that it is like the specimens of an uphol•
sterer's show room—some piece of every set, .but no•
thing in completeness and arrangement—a lumber o
fineries, odds and ends, at once more and less than ne.

cessazy to the fitting of any one mansion of the un-
derstanding. What a heap of confusion and contra-
diction, over-strained propositions, and conclusions
against all experience, is this speech ! At the outset,
we are told of evils entailed upon the country by bad
laws worse executed, the lawgiver having been out-
stripped in his pernicious course by the administra-
tors ; and yet within half-a-dozen pages comes this
naive self-contradiction ;—‘, My Lords, it has been
usual to blame the magistrates of the country for the
maladministration of these laws. lam not one of those
who ever have been able to perceive the justice of this
charge. * * 4 The worst that can be said of those
respectable persons to whom the country is so greatly in-
' debted, and of whose services I should speak more at large
if I had not the honour of addressing an assembly al-
,most wholly composed of magistrates, is, that in bringing
forth by the administration of the Poor Laws, the
grievous mischiefs inherent originally in the system,
they were not before the age they lived in ; that they
were not wiser than all who had gone before them, and all who lived around them, and, indeed, all who
for one or two generations have come after them.
This is the only charge that can 'be justly made
against them." Perhaps so ; but in a preceding page
the Chancellor had asserted that the magistrates were
‘ebreefbefor
oreteh age they lived in ;`' or, at least, that they
1,4,
the Legislature, for he distinctly says that