The Sun.
London, England, 1868-04-07 00:00:00

THE SUN, LONDON, TUESDAY EVENING, APRIL 7, 1868

the strife of race against race, the struggle of
the dispossessed nation with the foreign in-
vader. (Hear, hear). But distinction of race
has now become merged in, and virtually iden-
tical with, diversity of creed, and Protestant
ascendancy has become the actual living re-
presentative of English usurpation and injus-
tice. (Hear, hear, and cheers). To the effort
to force Protestantism on the reluctant people
of Ireland we are mainly to attribute the
cruelty and confiscations of the Tudor, the
massacres of the Stuart, and the fanatical
atrocities of Cromwell. To the Church Estab-
lishment we owe the penal code, the most atro-
cious laws that ever degraded or oppressed a
people or disgraced its rulers; that code which
set father against child and child against
father, which destroyed the most sacred ties of ,
nature, which prohibited Catholic worship in
a Catholic country, which denied the very ele-
ments of education to a Catholic, which was
devised to degrade the Catholic Irishman into
a savage and barbarian on his native soil (en-
thusiastic cheers). To the Church Establish-
ment we owe the fact that, in the year of
grace, 1868, in this Catholic country, the State
refuses a religious education, based upon the
faith of his fathers, to the Catholic child
(renewed cheers). To the Church Establish-
ment we owe in no slight degree the dogged
perseverance in the odious laws of land tenure,
which are sending the Irish peasantry in
hopeless exile from our shores (loud cheers).
Those laws are maintained, in order that terri-
torial domination and religious ascendancy
may afford each other mutual countenance and
support (renewed cheering). No candid man
possessed of a knowledge of the past and
capable of appreciating the present can fail to
admit that the Church Establishment in Ire-
land is a grievance and injustice—an intoler-
able grievance and injustice—a grievance
which has justly excited the scorn of the civi-
lised nations of the world. But the time has
come when the Catholic people of Ireland will,
by a united and vigorous effort, shake off for
ever this incubus which has so long brooded
upon our country, paralysing its energy and
crushing its strength—when, witli a giant's
might, we shall burst our fetters and terminate
for once and all this ignominious bondage.
(Prolonged cheering.) But, in achieving for
ourselves this religious emancipation, we must
take care that we do not imperil the free action
of our national church, or sacrifice the inde-
pendence of our own national clergy. (Loud
cheers.) Our bishops have announced their
determination to accept no State endowment
for the Catholic clergy—we shall support them
in that resolution. (Renewed cheers.) They
have shared all the vicissitudes of our country.
In her adversity they are the first and most
willing to suffer, in her prosperity they are the
most sincere and the least selfish in their joy.
(Renewed cheers.) But apart from our regard
and reverence for the opinion of the bishops,
let us see what reason we can have for this
new experiment of adopting State endowments
for our National Church. Are we encouraged
to it by the example of the other Churches
which we have before us ? Look at the
Church of England, united with the State,
, almost sharing the monarch's crown, endowed
with princely income, that Church has suffered
the English people to slip from her sway.
(Cheers.) Need I speak of the Irish Estab-
lished Church, which, though unjustly and
extravagantly favoured by the State, and pos-
sessed of regal revenues,
has ever pined and
languished, as has been well said, " like a
sickly exotic in a costly conservatory," until
it is now about to perish not so much by the
attack of its opponents as by its own inherent
worthlessness and weakness ? The example
of these Churches does not then encourage
us to expose our beloved Church to the baneful
and unhealthy influence of State favour and
endowment. (Cheers.) But do we require
any assistance from the State for the mainte-
nance of our clergy and the temporalities of
our Church ? (No, no.) Certainly not; and
the truth of that answer is made manifest by
the past history and the present condition of
Irish Catholicity.