The Sun.
London, England, 1844-11-12 00:00:00

Federalism." Its bashfulness is, we suppose,
its great recommendation with Irishmen, whose
excessive diffidence is proverbial, for other-
wise it is impossible to understand why they
should agitate, either for or against it, seeing
that, as yet, it has no substantial, settled
existence, and, in fact, is a mere chimera of Mr. GREY
PORTER'S brain, to be shaped, and moulded, and fully
developed, some day or other—but when, no one
exactly knows. Toss THUMB, as we are assured by
FIELDING, " made the giants first, and then he killed
them ;" but the Irish Anti-Federalists are more in-
genious still, for they—with the Editor of the Nation
at their head—are busily engaged in endeavouring to
kill a giant who is not yet manufactured I We have
no objection, however, to all this extraordinary
hubbub about a non-egistent crotchet. It serves to
divert the mind of Ireland from the more serious
agitation of Repeal, and, so far, is productive
of good. Meanwhile, we await with some
confidence, not unmingled with anxiety, the
announcement of the remedial measures which, it
is presumed, Sir ROBERT PEEL is now actively en-
gaged in concocting for the welfare of the sister
country. If these be such, as, from the Premier's
intimation towards the close of the last session, we
have a right to hope that they will be, we shall hear
little more either of Repeal or Federalism, both of
which will have received their death-blow ; but if
they be not—if they be merely tame, imperfect,
wishy-washy remedies, then we think it far from
unlikely that a combination will be formed among all
parties in Ireland—with the exception, perhaps, of
the Orangemen of the old school—for the purpose of
agitating in a determined, energetic spirit, the
ticklish question of the restoration of the Irish Par-
liament.

The recent defections of many members of the
Church of England ordained ministers, some of
them—to the Church of Rome, are a remarkable in-
dication of the danger that results from postponed
reforms in institutions which are admitted to require
amendment, by those, even, who most strenuously
' resist the adoption of any remedial treatment. Since
the reigns of the last two STUARTS, under whom
the principles of the Anglican Church and the disci-
pline of its clergy were subjects occasionally en-
forced upon public notice, and therefore matter of
salutary discussion, notwithstanding the general
laxity of morals which pervaded the whole aspect of
society, from that period to the present time we
have had a succession of polemical authorities—
Bishops and divines of the Establishment, pious Non-
Conformists, and (more lately) enthusiastic sectarian
teachers, who have all concurred in denouncing the
decay of earnestness, of zeal, of singleness of pur-
pose, of apostolical simplicity and disinterestedness in
our clergy, and the growth of an indecorous and
slovenly administration of the sacraments and cere-
monial of our Established form of worship. Yet the
Establishment has drowsily nodded on, though occa-
sionally disturbed by such shocks as the imprison-
ment of the seven Bishops, or the High Church fac-
tion of SACHEVEREL, or the Anti-Popery cry of
1779, renewed at various subsequent intervals, as in
1793, 1807, and 1828. The last uneasiness she has
experienced, owing to the matured growth and de-
velopment of the Tractarian heresy, does seem to
have at last alarmed her. She apprehends—and
with reason—that the "disturbing force" in this
movement, must be of deeper seat and more formid-
ab:e intensity than that of which she has heretofore
experienced the action ; and she has almost aroused
herself to attempt, in good earnest, the serious in-
vestigation of the causss that have engendered it.
She may find the work too much for her, if she
cannot rally all her energies for its accomplishment.
Of the very children whom she has reared, there are,
it seems, those who denounce her as a nuisance;
who not only abjure, but reject and execrate, in the
face of the world, the first elementary charter of
her rights and authority ; who anathematise Pro-
testantism by name; and deplore, with wailing and
in ashes, the mighty "Reformation" commenced by
HENRY VIII. in 1534, and completed by the recog-
nition and profession of ELIZABETH, at her accession
in 1558. Foremost in the rank of these deserters
are—not the influential laymen (and yet they are not
few), who have leaped her pale and betaken them-
selves to that of Romanism—but priests and deacons,
who have been ordained according to the tenor of her
institutes ; have expounded the Scriptures, according
t) her rule of construction ; and habitually solemnised
Divine worship in her churches, and according to her
ritual. It is hard for her to be repudiated by those
whom she has received into her bosom, and carefully
nourished, and at parting has (in some instances)
generously endowed. The course of their :proceed-
ings is, in truth, marked with the signs of original
duplicity and ulterior falsehood. They set out with
a pretence of effecting a sort of approximation of the
Anglican to the Roman Church, in matters indifferent,
with a view to the ultimate conciliation of the two
great denominations of the Christian world. This
was wisely projected. Any proposition for knitting
and uniting together the hearts and affections and
worship of all classes of Christian men in one great
spiritual unity, is, abstractedly considered, calculated
to enlist the attention—and, if proved, to realise the
support, of an intelligent community. The first
steps, too, openly taken in the same direction, were
well judged. The prevailing laxity of discipline in
the Establishment had been not only insisted upon
and lamented by some of its Bishops, in charges to
their clergy, and in speeches delivered in the House
of Lords; but many Bills had been passed for its
correction, and the extension of the jurisdiction
of the diocesan in the repression of this evil, which
the Legislature had been as often vainly called upon
to pass. The Tractarians cleverly advocated a more
strict adherence to the rubrical instructions contained
in the Book of Common Prayer, in matters that re-
garded the rites of our Church and their administra-
tion. They instanced, at first, one or two ; and after-
wards, from time to time, advocated a similar ob-

servance of others ; but it was not until after the
issue of a century of " tracts," and numberless con-

troversial pieces in answer
.to the various challenges
these had excited, that the amount of their object
was avowed, namely, to enforce conformity with the
whole of the Rubric as incorporated into the au-
thorised " Common Prayer" of 1548, with all its
admixture—by implication—of doctrines—and—ex-
pressly—of ceremonials, including some of those
most strenuously insisted on by the Church of Rome,
and most distinctly renounced by the Reformed
Church of England as superstitious, human, non-

essential, and inconsistent with the purity of its re-
formed doctrine. The controversy waxed "fast and
furious," till at length the impetuosity of the Trac-
tarians accomplished the repeated predictions of their
antagonists. From simple dissentients or non-con-
tents, the latter have become (in the persons of
some of their most eminent leaders) irreconcileable
enemies of the former. They have gone over to the
Church of Rome, renounced the ecclesiastical alle-
giance they had vowed to the Anglican Church, and
following the rule of almost all bigoted proselytes
they bid fair to become the most rancorous persecu-
tors of the fold which they should have guarded, but
ha 4 quitted.

For our own parts, having a sincere respect and
affection for Protestantism, we are very sorry for
what has occurred. But we cannot shut our eyes to
the proof it affords of the variety of mere forms as
defensible outworks or securities for the substantive
doctrines of religion. The moral of the case resolves
itself into the terse apostrophe of Earl GREY to
the Bench of Bishops. We must say 'to the
Intablished Church at large, " Set your house
order." Let those who have the best means
and most efficient authority for such a work, examine
uvigorously into the elements of her constitution, and
the manner of their working; let them remove ex-
crescent bodies, which mar the action of the machine,
and defeat its unity. Let them supply omissions and
deficiencies, whilst they extirpate unseemly redun-
dancies. If the revenues of the Church be indeed (as
her enemies charge) so unequally divided, that the
working parson, or his still harder worked curate, is
in a vast proportion of cases scandalously under-
paid, and subjected to the most sordid evils of
poverty, whilst he is upholding, by his example
and preaching, the great truths he has been

called to teach; let the vastly over-paid Bishops
(the Bishop of LONDON knows we do not point
at Llandaff, or Rochester, or Bristol or Bangor,
or Bristol and Gloucester, or Oxford) _ tribute from
their enormous incomes and the fines Accruing under
their life interest in the sees they hold, funds propor-
tionally large towards the adequate payment of all the