The Sun.
London, England, 1868-11-03 00:00:00

C.OiVDON, TUESDAY, NOV. 3, 13E8.

As advocates, for very many years past, of the
abolition of the Irish Church as an Establishment, as
avowed and strenuous advocates of that great reform
years upon years before any comprehensive change
of the kind had been dreamt of in Mr. GLADSTONE'S
philosophy, we are free to confess, at the same
time, that those who uphold the Irish Church, those
who are dead against its disestablishment, and
equally, of course, dead against its disendowment,
may be actuated, while so thinking, by the highest
and most conscientious motives, even though, from
that very fact, they are, according to our
thinking, most mistaken in their judgment.
Observing the extraordinary acrimony with which
the upholders of the Irish Church are
assailed by many of the more zealous followers of
Mr. GLADSTONE, but more especially by Mr. GLAD-
STONE himself, one is reminded of the excessive,
not to say fanatical zeal which has so often More
now been manifested by those who have but
very recently been converted. Heart and soul though
we are against the Irish Church, as we have been, in
fact, from as long as we can remember, we can
nevertheless perfectly well realise to ourselves the
possibility that there may be those who think other-
wise as honestly as we ourselves are impressed with
the necessityfor thelrishChurch's disestablishment and
disendowment. And, indeed, only for what has long
been known as to the zeal of converts, one might
have supposed that the author (in his younger days)
of that book about Church and State, which had the
high honour of being reviewed by MACAULAY in the
Edinburgh, when its writer, W. E GLADSTONE, M.P.,
was just fresh from being a Student of Christ
Church, Oxford, would have been about the very
first to acknowledge the perfect right of any
one still continuing to think in regard to the
Irish Church as he himself thought until so very
recently—the perfect right of any one so continuing
to think about it, to avow the fact of his so thinking,
and his equally perfect right to urge his convictions
upon others with all possible earnestness. But no—
so strenuous, in the fanaticism of their zeal, are the
new converts to the political faith we ourselves have
so long professed in regard to the Irish Church, that
anyone who dares to think, who dares to continue to
think as they themselves (those new converts) did until
yesterday, is a pariah, is a hissing and a derision, is
to be pursued with but one cry, and that—anathema
nzaranatha ! As for ourselves, as among the old be-
lievers in the destructability of the Irish Church, in
the certainty of its disestablishment and disendow-
ment sooner or later, we frankly enough concede,
as we have done all along, to those who think quite
otherwise, a right to express their thoughts as strongly
as we conceive we have a right to express ours, and a
right, if they so please, to enforce their views, far
and wide during this General Election, to the end, if

they can manage it, of sustaining for yet a little while
longer a structure that in the end we have a profound
conviction must crumble into dust. Champions of

the Irish Church there have been ever since the Irish
Church was first established. Champions of it there
will yet be, although their numbers have already been
wonderfully diminished and are still diminishing.
Can thorn be wanting to defend her cause

Lights of the Church or Guardians of the Laws?
That is a question which was asked thus nearly a cen-