The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1848-08-15 00:00:00

LORD JOHN AND THE MISR CMIRCH.

" What is truth ?" Is it the doctrine at the Protestant,
the Catholic, the Apostolic Church of Irelands Or is, it
that of Popery ? Or is there any truth at all ? Can Lord
John, can Sir George Grey answer this question ? If we
are to gather their answer from their speeches during the
debate on the state of Ireland, it will be something to
this effect—" What is truth, Mr. Bull, will, in every
country, depend very much upon what the majority of
the people choose to consider truth. We are willing to
believe that the doctrine of the Established Church is
truth, and we shall at any time be happy to find it so.
But since, unfortunately it does so happen, that in Ire-
land the great mass of the population has been taught to
look upon the doctrine of the Church as a lie, and upon
the Church herself as a nuisance, and since they have a
belief of their own, we incline to think that in Ireland
Popery is truth, at least to a very great extent."
And is this, we most humbly inquire, says the John
Bull, the notion which Ministers of the Crown, profess-
ing to be Christians, professing to believe in the revela-
tion of the God of truth. ought to have of the truth thus
divinely revealed ? We shall be answered, " Yes," and
be told as bigots, that the question is not one of divinity,
but of policy ; and that the noble lord and the right lion.
baronet speak, not as Christians but as statesmen, when
they intimate their belief that the Church of Ireland is a
serious grievance to the Roman Catholics, or, to use the
Premier's own pointless circumlocution, that " the en-
dowment of the Clergy of the minority of the people,
chile there is no endowment of the Clergy of the majori-
ty, is a just subject of complaint with the people of Ire
land."
Receiving this insidious statement—insidious as coming
from the first adviser of the Sovereign, who, by the solemn
obligation of an oath, is bound to uphold the church of the
minority, and whose " reconciliation" to the church of the
majority involves the forfeiture of the crown—we might
ask Lord John Russell if he is aware that the clergy of the
majority are a body of men intruded into the kingdom for
the express purpose of alienating the ignorant multitude
from the faith as well as the institutions of the country ;
that the existence of these politico-religious agitators was
the curse of Ireland before the Act of Union ; that, fur-
ther, in the Act of Union the maintenance of what he is
pleased to call the clergy of the minority is specifically
guaranteed by a solemn national compact ; and, lastly, that
when the Roman Catholics of the empire sought admit-
tance to an equality, not of civil rights only, but of politic 1
power, with their Protestant fellow-subjects, the question
as to the maintenance of the Irish church was expressly
raised, being one of the greatest impediments to the con-
cession sought for ; and that thereupon the Roman Catho-
lics, priests and laity, solemnly declared that they had no
wish to interfere with the maintenance of the Protestant
church, or to procure an endowment for their own—a de-
claration embodied in the oath, which Roman Catholics,
on their admission to the legislature, take, as a supposed
guarantee for the security of the Protestant establishment ?
All this we might ask—and it is sufficiently humiliating
that the First Minister of the Crown should lay himself
open to such questions—but we forbear. We have another,
and a more stringent question to ask of the noble lord.
Does his Lordship know what the meaning of a Church
is ? Has he capacity—we beg his pardon for the necessary
plainness of our interrogatory—to comprehend that the
Church is the living representative and teacher of God's
eternal verity ? that an Established Church is that
living representative and teacher, acknowledged by the
State in all the high authority which a Divine Commission
confers, and set to work to instruc; the people in those
principles of religion and morality which, as they alone
can make them acceptable in the eyes of their Maker, can
alone render them good and loyal citizens ? If Lord John
Russell can understand this, then let him for a moment
face this great element of national life, a national faith
founded upon everlasting truth, and let him ask himself
whether the hesitation to maintain the established Church,
and the suggestion to endow a Clergy inculcating deadly
error in opposition to that Church, is not more suitable
on the lips of a renegade to his country's faith, and an
enemy to his country's weal, than on the lips of him who,
as the chief councillor of our beloved Sovereign, ought to
be the " defender " of that faith, and the guardian of that
weal ?
Has Lord John Russell eyes ? If he has, let him look
abroad. Let him compare the condition of the country
which he so haughtily misrules, which is so deeply hum•
bled by the high position he holds in her, with the condi-
tion of other countries where Popery is the endowed
religion ,of the State—or, if he will, of countries where
every religion is endowed. Or if his statesmanlike vision
does not carry far enough to enable him to institute this
comparison, let him look at home, and compare the con-
dition of Ireland with that of England—Or that of the
Priest-ridden Popish population of Ireland with the Pro-
testant population of that same country. And if Lord
John Russell cannot, after all this, see cause to uphold
the Irish Church Establishment—and not only to uphold
it, but to strengthen its hands, until the religion which
it teaches shall have reached the minds and hearts of the
majority of the Irish people, all we can say is, that his
intellectual capacity is more hopeless than we are at pre-
sent willing to believe.

SKETCHES IN PARIS DURING THE LATE -
INSURRECTION.

(From Blackwood's Magazine.)
A NIGHT SCENE.

See here ! the bands of united men assembling by
night, and marching silently through the sleeping streets;
then shouting and tossing up their arms in defiance; then
the rising barricades, all bristling with bayonets • then
the national guards and troops pouring through the
streets; the smoke of the Ming; the mass of uniforms
mounting the barricades ; the tottering falling men ; the
confusion ; the bodies strewn hither and thither, of
wounded and dead ; the struggle, hand to hand, upon the
barricades ; of the blouse with the uniform of the national
guard,—fury and hatred between fellow-countrymen in
each face ; the cavalry dashing down the boulevards ; the
cannon rapidly dragged along ; the tottering houses bat-
tered down ; and then the biers slowly borne upon sad
men's shoulders, supporting the dying or the dead; the
carts filled with corpses ; the wounded, upon straw littered
down on the pavement, attended by the doctor in his
common black attire, contrasting with the pure white cap
and pinners of the neurs de charite : the uniforms, now
smeared! with blood and blackened by smoke, mingling
with the long dark dress and falling white collar of the
administering priest. See ! now again, in the midst of
the carnage and uproar and smoke, the young soldier of
the day, the Garde Mobile, borne on the shoulders of bis
comrades, and waving in his hand the banner which he
has wrested with valour from the hands of the insurgents
on the barricade; and women, even in the midst of the
terror and dismay, fling down flowers from the windows
upon the heads of these young defenders of their country
—the perfume of the flower mingling with the scent of
stifling powder-smoke and the rank taint of blood.