The language of a very zealous and active clergyman of Australia is this:--"Give us clergy and churches, and I will ensure congregations and a vast spread of the gospel in the Church of Christ by means of the Church of England."[210] But, so pitiable is the effect of religious strife, that rather than allow the necessary means to be given for this purpose, many would be content to leave things in their present miserable state; and although, as in the mother country, the majority of the population belong to the Church of England, yet the minority, in all its little sections, unite in grudging every effort that is permitted, every single pound that is spent, by the government in aid of the Church. There is no communion that can pretend to lay claim to the religious instruction of the people; it would be too absurd to propose that the English nation should entrust the religious training of a colony, like that of New South Wales,[211] containing upwards of 70,000 persons belonging to the national Church, into the hands of the Presbyterians, with their 13,153 souls, or into those of the Methodists and other dissenters, with their 5,093 souls, or even to the Romanists, with their 35,690 souls! And accordingly, since it was hopeless to get this important and responsible office exclusively for themselves, all parties really would seem to have conspired together to keep it, at all events, from falling into the possession of that body to which it of right belongs,--the national Church of England and Ireland,--a Church which the Presbyterians do not generally deny to be scriptural, and which the Romanists, by their peculiar hostility, proclaim to be, in the best and oldest meaning of the word, essentially Protestant. Under feelings of this description, the Roman Catholics, and their "Presbyterian brethren," (as they can condescend to call them when it answers their purpose,)[212] have been acting in Australia for some years past; and, aided by the potent force of agitation upon a government which "cared for none of these things," except how it might "please the people," they have been successful. Spurning the very name of toleration, and despairing of exclusive establishments for their own communion, they have succeeded in giving birth to a system of joint-establishment for three communions of Christians, and encouragement and assistance for as many more as the government may see fit to patronise. In 1836, the system which now continues in operation was commenced by Sir R. Bourke, then Governor of New South Wales, who, in proposing this plan, expressed a confident hope, (which has never yet been fulfilled,) that thus people of different persuasions "would be united together in one _bond of peace_." It is pitiable to see a fellow-creature, and him, too, a man in authority, borrowing an expression from a passage of Holy Scripture, (Eph. iv. 3,) while he is at the very time forgetting the duty there enforced. The eye that