Undoubtedly good has resulted from the enactment of this law in 1836, for before that there were scarcely any means open of obtaining help towards religious instruction, whereas certain means are open now, and have been very much used. Yet because some good has resulted in this way, the evil spirit and wretched tendency of the measure must not be overlooked. All the good that has resulted might have been obtained without any of its accompanying evil, if a perfect toleration had been established, the National Church properly endowed, and a sufficient supply of Roman Catholic priests or Presbyterian teachers for the convict population of those persuasions liberally supported by government, as in the gaols in Ireland. In this case, the poor convict, who is not permitted to possess money, would have had the consolations of religion, however imperfect, offered to him in his own way, while the free settler would have had the doors of the national Church opened to him, or the liberty, in case of his dissenting from that, of providing for himself a separate conventicle. Where would have been the hardship of this arrangement? Or why should the _voluntary system_, which is, in the northern hemisphere, so highly extolled by many Irish Romanists and not a few Presbyterians, in the southern, be thought a punishment and degradation? Thus, "not only has equal protection,--for God forbid that we should ever repine at equal protection,--but equal encouragement been given by government to every description of religious faith, and every denomination of professing Christians, in some of the most important dependencies of the British crown."[214] Is not this, it may be asked, the very course which a mild and tolerant _heathen_ government would pursue? And is the same policy, which would probably be followed by heathen rulers, either right or expedient in rulers professing themselves to be Christians? [214] Bishop of Exeter's Charge in 1837.