"Therefore we wish to see the Establishment in Ireland upheld; not for the sake of the Protestants, but of the people at large, that the ministers may be enabled to use the influences of their station, of kindly offices and neighbourhood, of the various occasions which the daily intercourse and habits of social life present; aye, and I do not hesitate to add of persuasion itself, applied with a zeal tempered by knowledge and discretion, in the propagation of that which is true, and which, being true, is good as well for those who as yet have it not, as well for those who have it. It is the proposition of the noble Lord which is really open to the charge of bigotry, intolerance, and arbitrary selection; because, disavowing the maintenance and extension of truth, he continues by way of personal privilege to the Protestants the legal recognition of their Church, which he refuses to the Church of the Roman Catholic." The negative part of this passage I adopt, except the censure it implies upon Earl Russell and his friends; who, whether their actual propositions were defensible or not, had the "root of the matter" in their hearts, and were far ahead of me in their political forethought, and in their desire to hold up at least the banner of a generous and a hopeful policy towards Ireland. In this manner I prove that, while I was bound by the propositions of my work, I was not singly but doubly bound. I was bound to defend the Irish Church, as long as it could be defended on the ground of its truth. But when the day arrived on which that ground was definitively abandoned, on which a policy was to be adopted by the Imperial Parliament such as to destroy this plea for the Irish Establishment, I was equally bound in such case to adopt no other: I had shown that justice would fail to warrant the mere support of the Church of the minority; I was held, therefore, not to construct out of rags and tatters, shreds and patches, a new and different case for maintaining it on the ground of favour, or, as it is termed, justice, to Protestants; and, if I had done anything of this kind, I should not have escaped the responsibility of inconsistency, but should simply have added a second and (as I think) a less excusable inconsistency to the first. The day for the adoption of such a policy as I have described was not far distant.