Scarcely had my work issued from the press when I became aware that there was no party, no section of a party, no individual person probably in the House of Commons, who was prepared to act upon it. I found myself the last man on the sinking ship. Exclusive support to the established religion of the country, with a limited and local exception for Scotland under the Treaty of Union with that country, had been up to that time the actual rule of our policy; the instances to the contrary being of equivocal construction, and of infinitesimal amount. But the attempt to give this rule a vitality other than that of sufferance was an anachronism in time and in place. When I bid it live, it was just about to die. It was really a quickened and not a deadened conscience in the country, which insisted on enlarging the circle of State support, even while it tended to restrain the range of political interference in religion. The condition of our poor, of our criminals, of our military and naval services, and the backward state of popular education, forced on us a group of questions, before the moral pressure of which the old rules properly gave way. At and about the same period, new attempts to obtain grants of public money for the building of churches in England and Scotland, I am thankful to say, failed. The powerful Government of 1843 also failed to carry a measure of Factory Education, because of the preference it was thought to give to the Established Church. I believe the very first opinion I ever was called upon to give in Cabinet was an opinion in favour of the withdrawal of that measure. In this state of facts and feelings, notwithstanding the strength of anti-Roman opinion, it was impossible that Ireland should not assert her share, and that a large one, to consideration in these critical matters. The forces, which were now at work, brought speedily to the front and to the top that question of Maynooth College, which I had always (rightly or wrongly) treated as a testing question for the foundations of the Irish Established Church; as, in point of principle, the _Articulus stantis aut cadentis Ecclesiæ_.