not of man, aimed at persecuting men out of one religion, but not at persecuting them into another. I will not be so rash as to enter on the field-- "Per quem magnus equos Auruncæ flexit alumnus." But the time of awakening had come. The Irish Church had grown conscious that she had a Gospel to declare. Even with my present opinions I might feel a scruple as to the measures now proposed, but for the resistless and accumulated proof of impotence afforded by the experience of my life-time, and due, I believe, to a radically false position. For the Irish Church has, since the tithe war of 1830-2 came to an end, had not only fair play--that is such fair play as in Ireland the Establishment allows to the Church--but fair play and something more. She has enjoyed an opportunity, extending over a generation of men, with circumstances of favour such as can hardly be expected to recur. What has been her case? She has had ample endowments; perfect security; an almost unbroken freedom from the internal controversies which have chastened (though, in chastening, I believe improved) the Church of England. The knowledge of the Irish language has been extensively-attained by her clergy.[10] She has had all the moral support that could be given her by the people of this country; for it was the people, and not a mere party, who, in 1835-8, repudiated and repelled the Appropriation Clause. Her rival, the Church of Rome, has seen its people borne down to the ground by famine; and then thinned from year to year, in hundreds of thousands, by the resistless force of emigration. And, last and most of all, in the midst of that awful visitation of 1847-8, her Protestant Clergy came to the Roman Catholic people clad in the garb of angels of light; for, besides their own bounty (most liberal, I believe, in proportion to their means), they became the grand almoners of the British nation. When, after all this, we arrive at a new census of religion in 1861, we find that only the faintest impression has been made upon the relative numbers of the two bodies; an impression much slighter, I apprehend, than would have been due to the comparative immunity of the Established Church from the drain of emigration; and, if so, representing in reality, not a gain, but a virtual loss of some part of the narrow ground which before was occupied by the favoured religion of the State.