It is well to be accurate in the bestowal of titles, and we give, therefore, the institution whose latest history lies before us the exact definition by which, these sixty years past, it rejoices to be known. Under this designation of its own choice this institution is open to the reflection of being one of the most modern of all the churches pretending to be national; the junior of even our own American Episcopal Church, which is not itself very far stricken in years; the junior, indeed, of all the other churches we can at this moment recall to memory, unless we were to include "the Church of the Latter-Day Saints," whose Mecca stands upon Salt Lake. On the first day of January, in the first year of this century, the ecclesiastical system, establishment, or organization which designates itself as "the United Church of England and Ireland, in Ireland," came, with sound of many trumpets, into the world. On that auspicious day, the legislative union of Ireland and Great Britain was proclaimed; a new national flag, "the Union Jack," was run up from the royal towers of London, Dublin, and Edinburgh; a new royal title was assumed for the coinage of the new realm, and in all great public transactions; a new "great seal" was struck for the sovereign of the newly modelled state; new peers and new commoners were added to the two houses of Parliament, and, to complete the revolution, by the 5th clause of the same act, the matters previously mentioned having been first disposed of, this new church was, on that same day and hour, by the same authority, called into existence. His majesty's proclamation, announced at Paul's Cross in London, at the Cross in Edinburgh, and where the Cross of _le Dame_ street ought to have been, in Dublin, that "the doctrine, worship, discipline, and government of the said United Church shall be and shall remain in full force for ever, as the same are now by law established for the Church of England." {201}