have left Ireland alone. But the deed was done, and many circumstances combined to suggest to the eminent statesman who had discovered the secret of Irish disaffection that here was the proper field for his genius, and that he was peculiarly the person to put his hand to the plough. The Irish Church had long been a scandal to Liberal sentiment, and Disraeli himself had denounced it. The land was the favourite subject of Radical declamation. Land-owning in Ireland showed under its least favourable aspect, and could there be assaulted at best advantage. It was true that the control of Ireland was vital to the safety of Great Britain, and that the Protestants there were the only part of the population whose loyalty could be depended on. Until recent years the Protestant feeling in England and Scotland would have forbidden a revolutionary change avowedly intended to weaken the Protestant settlement; but the extended franchise, either already conceded or made inevitable by Disraeli's Bill, would throw four-fifths of the representation of Ireland into Nationalist hands, and the adhesion of such a phalanx would give the party which could secure it an overwhelming preponderance, while the Protestant prejudices which had served hitherto as a check were wearing away. Sixty years ago the British nation adhered almost unanimously to the traditions of the Reformation. It had grown to its present greatness as a Protestant power. The Pope was still the Man of Sin. Roman doctrine, either pure or modified into Anglicanism, was regarded with suspicion, aversion, or contempt. Conversions were unheard of, and the few surviving hereditary Catholics were unobtrusive and politically ciphers. Catholic Emancipation in restoring them to power restored them at the same time to social consequence. The Liberals who had advocated that great measure, historians, statesmen, and philosophers, broke with the principles of which their predecessors had once been the staunchest advocates, changed front, and traduced the Reformation itself, to which Liberalism owed its existence. While Macaulay and Buckle were cursing Cranmer, the Oxford Movement made its way among the clergy, was welcomed largely by the upper classes, whose nerves were offended by Puritan vulgarities, and leavened gradually the whole organisation of the Church of England. Men of intellect who would once have interfered had ceased to care for such things, and allowed them to go their own way. The Rationalists and critics, whom Disraeli so sagaciously disliked, worked havoc in a party whose whole belief was in their Bible. The Evangelicals, who had been narrow and tyrannical in the days of their power, found themselves fading into impotence; while in the mass of the people a doctrinal faith was superseded by a vague religiosity which saw no particular difference between one creed and another. [Sidenote: THE CHURCH OF IRELAND]