MEMOIRS AND CORRESPONDENCE

OF

VISCOUNT CASTLEREAGH,

SECOND MARQUESS OF LONDONDERRY.

1799 CONTINUED.

The Bishop of Meath to Lord Castlereagh,

Dublin, November 13, 1799.

My Lord-Your Lordship would have sooner received the ideas which I have thrown together on the uniting and identifying the Churches of England and Ireland in the enclosed paper, but that I was assured they would not find you in London. I hope they may be worth the trouble it will give your Lordship to throw your eye over them. The principle is a simple one in itself, and all the details necessary to give it effect will be easily settled, if it be once adopted and recommended by administration.

There is every reason to think that the great question which detains you so long on the other side is suffering as much at this time as it did when your Lordship was last in England. The Speaker and his partisans still positively assert that they have one hundred and forty members sure; and this kind of boasting is, with many people, not without effect. We can do nothing in Meath until your Lordship's return. I have the honour to be,

T. L. MEATH.

VOL. III.

B

Memorandum as to Uniting and Identifying the Churches of England and Ireland, and making the latter subject, as formerly, to the See of Canterbury.

November 18, 1799.

The uniting and identifying the legislature of Great Britain and Ireland seems necessarily to suppose the uniting and identifying the Churches of England and Ireland. Church and State are, in our ideas, inseparable, and, when the State becomes in all its parts one, the Church should be but one.

The case of Scotland cannot be pertinently urged against this maxim, as applied to Ireland. It is well known that the great wish of the framers of the Union in England, as well as that of the Queen, was, that there should be but one Established Church for the United Kingdom; but the necessity of the case weighed against every consideration of that tendency. The Presbyterian was the Established Church of Scotland, and to alter it for the establishment of the Church of England was an attempt that might defeat the whole scheme, and sacrifice the mighty advantages that were to result to the empire from the general measure.

In the proposed Union between Great Britain and Ireland, no such necessity exists-no such danger is to be apprehended. On the contrary, the local circumstances of the Church of Ireland, the existence and safety of which is essential to the connexion between the two countries, would in themselves require that it should incorporate and identify with the Church of England, as the greatest security it can look to, and as its most effectual preservative against the dangers to which these circumstances may expose it. The last attempt that bears any resemblance to this measure was made by Lord Strafford, in the reign of Charles the First; and, through his influence and his zeal, seconding the wishes of that pious King, everything

1

It has been the fashion to consider Charles as a pious King, as a martyr, but it requires no very profound acquaintance with the history of his times to be convinced that this notion is an egregious mistake, and that he was neither the one nor the other.

was done that the existing connexion between the two kingdoms could admit.

The two Churches, like the two legislatures, were distinct, although united in the same head; and, as long as the legislatures continued so, the Churches must have done the same. The only thing, therefore, that Lord Strafford could propose to himself was, to bring the Church of Ireland to an agreement and conformity with the Church of England in doctrine, in worship, and in discipline; and this in the most essential points he happily effected. Before his time, the Church of Ireland had no canons set forth by public authority. In a convocation held in Dublin, in the year 1615, it was indeed resolved that the Church of Ireland should have a public confession of faith as well as other Churches. Archbishop Usher was then primate; and, from the character which he had long established, he was entrusted by the bishops and principal clergy with the care of drawing up the articles in which they were to declare their agreement. From the course of theological studies pursued by the reformed clergy of his earlier days, and from the predilection which, influenced by the example of the exiles in Queen Mary's reign, he had conceived for the Geneva Liturgy and the doctrines of Calvin, he not only inserted, in this confession of faith, the Nine Articles, commonly called the Lambeth Articles, because proposed by Archbishop Whitgift to the University of Cambridge, which Queen Elizabeth suppressed, and which were afterwards rejected by King James, when brought forward at the conference at Hampton Court, but he further added several articles, equally Calvinistical and equally differing from the articles of the Church of England, as they were finally agreed upon in 1562. The confession so formed was approved and adopted by the Convocation as the confession of faith of the Church of Ireland, and it was afterwards confirmed by the Lord Deputy Chichester.

The discipline of the two Churches was, in many instances,

as different as their articles of faith. It would indeed appear, from a letter from Lord Strafford to Archbishop Laud, that, in point of discipline, the Church of Ireland was in a most lamentable state. He draws a picture of it, with respect to the want of all professional learning; to non-residence and all the abuses resulting from it; to the state of the churches and glebe-houses; to the want of all decency of habit, order, or gravity, in performing the rites and services of the Church; to the custom of having their marriages and christenings in private houses; and to many other particulars, which, it must be confessed, is not altogether inapplicable to our own days.

It appeared, at first, to be a hopeless attempt to reduce all these things to the custom of England; to induce the Primate and Clergy of Ireland to substitute, to the confession of faith which they had so lately set forth, the Book of Articles of Religion, agreed upon by the English Convocation in 1562, and persuade them to consent that all the canons in force in England should be imposed upon the Irish clergy, and that their Church should be altogether governed by the same rules. But the wishes of the King, the zeal and firmness of the Lord Deputy, the talents and weight of character possessed by Bramhall, lately appointed Bishop of Derry, and the candour, mildness, and moderation of Primate Usher, removed all difficulties. An expedient was found to reconcile the Primate, and not to hurt his feelings. No censure was to be passed on of the former Irish Articles. They were to be virtually any renounced by approving the Articles of England, and receiving them in their place; and the English canons were not to be established in a body, but those which the Primate scrupled were to be left out, and a collection to be made of the rest, new arranged and new modified, as the confession of faith and the rule of discipline of the Church of Ireland.

The Lord Deputy was not so complaisant to the other members of the Convocation as to the Primate. He was particularly peremptory with those of the Lower House, who, in