of the recently given endowment of Maynooth College, stand on the same footing of impossibility and of unfairness, while we are sure that either would seriously jeopardise the political safety of Ireland itself. English Churchmen in general are, we believe, inclined to look upon the Irish Church as the member of the family which had better never be spoken about. That body has its great faults and shortcomings, and its position as the Church of the minority is the striking evidence of some misconduct or other at some earlier epoch. Yet there is, we believe, a revival of Churchmanship in progress among the Protestants of Ireland, which the Englishman, who is not familiar with the Irish character, would not guess. An Irishman is naturally traditional, and naturally polemical, so that the loud denouncer of Popery, and all that he believes or thinks assimilating to Popery, may often at bottom have an uncultivated store of something very like genuine, though imperfectly developed, Churchmanship, in duty to which he has persuaded himself that he does right in hoisting the No Popery banner. Of all most unexpected forms the Church movement has taken an ecclesiological one in Ireland, and stands confessed in the new cathedrals, built or building, in Kilmore, Cork, and Tuam, not to speak of the one projected for Belfast, and those restored or under restoration at Dublin, Limerick, Kilkenny, Killaloe, and Londonderry. Again, synodical action seems on the point of being advocated in that Church. Whatever Ireland takes up, it takes up rapidly and hotly, so there is no reason why a very decided High Church movement may not be a coming phase of its Anglican population. As it is, the reasons for its actual shortcomings were sketched with a very friendly, but yet fair as well as clever pencil, by Dean Magee, of Cork, in a characteristically but wholesomely Irish speech which he made at the Bristol Congress.
There is another point, of a character partly doctrinal and partly political, on which we may as well say a few words in this place—the agitation for a reformed system of subscription in the Church of England, which Lord Palmerston very adroitly postponed by the appointment of a Commission of unimpeachable weight and respectability. What its report may be we do not yet know, but enough seems to have oozed out to show that the ostensible grievance will be remedied, a form of subscription of workable stringency introduced, and the hopes of those who expected to enter the ministry of a Church where endowments would count much and faith little, considerably chilled. If so, we shall not say that the Commission met for nothing, little as we like meddling with a Church's belief or practice by way of Commission.
Church Congresses were, as we have seen, a bold experiment
b
