The persons to whom the provisions of the new measure were to be primarily applied, who from the official clergy of a State Church were to be converted into the ministers of a voluntary association, were these following-two archbishops, ten bishops, and about 2,380 parochial clergy and curates.* Before considering and guarding the rights of these persons, it was necessary to provide for the case of those who should, by nomination

• The statistics of the persons and property of the disestablished

the vacancy occurred for the consecration of an individual to be named by them. These interim appointments would carry with them no vested interest, and no rights of peerage. With regard to the existing prelates and clergy the former, as has been already stated, would lose their right to seats in the House of Lords from the date of the legal disestablishment. Before the 1st January, 1871, the clergy and laity of the Church were invited to meet together and re-organise the institution on a voluntary

Bernard's "Decisions under the Irish Church Act" (1873).

through which it might communicate with the Government

A.D. 1869.]

of the day by the intervention of the Ecclesiastical Commission nominated in the Act. The Irish Convocation had not met, Mr. Gladstone said, for a period of fully a century and a half, if not of two centuries; and not only were there great technical difficulties in the way of its revival, but there also existed a special statute called the Convention Act, certain clauses of which rendered it doubtful whether the Convocation could be legally convoked at all. One of the earliest enactments in the bill

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for disestablishment, the provisions of the Act for satisfying the vested interests, not only of the Protestant clergy, but also of the students and professors of Maynooth, and of the ministers of the Presbyterian Church, would begin to take effect. What is a vested interest? Mr. Gladstone defined it thus, after stating that the "expectation of promotion " could not possibly be comprehended in the definition:-"The vested interest of the incumbent [whether of a see or a benefice] is this-it is a title to receive

was, accordingly, the repeal of the Convention Act, so far as it affected the Irish Church, and the removal of all disabilities of whatever kind which might hinder the clergy and laity from meeting in synod and re-organising the Church as a voluntary society. The Government would take no power for the Crown to interfere in the election of the governing body, but would merely require that it should be truly representative, as resulting from the joint action of bishops, clergy, and laity. The governing body so appointed would be recognised by the Government, and it would become incorporated under the present Act. When the 1st January, 1871, had arrived, the date fixed VOL. IX.-No. 443.

a certain net income from the property of the Church, in consideration of the discharge of certain duties to which he is bound as the equivalent he gives for that income, and subject to the laws by which he and the religious body to which he belongs are bound." In the possession of such net income, subject only to deductions for the curates whom he might have permanently employed, every incumbent was secured by the Act for the term of his natural life, so long as he continued to discharge the equivalent duties. He might, however, if he chose, commute his right to receive his net income annually from the State for a capital sum to be calculated at a rate of interest of three

and a half per cent. This commutation could only be made upon the application of the incumbent, and the sum of money would then be paid to the Church body, "subject to the legal trust of discharging the obligation or covenant which we had ourselves to discharge to the incumbent namely, to give him the annuity in full so long as he discharged the duties." This commutation would be voluntary; but as it would be greatly to the interest of the State to relieve itself as quickly as possible from the task of maintaining relations of payment with the individual clergymen, the scale on which it was computed would be a liberal one; and Mr. Gladstone hoped that it would be very largely resorted to. The various incidents of the freehold tenure on which the existing incumbents now held their benefices or lands would be allowed to subsist during their lifetimes, with two exceptions. The Tithe Rent-charge (which, for various important reasons, it was desirable to have the power of dealing with immediately after disestablishment) would, from the date of the passing of the Act, vest in the new Commissioners without any intervening life-interest, the faith of Parliament being, of course, pledged to the payment of the whole proceeds which the clergymen could derive from it. The other exception related to ruined churches, the freehold of which might be in the incumbent; in these cases it would be taken from him and vested in the Irish Board of Works, with an allocation of funds necessary to preserve the churches from desecration or further injury. The vested interest of all incumbents, whether bishops or presbyters, was thus provided for. With regard to curates, Mr. Gladstone distinguished between those who were permanently, and those who were temporarily employed. The Act left it to the Commissioners to determine in each case whether a curate applying for compensation had really been in permanent employment, stipulating only that, in order to be entitled to that character, he should have been employed on the 1st January, 1869, and that he should continue to be so employed on the 1st January, 1871; or that, if he had ceased to be so employed, the cessation should be due to some cause other than his own free choice or misconduct. Such curates were to be held entitled to receive their stipends for life or to commute them, exactly on the same principles as the Act applied to incumbents. Curates of the transitory class were to be compensated by simple gratuities, on the principle recognised in the Civil Service Superannuation Acts.

We now proceed to the consideration of the manner in which the Act proposed to deal with the property of the Irish Church. The annual value of that property, roughly stated, came to about £670,000, and was derived from the following sources of income:

An important and difficult question immediately presented itself, to the solution of which Mr. Gladstone devoted all his powers of analysis and all his resources of expression. It was this: among the various endowments enjoyed by the Irish Church,-which were of a public nature, and had accrued to it as the representative of the ancient endowed Church of the country? which were, on the other hand, of a private nature, and were made with the full knowledge and intention of the donors that they were assisting by their benefactions the Protestant Episcopal Church of Ireland, bound by such and such articles, and using such and such a liturgy? In the adjustment of so complicated a matter, mathematical accuracy is out of the question; but Mr. Gladstone considered that substantial justice would be done by fixing a date, all endowments anterior to which should be deemed public, and those posterior to it private. This date he proposed to fix at the epoch of the Restoration, 1660, on the ground that the Irish Establishment did not attain its regular organisation and definite Protestant character much before that date. On the whole, he thought that the value of the private endowments, so limited, did not exceed half a million sterling; and this sum the Act awarded in compensation for them to the disestablished Church.

By drawing the line at the year 1660, Mr. Gladstone excluded from the category of private endowments the grants of lands in Ulster, which James I., after having planted in large numbers of his Scottish countrymen in the room of the exterminated native proprietors, assigned to the dominant Church. These lands were commonly known as the Ulster glebes. A strenuous effort was made in the House of Lords to effect their retention for the Church, on the ground that they partook rather of the nature of private than of public benefactions. But Mr. Gladstone stood firm, and refused to allow these royal grants, the original motive for which was unquestionably in large measure political, to be treated differently from the general mass of the Church property.

An important item of the material belongings of the Establishment, yet one which could not easily be made to enter into any financial estimate, consisted in the churches themselves. As to these, the Act provided that, wherever the "governing body" made an application, accompanied by a declaration that they meant either to maintain the church for public worship, or to remove it to some more convenient position, it would be handed over to them. In the case of St. Patrick's Cathedral, and about a dozen other churches partaking of the character of national monuments, the Commissioners were empowered to allot a moderate sum for their maintenance. Churches not in use, or in ruins, were to be handed over to the custody of the Board of Works.

With regard to glebe-houses, Mr. Gladstone announced that he had changed the opinion which he had expressed in the preceding year. Then he was inclined to consider them as "marketable property," like lands or tithes, and as such to withhold them from the disestablished Church, and allow only a life interest in them to their present possessors. But having investigated the matter more closely, and discovered that although an expenditure of

A.D. 1869.]

£1,200,000 upon them could be distinctly traced, their annual value could not be rated above £18,600, while there was a quarter of a million of building charges upon them, which the State would have to pay on coming into possession, he had come to the conclusion that the glebe-houses were not, in the strict sense of the words, "marketable property." The Act therefore proposed to hand over the glebe-houses to the Church body, on their paying the building charges; and they would also be allowed to purchase a certain amount of glebe-land round the houses at a fair valuation.

The burial-grounds adjacent to churches went with the churches, all existing rights being reserved; and other burial-grounds were to be handed over to the Poor Law Guardians.

The scheme being thus far developed, the aspect of affairs at the end of two years promised to be this-the churches and glebe-houses, together with strips of land around the latter, would then be the permanent property of the disestablished Church, while the tithes and Church lands, subject to various life-interests, would be vested in the State, through its organ, the "Commissioners of Irish Church Temporalities." But that the State should long retain all this mass of real property in its own hands was most undesirable. Mr. Gladstone therefore propounded an elaborate scheme for the final extinction of the tithe rent-charge within forty-five years, and for the conversion of the lands into money. Landlords would be allowed, if they chose, to purchase the rentcharge, so far as it affected their own properties, at twenty-two and a half years' purchase paid down; but if they declined to avail themselves of this option, power was taken for disposing of it to them by a compulsory sale, at a rate which would yield 44 per cent. interest, they being at the same time credited with a loan at 34, payable in instalments in forty-five years. Thus, if a landlord's property were burdened with the tithe rent-charge to the extent of £90 a year, the State would compel him to buy it out and out for the sum of £2,000; which sum, however, he would not have to pay immediately, but only by instalments coming in the shape of an annual rent of £70, and terminating at the end of forty-five years. How greatly the landlords were gainers by this transaction is obvious. With regard to the Church lands, the tenants on them were to have a right of pre-emption, and three-fourths of the purchase money might be left on the security of the land; one way or other, they were to be converted into money with all practicable dispatch.

When by these sales the property of the Irish Church should all have been realised, and its affairs wound up, Mr. Gladstone calculated that the balance-sheet would stand as follows. The tithe rent-charge would have yielded £9,000,000; the lands and perpetuity rents would have been sold for about £6,250,000; these sums, together with a balance of £750,000 in money, would make a grand total of £16,000,000.* Of this, the bill

• In the work by Mr. Leigh Bernard above cited, it is stated as the confident expectation of the Commissioners in 1873, that the Church property, when all sold, "will realise at least the approximate value of £16,000,000, placed thereon by the Prime Minister."

*

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would dispose of £8,650,000-viz.: Vested interests of incumbents, £4,900,000; ditto of curates, £800,000; lay compensation, £900,000; private endowments, £500,000; building charges, £250,000. To these would have to be added the sums required for the commutation of the Regium Donum and the Maynooth Grant, the particulars of which will be given presently, amounting to £1,100,000; and, finally, the expenses of the Commission, £200,000. Consequently there would remain, after the satisfaction of all claims, a surplus of between £7,000,000 and £8,000,000. After discussing various suggestions for the disposal of this surplus, and giving his reasons for not devoting any part of it to the endowment of any religious body or institution, Mr. Gladstone stated that, in the opinion of the Government, it would be most fitly and profitably applied to the relief of "unavoidable calamities and suffering," not provided for by the Poor Law. Assuming that the surplus fund would produce an annual return of about £311,000 a year, the Act would allot £185,000 of this revenue to lunatic asylums, £20,000 to idiot asylums, £30,000 to institutions for tho harbouring and training of the blind, and of deaf mutes, £15,000 to training-schools for nurses, £10,000 to refor. matories, and £51,000 to county infirmaries; thus dis posing of the whole revenue.

The arrangements for the extinction of the Regium Donum and the Maynooth Grant have still to be considered. The sum to be dealt with amounted to about £70,000, of which £26,000 was the Maynooth Grant, and the remainder was distributed among the various denominations of Presbyterians. The expectation of life among the clergy being known to be between thirteen and fourteen years, Mr. Gladstone had fixed fourteen years' purchase as the basis of commutation in the case of the incumbents of the Irish Church, and he now adopted the same scale for the Presbyterian Churches and for Maynooth. A sum amounting to fourteen times the annual grant in each case was to be set aside out of the Irish Church Fund, and devoted to the satisfaction of lifeinterests, or to their commutation, on conditions substantially agreeing with those already explained in the case of the Establishment. About £1,100,000 would be required for the purpose, two-thirds of which would go to the Presbyterians.

At the conclusion of his speech, Mr. Gladstone invited criticisms and suggestions as to the details of the bill, which it was the desire of its framers to render as little harsh and onerous as possible, consistently with the complete and final execution of the task which they had undertaken. "I trust, Sir," he said, "that although its operation be stringent, and although we have not thought it either politic or allowable to attempt to diminish its stringency by making it incomplete, the spirit towards the Church of Ireland, as a religious communion, in which this measure has been considered and prepared by my colleagues and myself has not been a spirit of unkind

* The expenses having, chiefly owing to concessions made during the progress of the bill through Parliament, greatly exceeded this estimate, Mr. Leigh Bernard, in the passage cited in the preceding note, reckons on a surplus of £5,000,000 only.