Mr. Dillwyn on Tuesday brought on, at eight o'clock,—af ter
a wearisome preliminary debate on a private Bill in relation to the Manchester Ship Canal,—his resolution affirming" that as the Church of England in Wales has failed to fulfil its-pro- fessed object as a means of promoting the religious interests of the Welsh people, and ministers to only a small minority of the population, its continuance as an Established Church in the Principality is an anomaly and injustice which ought no longer to exist." He urged that in spite of the non-existence of any official religious census, it is certain, from the carefully prepared religious statistics of the Nonconformists themselves, that the Church of England cannot rank higher than third among the religious denominations of Wales, the Congrega- tionalists coming first with 253,000, the Calvinistic Methodists next with 250,000, and the Church of England certainly coming not higher than third with 217,000 members. Besides,these, the Baptists number 194,000, the Wesleyans 78,000, the Roman Catholics 50,000, the Primitive Methodists 17,000, and (smaller sects 8,000. As the whole population of Wales numbers 1,343,000, the Church contains,—as Mr. Dillwyn is reported to have said,—only one-eighth of the whole ; but surely 217,000 is about one-sixth of 1,343,000. Nevertheless, the Established Church, in any case, is only the Church of a very email minority of the Welsh people ; and Mr. Dillwyn maintained that the Welsh differ from the English in thought, character, and feel- ing, as well as in religion and language, and those differences, he maintained, instead of diminishing, are on the increase. "It could not be denied that Wales is practically a separate nationality." At all events, the United Kingdom is bound to see that wherever the institutions which suit one part of the Kingdom are notoriously unsuitable to another well defined and substantial part, they shall be reformed so as to bring them into keeping with the inhabitants. The speech had a very marked flavour of Home-rule about it.
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