THE COLLAPSE OF RE-ENDOWMENT IN THE IRISH CHURCH.
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."] SIE,—The money is not coming in to the Irish Church Body, and some are putting the blame on the lethargy and inefficiency of the body. From the complainants' point of view the criticism seems fair enough, but there is another aspect of the matter, which assigns a totally different reason for the commercial failure, and although that interpretation is not popular just now, it is no more than justice to many Christian people to mention iL
People won't re-endow. Why ? Because they think, rightly or wrongly, that they ought not to re-endow, and that if they do re- endow they are giving against God and going against God. Their reasoning has at least a Christian appearance, and in brief here it is In the Lent of 1869, when the great debate was about to begin, in obedience to our Bishops, we all, laity and clergy, in all our churches throughout all Ireland, with one voice besought God to take the matter into His own hands, and to order the issue according to His own good pleasure. We thus left the result to Him, as plainly as Elijah left the issue between himself and Baal to "the God that answereth by fire." God decided for disestablishment and disendow- ment as plainly as He decided against Baal, and for all that, now we are told that we are false to Christ unless we fly at God's face with our right hand and with our left hand, and unless we make over again what He has unmade.' I don't see how anyone who believes in a God that heareth prayer can repudiate this simple common-sense Scriptural reasoning, nor why anyone need go farther to seek for the causes of the collapse of the re-endow- ment scheme. It is worth while to notice also (as an " undesigned coincidence" between divine and human truth) that this refusal to re-endow when God has disendowed is not only siding with God's side, but that it is also in accord with the leading axiom of modern social science, namely, that every age and generation should maintain its own religion, as well as feed its own poor, and pay its own soldiers, and fight its own wars. This is now the condition of the only healthy energies of the Church, her mission- ary agencies ; and although this condition will not do for "taking care of Dowb," and for pampering the Mamelukes of an ecclesi- astical Cmsarism, still it is the condition which Christ appointed for His Church. It was in this condition that Apostles ministered, in this condition that the Church conquered, and was conquering, the world, until in the most disastrous hour that ever befell her, Constantine, by "endowing and establishing," made the kingdom of our Lord a "kingdom of this world."—I am, Sir, &c.,
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