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'If plagues or earthquakes break not Heaven's design,
Why then a Borgia, or a Catiline ?'

If we recognise the hand of Providence in these scourges of our race, are we also bound to praise, honour, and worship them? To do so would be to imitate the barbarians who select for their fondest adoration the fetish or idol they think most capable of working evil. This tendency of the human mind, when unaided by revelation, to form for itself malevolent and maleficent deities to be propitiated by blood and pain, has led a very eminent writer and thinker to contend that natural religion has done more harm than good, has proved less a blessing than a curse. Without going the whole way along with him in his argument, we deem it quite conclusive against that popular faith or superstition, which erects a temple to imperialism and places 'the grand figure' of Napoleon on the shrine.

ART. III.-1. Charges of the Bishops of Bangor, Llandaff, and St. David's, 1869.

2. St. Asaph Diocesan Statistics, 1869.

3. Llandaff, Education Board Report, 1864. Church Building, Church Extension, Diocesan Home Mission Societies' Reports, 1869. St. David's Archidiaconal Education Board Reports, 1868. Bangor Church Building Society's Report, 1869.

4. Speech of the Dean of Llandaff at the Festival on the Completion of the Cathedral Tower, 1869.

5. Exercises on the Religious Statistics of Wales, 1869.

6. The Position of the Established Church in Wales. A Sequel to Exercises on the Religious Statistics of Wales, 1870.

THE Cided. The work of confiscation there is done. Her HE fate of the Irish Church has now been irrevocably

connexion with the State is severed. She is no longer either established or endowed, and she has to undertake at once the task of reconstruction, and must endeavour to accommodate herself to the altered circumstances in which she is so suddenly and so unexpectedly placed. There were, indeed, special conditions which naturally drew upon her the first attack of those whose real warfare is with Ecclesiastical Establishments of every kind, and who would desire to rend asunder each link which binds religion and civil government together.

In this, their first assault, they were sure of support from men who had no sympathy with their general principles, while they themselves provided that the immediate object was secured-the

first step gained, were quite content to keep, for the present, their own ultimate views somewhat out of sight, and to make, for a time, no demonstration of a resolve to push them eventually to their full and logical conclusion.

But now that the Establishment in Ireland has been overthrown, and such reticence is no longer needed, either to satisfy the scruples, or to allay the fears, of their recent allies, it is quickly cast aside, and despite the distinctions and the differences which were in the last Session so carefully and so scrupulously pointed out between the condition of the Church on this side of the Channel, and her position on the other, despite, too, of the repeated assurances of the Premier and of his friends, that the disestablishment and the disendowment of the one Church had no necessary or natural connexion with the disestablishment and the disendowment of the other, the ink is scarce dry which records the Royal consent to the enactment providing for the spoliation of the Establishment in Ireland, when notice is at once given that the same measure must forthwith be meted out to the Church in Wales. That the Church in Wales (there is no Church of Wales) is inseparably connected with the Church in England—that there is no geographical separation, no natural boundary between Wales and England-that the religious differences which divide the population in Wales, are far less intense than those which separate the Protestants of Ulster from the Roman Catholics of Connaught; that the bitter recollections of conquest and of confiscation which mixed themselves with Ecclesiastical questions in Ireland have no counterpart in the condition of Wales, are matters now altogether forgotten, and the cry is already raised-Do justice to Wales, as you have done justice to Ireland. Deal with the Church in Wales as you have already dealt with the Church in Ireland. Her numbers are less than the numbers enrolled in the ranks of dissent. Disestablish her, therefore, and disendow her, as the natural result. But if the mere question of numbers (a question, however, which has never been thoroughly sifted as yet) is to be considered conclusive on such a subject, are we simply to balance the number of Churchmen in Wales against the number of Dissenters there, or ought we not rather to treat England and Wales as one undivided whole, with no separate interests, no landmarks of division, as closely connected the one with the other as Lancashire is with Cheshire, or as Dorset is with Devon. And if the 'lore-of nicely calculated less or more' is to decide a question such as this, might it not as well be applied to Middlesex, or to Cornwall, or to any other county, where it may be alleged that a calculation of adherents would cast the sum against the Established Church? Or why should

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we not employ the same rule in smaller communities still, and determine upon the same principle, whether in each town or village the Church shall, or shall not, be forthwith disestablished and disendowed? 'Repeal the union between England and Ireland,' said Mr. Canning, 'why not restore the Heptarchy?' And such partial treatment of the question of Establishment as is now proposed will be, indeed, to disintegrate a great nation, and to resolve it once more into its original elements. If, then, the subject of religious Establishments is to be discussed at all, it must be discussed on broader ground than this; it must be treated with reference to the whole realm, and not be debated merely as to its application to the Principality of Wales.

Welshmen, however, have no wish to avoid a discussion on the state of the Church in Wales. They are persuaded that her real condition is persistently misrepresented by her enemies, and very much misunderstood even by her friends. The one, perhaps, accounts for the other, and assertions confidently made, and constantly repeated, have been too readily accepted by those who ought to have distrusted the source from which they came.

The Church in Wales is said to be either dead or dying, and we are told that the people are altogether alienated from her ministrations, and that her power and influence amongst them is irrevocably gone, and that she is a mere name—a shadow—a skeleton, and nothing more.

But is this really the case? Have these assertions any foundation in truth? Will facts confirm or contradict them? We are willing to abide the issue. There was, indeed, a time when much which is now said of the condition of the Church in Wales, could have been asserted, with at least some measure of truth; but it was a time when a like record might have been as justly written against the Church in England too, when a coldness, deadness and indifference as to religious things prevailed throughout the whole length and breadth of our land. It was no distinction, no peculiarity of Wales; and when the day of awakening and of revival came, it was through the Church and the ministers of the Church that the work of reformation again began. It was so in England, as the names of Whitfield and of Wesley will at once suggest. It was so in Wales, where those who ministered at her altars were the first to break the spell, to kindle and to satisfy the religious instincts of their countrymen. And if the prevalence of dissent in Cornwall owes its rise to the want of sympathy on the part of our Ecclesiastical rulers with the fire and energy of the men whom we have named, it was the same in Wales; and thus, when earnest and zealous men, after struggling for a time amidst the discouragements and opposition

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of the great body of their brethren, ended by breaking out from the fold, they were supported by the sympathy of multitudes whose religious convictions had been awakened by their means, and who failed to obtain in the church of their own parish the food for which they had there learned to hunger.' Such is the faithful record which the Bishop of Bangor gives in his recent Charge of the origin of modern dissent in Wales. But the breach once made, could not be so swiftly or so easily closed. The disciples, as usual, went beyond their masters, and in the next generation, in Wales, as in England, the separation from the Church became wider and more complete. It was no longer a reformation within her pale, but an alienation from her ministrations, and from her communion; and, as the followers of John Wesley have departed widely from the counsel which he once gave to his assistants 'Let all our preachers go to church; let all our people go constantly; receive the Sacrament at every opportunity; warn all against niceness in hearing, a great and prevailing evil; warn them likewise against despising the prayers of the Church'† -so the descendants, of those who sat at the feet of Rowlands, of Llangeitho, who a short time before his death, showed his continued affection to the Church by the words which he addressed to his son, 'Stand by the Church by all means; there will be a great revival in the Church of England; this is an encouragement to you to stand by it;' and who, when his son asked, 'Are you a Prophet, father?' added, 'No, I am not a Prophet, nor the son of a Prophet, but God has made this known to me on my knees '-notwithstanding that a revival has come, are scattered from his Church and the Church of their fathers, and are gathered into separate religious communities of their own. And, regardless of the saying of John Elias, whose memory is still venerated, and whose name is yet a household word in Wales,-'no true sincere Methodist can be opposed to the Established Church,' amongst them are joining hands with those who are bent upon her ruin and destruction. It is with this state of things that the Church in our time has to deal, and the real question is notwhat were her shortcomings and her deficiences in days gone by, but what is she really doing now? For where privilege exists it will be no longer sufficient to show the title-deeds under which it has been handed down, or the benefits which it once conferred

* Bishop of Bangor's Charge, 1869, p. 4.

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† Southey's Life of Wesley,' vol. 1., p. 306. 'Wales,' by Sir Thomas Phillips, p. 146. Sir T. Phillips, Wales, p. 162.

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We accept this test with reference to the Church in Wales, and we are content to go to the proof, satisfied that she can show a 'raison d'être plain and palpable to all eyes-that of practical † usefulness, the only one which in the present day the nation will accept for establishments or institutions of any kind.'

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Let us first look at the state of the Cathedral Churches in Wales. It was said in the Quarterly Review' in 1850, The Cathedral of Llandaff is rising, but rising slowly from its ruins.' A great change has taken place since then. A painter or a poet in search of the picturesque will find no ruins at Llandaff now. Let us take the contrast of its past and present state, not from the speech of the Dean at the festival recently held to commemorate the completion of the work of restoration, nor from the Charge since delivered by the Bishop, but from what may be considered a more impartial source, a parallel lately drawn in the 'Saturday Review' between Manchester and Llandaff. 'Five-and-twenty years ago, Llandaff had a church half in ruins, half tortured into a form of grotesque ugliness. The solitary sign of its claim to cathedral rank was a mean wooden box, with the legend of "Dom. Episcopi." A Bishop resident in the city had not been heard of for ages; a Bishop resident in the diocese was a novelty of the then Episcopate; there was a nominal Chapter; but as no special Residentiaries had ever been appointed, the duty of residence falling on all alike, was avoided by all alike. The practical Ecclesiastical Establishment consisted of a single vicar; the choral establishment consisted of a single fiddle: now there is a resident Bishop; a resident Dean; Canons as much or as little resident as they are in most other places; a cathedral nobly restored in its fullest extent; a choir and cathedral service, if not of first-rate merit, yet a vast improvement on anything which had been seen at Llandaff for ages.' After this record, there is surely truth in the Dean's words, when he had finished his own contrast between the present and the past: 'Looking to what we were and to what we are, there is no restoration like our own,' If we turn to St. David's we find a similar work in hand, though the cathedral there had never been reduced either in its fabric or in its services to the miserable condition in which Llandaff lay for more than one hundred years. But if from its position, distant as it is from any of the large centres of population, it cannot,

* Charge of the Bishop of Bangor.

† Speech of the Dean of Llandaff.

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