In The Course Of His Sermon, He Read Long
Portions Of An Address From The General Assembly Of The Free
Church of
Scotland, appointing the following Thursday as a day of fasting and
prayer, on account of the peculiar circumstances
Of the time, and more
especially the dangers flowing from the influence of popery, alluding to
the grant of money lately made by parliament to the Roman Catholic College
at Maynooth. The address proposed no definite opposition, but protested
against the measure in general, and, as it seemed to me, rather vague
terms. In the course of the address the title of National Church was
claimed for the Free Church, notwithstanding its separation from the
government, and the era of that separation was referred to in phrases
similar to those in which we speak of our own declaration of national
independence. There were one or two allusions to the persecutions which
the Free Church had suffered, and something was said about her children
being hunted like partridges upon the mountains; but it is clear that if
her ministers have been hunted, they have been hunted into fine churches;
and if persecuted, they have been persecuted into comfortable livings.
This Free Church, as far as I can learn, is extremely prosperous.
Dr. Candlish is a fervid preacher, and his church was crowded. In the
afternoon I attended at one of the churches of the established or endowed
Presbyterian Church, where a quiet kind of a preacher held forth, and the
congregation was thin.
This Maynooth grant has occasioned great dissatisfaction in England and
Scotland. If the question had been left to be decided by the public
opinion of these parts of the kingdom, the grant would never have been
made. An immense majority, of all classes and almost all denominations,
disapprove of it. A dissenting clergyman of one of the evangelical
persuasions, as they are called, said to me - "The dissenters claim nothing
from the government; they hold that it is not the business of the state to
interfere in religious matters, and they object to bestowing the public
money upon the seminaries of any religious denomination." In a
conversation which I had with an eminent man of letters, and a warm friend
of the English Church, he said: "The government is giving offense to many
who have hitherto been its firmest supporters. There was no necessity for
the Maynooth grant; the Catholics would have been as well satisfied
without it as they are with it; for you see they are already clamoring for
the right to appoint through their Bishops the professors in the new
Irish colleges. The Catholics were already establishing their schools, and
building their churches with their own means: and this act of applying the
money of the nation to the education of their priests is a gratuitous
offense offered by the government to its best friends." In a sermon which
I heard from the Dean of York, in the magnificent old minster of that
city, he commended the liberality of the motives which had induced the
government to make the grant, but spoke of the measure as one which the
friends of the English Church viewed with apprehension and anxiety.
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