FROM THE ARCHIVES:Proposals to disestablish the Church of Ireland in 1867 were vigorously opposed by members of the church and by The Irish Times, which ran this editorial after a protest meeting in Co Down. – JOE JOYCE
THE GREAT meeting at Hillsborough was held yesterday under most favourable auspices. The day was one of those cheerful and even genial days which sometimes brighten the close of October. The numbers present are estimated at fifteen thousand persons. The rank and nobility of the North and many from other parts of Ireland crowded the platform. It is most satisfactory that there was no party emblem of any kind displayed. It was what it was intended to be, a meeting of Protestants of all denominations assembled to give an earnest and emphatic protest against the spoliation of the Established Church in Ireland, with whose spirit many are united though they may differ from it in forms.
It was no aggressive assembly, not designed to infringe upon the civil or religious liberty of any. The nobility, gentry, and people met, not to assail the rights of others, but to defend their own. The most captious cannot find anything to censure either in the resolutions, the petition, the address to the Protestants of the Empire, or to the organization of Defence Societies.
It must be admitted, also, that the popular element enters far more largely into the defence of the Established Church in Ireland than into the assaults upon it. There has been no popular clamour or agitation for the abolition of the Established Church or the spoliation of her revenues. The rent-charge [tithes], of which the revenues of the clergy consist, is paid almost exclusively by Protestant landowners. The amount of the grant annually made by the State for the support of the College of Maynooth would more than cover the entire amount of rent-charge paid by Roman Catholic proprietors. It is a remarkable fact that not a single payer of rent-charge belonging to a different communion has come forward to join in an agitation for its abolition. The tenant farmers, moreover, throughout Ireland are well aware that if the rent-charge should be abolished to-morrow they would not be benefited to the value of one farthing. To them the residence of a minister amongst them, though of a different creed, is anything but a grievance, and they have shown, by their abstention from an agitation which they were stimulated to take part in, that they neither suffered under a grievance nor had the least faith in the remedy proposed.
But as no Roman Catholic payer of rent-charge has lent his name to attacks upon the Established Church, so there is no member of that Church who is opposed to just and proper reforms. The Established Church is, as we stated, supported almost entirely by its own members, and there are few who would not gladly see that it was supported wholly by those of its own communion alone, if that end could be gained without the sacrifice of a just right.
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