m they have been in alliance, and then reign supreme; or
whether, as happened in France at the end of the eighteenth century
and in Portugal recently, the anarchists who have grown up within
the bosom of the Church will prove to be a more deadly foe to the
clericals than the heretics ever were--it is impossible to say; but
neither prospect seems very cheerful.

In the second place, the Nationalist movement has drawn all the
Protestant bodies together as nothing else could. Episcopalians,
Presbyterians and Methodists have all joined hands in the defence of
their common liberties. The Nationalists have left no stone unturned
in their efforts to prove that the northern Protestants are disloyal.
They have succeeded in finding one speech that was made by an excited
orator (not a leader) forty-four years ago, to the effect that the
Disestablishment of the Church might result in the Queen's Crown being
kicked into the Boyne. As this is the only instance they can rake up,
it has been quoted in the House of Commons and elsewhere again
and again; and Mr. Birrell (whose knowledge of Ireland seems to be
entirely derived from Nationalist speeches) has recently elaborated
it by saying that when the Church was going to be disestablished
"they used to declare" that the Queen's Crown would be kicked into the
Boyne, and yet their threats came to nothing and therefore the
result of Home Rule will be the same. The fact was that the Church
establishment was the last relic of Protestant Ascendancy; and as
I have already shown, that meant Anglican ascendancy in which
Presbyterianism did not participate; hence, when the agitation for
Disestablishment arose, though some few Presbyterians greatly disliked
it, their opposition as a whole was lukewarm. But when in 1886 Home
Rule became a question of practical politics, they rose up against it
as one man; in 1893, when the second Home Rule Bill was introduced and
actually passed the House of Commons, they commenced organising their
Volunteer army to resist it, if necessary, by force of arms; and
they are just as keen to-day as they were twenty years ago. They are
certainly not disloyal; the republican spirit which permeated
their ancestors in the eighteenth century has long since died out
completely. Sir Walter Scott said that if he had lived at the time of
the Union between Scotland and England, he would have fought against
it; but, living a century later and seeing the benefit that it had
been t