ine of an 'alliance'
between church and state. The Tory inferred that the church should be
supported. His prescription for meeting discontent was 'more yeomanry'
and a handsome sum for church-building. The Whig thought that the
church got a sufficient return in being allowed to keep its revenues.
On the Tory view, the relation might be compared to that of man and
wife in Christian countries where, though the two are one, the husband
is bound to fidelity. On the Whig view it was like a polygamous
system, where the wife is in complete subjection, and the husband may
take any number of concubines. The Whig noble regarded the church as
socially useful, but he was by no means inclined to support its
interests when they conflicted with other political considerations. He
had been steadily in favour of diminishing the privileges of the
establishment, and had taken part in removing the grievances of the
old penal laws. He was not prepared to uphold privileges which
involved a palpable danger to his order.

This position is illustrated by Sydney Smith, the ideal divine of
Holland House. The _Plymley Letters_[56] give his views most pithily.
Smith, a man as full of sound sense as of genuine humour, appeals to
the principles of toleration, and is keenly alive to the absurdity of
a persecution which only irritates without conversion. But he also
appeals to the danger of the situation. 'If Bonaparte lives,'[57] he
says, 'and something is not done to conciliate the Catholics, it seems
to me absolutely impossible but that we must perish.' We are like the
captain of a ship attacked by a pirate, who should begin by examining
his men in the church catechism, and forbid any one to sponge or ram
who had not taken the sacrament according to the forms of the church
of England. He confesses frankly that the strength of the Irish is
with him a strong motive for listening to their claims. To talk of
'not acting from fear is mere parliamentary cant.'[58] Although the
danger which frightened Smith was evaded, this was the argument which
really brought conviction even to Tories in 1829. In any case the
Whigs, whose great boast was their support of toleration, would not be
prompted by any Quixotic love of the church to encounter tremendous
perils in defence of its privileges.

Smith's zeal had its limits. He observes humorously in his preface
that he had found himself after the Reform Bill engaged in the defence
of the National Church against the