es, not from the mode in which the power was
exercised, but from the way in which it was defended. The mediaeval
writers were accustomed to generalise; they disregarded particular
circumstances, and they were generally ignorant of the habits and ideas
of their age. Living in the cloister, and writing for the school, they
were unacquainted with the polity and institutions around them, and
sought their authorities and examples in antiquity, in the speculations
of Aristotle, and the maxims of the civil law. They gave to their
political doctrines as abstract a form, and attributed to them as
universal an application, as the modern absolutists or the more recent
liberals. So regardless were they of the difference between ancient
times and their own, that the Jewish chronicles, the Grecian
legislators, and the Roman code supplied them indifferently with rules
and instances; they could not imagine that a new state of things would
one day arise in which their theories would be completely obsolete.
Their definitions of right and law are absolute in the extreme, and seem
often to admit of no qualification. Hence their character is essentially
revolutionary, and they contradict both the authority of law and the
security of freedom. It is on this contradiction that the common notion
of the danger of ecclesiastical pretensions is founded. But the men who
take alarm at the tone of the mediaeval claims judge them with a theory
just as absolute and as excessive. No man can fairly denounce imaginary
pretensions in the Church of the nineteenth century, who does not
understand that rights which are now impossible may have been
reasonable and legitimate in the days when they were actually exercised.

The zeal with which Mr. Goldwin Smith condemns the Irish establishment
and the policy of the ascendency is all the more meritorious because he
has no conception of the amount of iniquity involved in them.

The State Church of Ireland, however anomalous and even scandalous
its position may be as the Church of a dominant minority upheld by
force in the midst of a hostile people, does not, in truth, rest on a
principle different from that of other State Churches. To justify the
existence of any State Church, it must be assumed as an axiom that
the State is the judge of religious truth; and that it is bound to
impose upon its subjects, or at least to require them as a community
to maintain, the religion which it judges to b