adopt the common faith of the immense
majority of the people. The connection between Church and State was
therefore a natural, not an arbitrary, institution; the result of the
submission of the Government to popular influence, and the means by
which that influence was perpetuated. No Catholic Government ever
imposed a Catholic establishment on a Protestant community, or destroyed
a Protestant establishment. Even the revocation of the Edict of Nantes,
the greatest wrong ever inflicted on the Protestant subjects of a
Catholic State, will bear no comparison with the establishment of the
religion of a minority. It is a far greater wrong than the most severe
persecution, because persecution may be necessary for the preservation
of an existing society, as in the case of the early Christians and of
the Albigenses; but a State Church can only be justified by the
acquiescence of the nation. In every other case it is a great social
danger, and is inseparable from political oppression.

Mr. Goldwin Smith's vision is bounded by the Protestant horizon. The
Irish establishment has one great mark in common with the other
Protestant establishments,--that it is the creature of the State, and an
instrument of political influence. They were all imposed on the nation
by the State power, sometimes against the will of the people, sometimes
against that of the Crown. By the help of military power and of penal
laws, the State strove to provide that the Established Church should not
be the religion of the minority. But in Ireland the establishment was
introduced too late--when Protestantism had spent its expansive force,
and the attraction of its doctrine no longer aided the efforts of the
civil power. Its position was false from the beginning, and obliged it
to resort to persecution and official proselytism in order to put an end
to the anomaly. Whilst, therefore, in all cases, Protestantism became
the Established Church by an exercise of authority tyrannical in itself,
and possible only from the absolutism of the ruling power, in Ireland
the tyranny of its institution was perpetuated in the system by which it
was upheld, and in the violence with which it was introduced; and this
tyranny continues through all its existence. It is the religion of the
minority, the church of an alien State, the cause of suffering and of
disturbance, an instrument, a creature, and a monument of conquest and
of tyranny. It has nothing in common with Catholic establ