g to take the communion
at the altar of the privileged establishment. The next year a deadlier
blow fell after a more embittered fight--the admission of Roman
catholics to parliament and place. The Reform bill of 1832 followed.
Even when half spent, the forces that had been gathering for many years
in the direction of parliamentary reform, and had at last achieved more
than one immense result, rolled heavily forward against the church. The
opening of parliament and of close corporations was taken to involve an
opening to correspond in the grandest and closest of all corporations.
The resounding victory of the constitutional bill of 1832 was followed
by a drastic handling of the church in Ireland, and by a proposal to
divert a surplus of its property to purposes not ecclesiastical. A long
and peculiarly unedifying crisis ensued. Stanley and Graham, two of the
most eminent members of the reforming whig cabinet, on this proposal at
once resigned. The Grey ministry was thus split in 1834, and the Peel
ministry ejected in 1835, on the ground of the absolute inviolability of
the property of the Irish church. The tide of reaction set slowly in.
The shock in political party was in no long time followed by shock after
shock in the church. As has happened on more than one occasion in our
history, alarm for the church kindled the conservative temper in the
nation. Or to put it in another way, that spontaneous attachment to the
old order of things, with all its symbols, institutes, and deep
associations, which the radical reformers had both affronted and
ignored, made the church its rallying-point. The three years of tortuous
proceedings on the famous Appropriation clause--proceedings that
political philosophers declared to have disgraced this country in the
face of Europe, and that were certainly an ignominy and a scandal in a
party called reforming--were among the things that helped most to
prepare the way for the fall of the whigs and the conservative triumph
of 1841. Within ten years from the death of Canning the church
transfixed the attention of the politician. The Duke of Wellington was
hardly a wizard in political foresight, but he had often a good
soldier's eye for things that stood straight up in front of him. 'The
real question,' said the duke in 1838, 'that now divides the country and
which truly divides the House of Commons, is church or no church. People
talk of the war in Spain, and the Canada question. But all that is