the recognised solution of the
difficulty.

With the introduction of the Bill in 1869 began those dire prophecies
and grim forebodings which have formed a running accompaniment to every
Irish reform, and Mr. Gladstone and the Liberals were denounced for
having sanctioned sacrilege. In the end the Church saved from the
burning more than in any equitable sense she was entitled to claim. The
Representative Body, which was incorporated in 1870, received about nine
millions for commuted salaries, half a million in lieu of private
endowments, and another three-quarters of a million was handed over to
lay patrons.

The commutation paid to the Non-Conformists for the Regium Donum and
other payments was nearly L800,000, and in lieu of the Maynooth grant
the Catholic Church received less than L400,000, the income from which
fund only covers about one-third of the annual cost of maintenance of
Maynooth. The history of this grant dates from the L9,000 given to the
College by the Irish Parliament, which was increased by Peel in 1844 to
L26,000 a year. When in the following year he brought in a Bill to make
it a vote of,L30,000 for building purposes, the _Times_, according to
Greville, "kept pegging away at Peel in a series of articles as
mischievous as malignity could make them, and by far the most
disgraceful that have ever appeared on a political subject in any public
journal."

That on the purely financial side the Catholic Church in Ireland would
have gained by concurrent endowment these figures, which represent the
whole of her receipts from public funds, amply bear witness, but that
she gained in a moral sense far more than in a material sense she might
have secured, no one will for one moment deny.

The glaring discrepancy between the amount of public funds at her
disposal and the amount held by the other religious bodies from public
sources did not abate the virulence with which the Church Act was
assailed, but at this day what is of interest is that the jeremiads of
the Protestants as to the consequences either to the country at large or
to their Church in particular were in every respect uncalled for, as was
acknowledged by no less a person than Lord Plunket, at a later time
Archbishop of Dublin, who, when in that position, admitted that the
Church Act had proved not a curse, as was expected, but a blessing to
the Episcopalian Protestant Church. This body has at the present moment
in Ireland 1,500 churches, to which