emoved; no
tithes, no church-rates, no exclusive state support." And yet there, it
may be added, the fierce contentious spirit which rages in England is
unchanged in character, and the way of the Church is just as evil spoken
of in New South Wales as in the mother country. The only grievance the
dissenters can complain of now in Australia is that assistance is
afforded to the Church to a larger amount than they would like. But
this is grievance enough for them to raise an outcry about. And hence
arise fresh hindrances to the progress of true religion in these
settlements. There are other spirits besides the unclean spirits of
infidelity and iniquity which the Church has here to contend against.

The language of a very zealous and active clergyman of Australia is
this:--"Give us clergy and churches, and I will ensure congregations and
a vast spread of the gospel in the Church of Christ by means of the
Church of England."[210] But, so pitiable is the effect of religious
strife, that rather than allow the necessary means to be given for
this purpose, many would be content to leave things in their present
miserable state; and although, as in the mother country, the majority of
the population belong to the Church of England, yet the minority, in all
its little sections, unite in grudging every effort that is permitted,
every single pound that is spent, by the government in aid of the
Church. There is no communion that can pretend to lay claim to the
religious instruction of the people; it would be too absurd to propose
that the English nation should entrust the religious training of a
colony, like that of New South Wales,[211] containing upwards of 70,000
persons belonging to the national Church, into the hands of the
Presbyterians, with their 13,153 souls, or into those of the Methodists
and other dissenters, with their 5,093 souls, or even to the Romanists,
with their 35,690 souls! And accordingly, since it was hopeless to get
this important and responsible office exclusively for themselves, all
parties really would seem to have conspired together to keep it, at all
events, from falling into the possession of that body to which it of
right belongs,--the national Church of England and Ireland,--a Church
which the Presbyterians do not generally deny to be scriptural, and
which the Romanists, by their peculiar hostility, proclaim to be, in
the best and oldest meaning of the word, essentially Protestant. Under
feelings of this