themselves when left without comment. This practical exposition of the new doctrine of equality is one of them. It has been for about ten years before the 'Liberation Society' and the public: I am not aware that its authors have retracted or abandoned any part of it. They may, of course, do so now, if they find it convenient for their main objects. But for some purposes it is incapable of being retracted. It must remain for ever an imperishable record, worthy to be engraved on tablets of brass wherever true liberality and distributive justice are held in any regard, of the idea of those things, entertained by the persons and the party whose war-cry is the Disestablishment and Disendowment of the Church of England.

CHAPTER XIX

THE ATTEMPT TO SEPARATE WALES

THE objects of those, who propose to break up the Church of England by piecemeal, and to begin in Wales, can hardly be misunderstood by Churchmen, or by any serious politicians.

1. The Separatist Argument.

With this view, language is addressed to the Welsh people, tending to a disintegration of the United Kingdom in this, as in other directions. From the time of Alfred, if not earlier, the Princes of Wales acknowledged the Kings of England as lords paramount; and, by the wars of Henry the Second and Edward the First, the direct government of the English Crown was established, first in South Wales, and afterwards throughout the Principality. Two hundred years later, Wales gave to England a dynasty descended from her own Princes, the most masterful which ever ruled over us. Under that dynasty the Reformation took place :- the existing division of Wales into counties was made; Monmouthshire became an English county; and Wales was, by statute,1 united with England, and admitted to a full and equal participa27 Hen. VIII., cap. 26.

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tion in English laws and liberties. Descendants of that dynasty have ever since occupied, and still occupy, the throne. The union has been a very happy and prosperous one, both to England and to Wales. To denounce the Church in Wales as 'the Church of the alien,' -to urge disestablishment on such grounds, as that the Celtic population of Wales 'is still divided from the Anglo-Saxon race by a seemingly insurmountable diversity of tastes and habits,' does not, I venture to think, become a liberal Englishman, or a patriotic Welshman.

2. The Ancient Welsh Church.

The Church in Wales has a peculiar historical interest. Its Episcopate is a connecting link between the Church founded among the Anglo-Saxons by Augustin, and the original British Church of Roman times. The remnants of that Church, not exterminated by the heathen invaders whose dominion succeeded that of Rome, found refuge in the mountainous parts of the island, and survived, with a complete ecclesiastical organisation, in Wales only. Of that earliest British Church, the present four Welsh Bishoprics are monuments.

Those who study the learned work of the late Mr. Haddan and Bishop Stubbs will find in the materials there collected (from which alone it is possible to obtain any knowledge of the ancient Welsh Church) nothing to justify the statement, that the disappearance of differences, or the

1 C. D., p. 109.

2 Mr. Osborne Morgan, Nineteenth Century, November 1885, p. 764. 3 Councils and Ecclesiastical Documents, etc., vol. i. (Oxford, 1869). 4 C. D., p. 108.

establishment of practical unity, between the Church of England and that of the Principality, was the result of Norman wars or conquests, or of the interference of Norman Kings, Barons, or Bishops. The differences 1 were of a trivial kind, quite unworthy to divide Churches; they disappeared (as much under native Welsh as under Saxon influence), during the Anglo-Saxon period, about the end of the eighth century.2 Full intercommunion, and close ecclesiastical relations between the Churches, followed: during the reign of Edward the Confessor, the English diocese of Hereford was, for several years, administered by one of the Welsh Bishops.3 It was, no doubt, after the Conquest, that the Welsh Bishops first acknowledged the Metropolitan jurisdiction of the See of Canterbury, and began to be summoned to, and to attend, Synods and Legatine Councils, as Bishops of that province. is true, also, that the power and influence, which the Norman Kings and their Barons acquired in Wales, extended, there as in England, to ecclesiastical as well as temporal matters: and that Normans were promoted to Welsh Bishoprics. But this did not interrupt, in Wales more than England, the continuity or identity of the Church :—and we are, happily, now remote from the time, when the words 'alien,' or 'stranger,' might have been appropriate, in any part of Great Britain, to describe, relatively to each other, men of Norman, or Saxon, or Celtic blood.

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1 Haddan and Stubbs, vol. i. p. 152.

3 Ibid., p. 291.

2 Ibid., p. 203.

It

4 Eadmer, Hist. Nov., lib. iii. p. 67; Spelman, Conc., vol. ii. p. 33; Wilkins, Conc., vol. i. p. 408.

3. Dissent in Wales.

It was not till the preaching of Whitefield and Wesley, and their followers, in the last century, that there was any considerable amount of Non-Conformity in Wales. Among their followers were some Welshmen of remarkable gifts and ardent zeal, who, preaching to the Welsh people in their own language, obtained great ascendency over them. I do not wish to detract from their praises: it is beyond all question that they did much good. The natural consequence was, that Dissent became a power in Wales, relatively greater than it is in England and so it is now. So much as this must be admitted: but I believe it to be equally true, that the Church has since recovered in Wales much of her lost ground, and promises to recover more, if fair scope is left to her. To ascertain the true numerical ratio of Churchmen to Non-Conformists in Wales is not possible, unless those means were taken, which the general body of Non-Conformists in England has hitherto resisted. It is easy, under these circumstances, for political or religious partisans to magnify the disproportion much beyond the truth. The so-called religious census of 1851, and other unauthorised and still less trustworthy attempts to substitute for a real census computations of comparative attendances at church or chapel, made by private and not impartial persons, are of no greater value for Wales, than they are for England.

4. Position and Work of the Present Welsh Church.

Some facts there are, which I am content either to take as I find them in authentic sources of information, or to accept as they are stated by those with whom I am in controversy.

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