BACK PAGES:Describing The Irish Timesof the past as a Protestant paper was usually shorthand for saying it supported the union, and opposed Home Rule and independence. When it mentioned "the country" it usually meant the United Kingdom, including Ireland, and the government was the British government (pre-independence references to the Irish government meant the Dublin Castle administration). But it was also, doctrinally, a Church of Ireland newspaper, as this editorial from a quiet week during the War of Independence illustrates.
During the last three years a hundred books have been written about the war’s influence on religion. All of them assume that the daily contact of millions of men with the naked issues of life and death must have made religion a more real thing to most of these men than it was before the war. . . The war seems to have strengthened their hold on the great, general truths of the Christian faith, and, at the same time, to have made them impatient of non-essential details. Men who bled and starved together in the trenches are unwilling to believe that a rubric can separate them in eternity . . .
In Ireland, up to a certain point – for we are, of course, conscious of . . . difficulties that good fellowship alone cannot solve – the Protestant denominations have made quicker and longer strides towards reunion. There are at least two reasons for this progress . . . In the first place, the disestablished Church of Ireland has always been proud to call itself Protestant. Its whole atmosphere is hostile to mere ecclesiasticism . . . has large fields of faith and practice in common with the other Protestant Churches of this country. In the next place, all our Protestant Churches, save in that part of Ulster where Presbyterianism is the prevailing creed, are the churches of minorities of the people. They are thrown, almost perforce, into one another’s company. If three educated men in a small Southern town – the rector and the Presbyterian and Methodist ministers – do not become friends and co-workers in the many social matters that lie outside the strict domain of doctrine, something must be very wrong with one or other of them.
In a country where so many influences are centrifugal this centripetal tendency of the Protestant Churches must be a subject for hope and gratitude . . . It is an asset which true statesmanship will not fail to conserve . . . in any plan for the future government of Ireland . . . The government’s paramount duty to Ireland today is not the throwing of new ingredients into our witches’ cauldron of hate and crime, but the firm restoration of security and law. One thing, however, requires to be said of the cabinet’s supposed intentions. Whatever its other features might be, any plan based on the partition of Ireland would be fatal to the vital interests of all the Protestant Churches in this country. It would divide the Church of Ireland and the Presbyterian and Methodist Churches not only against one another, but against themselves. The Presbyterian centre in Belfast would lose touch with its groups of isolated . . . colonies in the South and West. The Church of Ireland would be split into two sections, between which every year of partition would develop new breaches of outlook and interest. They might come in time to have no bond of union save the common name. All three Churches would lose prestige, strength, vitality, opportunities of service. The growing hope of reunion would be killed for ever. We can conceive no advantage from any “settlement” by partition which would furnish compensation for this calamity to the spiritual and social life of Protestant Ireland.
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