The Church of Ireland. Ecclesiastical Reform and Revolution, 1800–1885 by Donald Harman Akenson (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 195 concern for the facticity of the events connected with the Resurrection was not reflected in the early Church which used the narrative of the empty tomb not for verificational but for apologetic purposes. Faith continues to require the experience of the Resurrection rather than its proof, yet the New Testament can give us moral certitude about the life of Jesus, and on the basis of this moral certitude faith makes its appearance. The dimension of believer is thus added to that of investigator/historian. Dominican House of Studies Wa~~hington, D. C. BoNIFACE RAMsEY, 0. P. The Church of Ireland. EcclesilUJtical Reform and Revolution, 1800-1885. By DoNALD HARMAN AKENSON. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Pp. 4~~- $15.00. Recent events in Northern Ireland have focused attention on the religious situation in Ireland. There are approximately 41A, million people on the island taken as a whole. Northern Ireland accounts for I% million of these. It has a Protestant population of 900,000 of all denominations. 345,000 of these Christians are members of the Church of Ireland. This affiliation is shared by 130,000 citizens of the Irish Republic which is 3.7% of a population where Protestants form not quite 5% of the total. The Church of Ireland is, then, a substantial Protestant body in Northern Ireland and in the Republic, the most significant. This significance cannot be converged simply by statistics. Historically, it was the church of the English establishment in Ireland. On a more positive side, it was the church of such clerics as Jonathan Swift and George Berkeley. Most famous Irishmen were at least baptized in the church and the son of one of its clergymen. W. B. Yeats once reminded the fledgling Irish Free State senate that those of his stock were " no mean people." This book, by an associate professor of history at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, is an historical account of the processes by which the organizational structure of the Church of Ireland assumed its present shape. The crucial years are covered in this book. In the aftermath of the Reformation, the Church of Ireland was established as a State church just as was its sister church, the Anglican body, in England. The Act of Union of Great Britain and Ireland of 1801 also brought the two churches into union-but only in name. The Church of Ireland proved more easily vulnerable to moves for disestablishment by reason of the conjunctive forces of liberal opinion in Britain and the ever more politically powerful Roman Catholic Church in Ireland under Cardinal Cullen. Disestablishment 196 BOOK REVIEWS was finally enacted in 1868. This event required a radical restructuring of Church polity and was an enormous crisis for the church. The upshot was a de-emphasizing of the hierarchical principle of church governance in favor of a more democratic structure with a strong lay voice. Though the author explicitly steers away from theological questions, he does mention the concomitant hegemony of evangelical thinking and the abhorrence of Romish tendencies espoused by the Tractarian movement. Sociologically well-informed, this book provides a thorough treatment of the organizational re-ordering of the church of the Anglo-Irish who, of necessity, have had to suffer great trials, because of divided loyalties, and yet have contributed much to the land that their ancestors sought to colonize. The Catholic University of America Washington, D. C. WILLIAM HAYEs, 0. P. ...