Welsh Journals

clergy). The nineteenth-century Irish Church, incidentally, is getting a much better press from historians than it did from most of its contemporaries. The third chapter deals with reforms of the Church by outsiders between 1830 and 1867, and includes a good account of the framing and terms of the Church Temporalities Act of 1833, and a most useful section on the work of the Irish Ecclesiastical Commissioners, who brought new standards of efficiency to the administration of the Irish Church. The fourth and fifth chapters are on the disestablishment of the Irish Church and its subsequent reorganisation. Here, the present reviewer has worked over much of the same material as Mr. Akenson, and emerged with very similar conclusions. However, there are a few points to question. Is it quite correct for Mr. Akenson to say (p. 237) that Gladstone could approach disestablishment in any way he desired ? There were limitations imposed on him by the alliance of Liberals, Irish Catholics, and British Nonconformists which he was leading-as he found when he tried to give money to Irish Catholics and Nonconformists for glebe-houses. Also, in his generally justified praise for the Irish Church Act, Mr. Akenson fails to point out that the provisions in the Act for tithe redemption proved useless, because the price to be charged was well above the market value of tithe. This meant that the capital sum which Gladstone assumed would be provided for the relief of poverty in Ireland was never forth- coming. It was a serious flaw in the Act, and a strange miscalculation by Gladstone. On the reorganisation of the Irish Church, Mr. Akenson exaggerates the success of the revisionists in the Prayer Book controversy by concentrating too much on the new Irish canons, and not enough on the failure to change any crucial passage in the services for ordination, baptism, and Holy Communion. There remains the question of the style and approach of the book. The author writes that his approach has been that of the social scientist. In so far as this means that he has sought to present statistics and to construct tables wherever possible, this is valuable. But he has also caught some of the jargon of the social scientist, and this makes the book difficult to to read and longer than it need be. There are sometimes two sentences of identical meaning, one in jargon ('the government lacked negative sanctions'), the other in plain words ('there was almost nothing the politicians could do about it') (p. 32). A sentence in the preface (p. xii) reads: 'Given the assumption that the purpose of the church was to deliver pastoral services to the Anglican constituency, the criterion for judging whether or not a given practice or activity was functional or dysfunctional to the organization is whether the practice implemented or impeded the delivery of these pastoral services.' This is wordy, clumsy, and typical of too much of the book's style. P. M. H. BELL Liverpool