Page:The Conscience Clause (Oakley, 1866).djvu/20

8 regard this trust deed as solemnly guaranteed to them for ever, "without making any allowance for the change of circumstances, since that precedent was accepted by the Committee of Council as a suitable condition for the receipt of Parliamentary aid.

The most famous and typical case that had arisen was the well-known one of Llanelly, and this brought matters to a point. War was declared in the usual form, and the serious campaign, which has not yet closed, was opened, after much argument and correspondence, and some less important deputations, with an invasion of the Council Office by a very important deputation from the National Society on April 5th, 1862. The cases of grievance which they carried with them to discharge at the Lord President were four English ones, of various degrees of importance, which I cannot stop to explain. They embodied, however, more or less, the points that had been at issue in the great case at Llanelly. It was, in fact, in great measure out of the peculiar composition of the Welsh parishes that the difficulty arose in its most pressing shape, Protestant Dissenters constituting in many parishes in Wales a large proportion, not seldom an overwhelming majority, of the population. The point had, however (I may mention by the way, and I do not remember to have seen it noticed before), presented itself still earlier in Scotland, when, on occasion of the disruption of the Established Church, the Free Church was at first disposed, till held in check by the Committee of Council, to plant a new Free Church school yard-arm to yard-arm with each one belonging to the Established Communion. In the South, however, the matter came to a head in Wales, and the case of Llanelly, in Carmarthenshire, will best, perhaps, represent its difficulties. I take it because in it the case of the Council Office is the most difficult to sustain in the eyes of zealous Church people, and the common sensible acquiescence in the