rately by legal subtleties and theological animosities.
In spite of strenuous opposition, Sir Robert Peel and
Lord Chancellor Lyndhurstput an end to these ques-
tions by passing an Act which confirmed in the full
possession of establishments of this nature any reli-
gious society which had been in possession of them for
twenty years. The validity of the marriages of the
Presbyterians, who had settled in great numbers in
the north of Ireland, was a matter of considerable
doubtfulness; but this was entirely removed by a bill,
frankly accepted by the Episcopal Church of Ireland.
The Poor-Law received important and difficult ame-
liorations. The obligation to take a Christian oath
excluded the Jews from certain municipal offices-it
was abolished. The Cabinet did not succeed so well
with its measures for the reform of the Ecclesiastical
Courts, and of the municipal system in Ireland: on
these two questions, it was obliged to drop the bills
which it had presented. Placed between the syste-
matic adversaries and the systematic partizans of all
innovations, when it was unable to adduce, in support
of those which it proposed, either an imperious neces-
sity or that superabundant evidence in presence of
which prejudices and passions are sometimes silent,
it ran great risk of failing, either through having
attempted too much or not done enough. But these
reverses did not discourage Sir Robert Peel; it was
one of the characteristics of his mind that he had a
taste for small affairs as well as for great, and took
almost as much pleasure in the laborious accomplish-
ment of a modest administrative measure as in the

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