Along with this advocacy of internationalism goes a plea for the disendowment of the Church, in order to provide an adequate financial basis for the future Crusade.
This has been aptly called "the disendowment of the religion of the misteries."
This stirring of the question deeply moved Lord Selborne, who was strongly opposed alike to disestablishment and disendowment, and in the following year, 1886, he published a work entitled A Defence of the Church of England against Disestablishment, with an introductory letter addressed to Gladstone.
It was promulgated in Mexico, and the ecclesiastics and Spaniards, fearing that a Liberal Spanish government would force on them disendowment, toleration and other changes, induced Augustin de Iturbide, who had already been conspicuous in suppressing the risings, to take the field in order to effect what may be called a reactionary revolution.
The success of the Baptists of Virginia in securing step by step the abolition of everything that savoured of religious oppression, involving at last the disestablishment and the disendowment of the Episcopal Church, was due in part to the fact that Virginia Baptists were among the foremost advocates of American independence, while the Episcopal clergy were loyalists and had made themselves obnoxious to the people by using the authority of Great Britain in extorting their tithes from unwilling parishioners, and that they secured the co-operation of free-thinking statesmen like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and, in most measures, that of the Presbyterians.