planted his colony with such a multitude of Anabaptists, Quakers, and other worser sectaries, that in the beginning of the English rebellion were broken citizens, tradesmen, tailors, tinkers, shoemakers, coblers, plowmen, and other of the like; men of no fortune, thought to raise themselves by the Irish wars; and, having some arrears of pay due unto them, got orders to let out lands unto them for the same; and the kingdom being depopulated and wasted, and made a wilderness without inhabitant, the lands were nothing worth, and they had what lands they pleased, and at what they pleased, for the arrears.

"These men being mounted upon cock horse to be such great freeholders, the Irish proprietors being for the most part driven away, and the church lands being taken into these soldiers' hands, they considering their own interest to he alike in the lands both of the church and Irish, do stick and cling together like sworn brothers, or rather like foresworn wretches, to defend and maintain each others title in the lands, both against clergy and laity, God and the king; be the same right or wrong, they will not let go their hold." Again, he says in his other tract, "If you walk through Ireland, as I rode from Carlingford to Dublin, and from Dublin to Kilkenny, and in my visitation thrice over the diocese of Ossory, I believe that throughout all your travels you shall find, as I find it, scarce one church standing and sufficiently repaired, for seven (I speak within compass,) that are ruined—and what a lamentable and miserable sign is this! If you say that in the time of blindness the people were over zealous in building up too many churches, I say that now in the sunshine of the Gospel, they are too riotous in pulling them down." Further on he says, "That of about one hundred churches that our forefathers built, and sufficiently endowed in the diocese of Ossory, there are not twenty standing, or ten well repaired at this day." The indignant bishop goes on then to show how the best livings in the diocese was held by the nobility, gentry, and corporations, who yielded little or nothing towards the service of God in the Church, neither dare the poor vicars or curates ask them any thing for the service of those churches; and it is to no purpose for any incumbent to sue for tithes or rights that belong to his church, for when he sueth and proveth his allegation, then comes a prohibition procured by the interest of the great man, to stop further proceedings in the Court Christine; and the consequence is that curates and vicars cannot strive against the stream, and labour in the vineyard, while wanting bread; and so our God is dishonoured, the people are uninstructed, and ignorance, superstition, and popery very likely to continue still unrooted out."

His Lordship then, in all fair dealing, and in order to show how the poor parsons and vicars in Ossory were provided for, gives the value of the respective benefices which his clergy held in their possession; "by which (says he) my readers can understand the meanness of our Irish livings." We wish we had room to insert the whole document, it would form a curious contrast to the present value of the same preferments. For brevity sake, the Bishop's observations concerning the state of his diocese, may be summed up in the following quaint and characteristic observation. "To say the truth, without fear of any man, we are not only deprived of the vicarial tithes and offerings, by the farmers of the great lord's impropriate rectories; but our lands and glebes are clipped and paired, so as to become as thin as Banbury cheeses." This was a bad state of the Church. have reason to believe, that the Protestant English Parliament urged their Popishly inclined king, to restore many of the impropriate rectories that remained in possession of the crown, to the clergy; as also to endow the

VOL. XI.

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southern bishops, under the Act of Settlement out of the forfeited lands, who received many grants to that effect; but it is too evident, that the Established Church was in a poor degraded state during the whole of this reign. The reigns of the Popish James, and the warlike William, were a in which the Church could not thrive. In Anne's reign it began to hold up its head. She bestowed on the clergy of Ireland the first fruits which originally belonged to the pope, but which Henry VIII. vested in the crown; but as the bishops and superior clergy had contrived to keep, in paying their first fruits into the king's treasury, to the old valuation of benefices, ascertained in Henry's time, so this gift of the crown was of comparatively little good, in building or repairing churches, or augmenting the income of inferior vicarages and curacies. Had the real value, increasing with the times, been paid in, there would have been no necessity to apply to parliament for aid; there would have been comparatively little occasion for the levying of parish cess, and there would not exist at this day that deplorable inequality between benefices. When, as in too many cases, he who has most work and most responsibility, has the least maintenance. Dean Swift gives rather a sorry picture of the impoverished state of the Church at the accession of the house of Hanover; it seems the worthy Irish Protestants, were desirous to have all the proceeds of the island in their own purses, and therefore, they began to clamour against the overgrown incomes of the bishops and clergy; and having first spoliated the Church, so far as to cause a necessity of uniting parishes, to produce a competence for a minister, they began to exclaim against the very pluralities and unions that their own sacrilege was the cause of. Swift thus defends the bishops and inferior clergy: "To gratify this great reformer, who enlarges the episcopal interest almost one half, let me suppose that all the Church lands in the kingdom were thrown up to the laity, would the tenants, in such case, sit easier in their holdings than they do now, or would the money be equally spent in the kingdom? No, the farmer would be screwed up to the utmost penny by the agent stewards of absentees, and the revenues employed in making a figure in London, to which city, a large part of the whole income of Ireland is annually returned."

"Another of his quarrels is against pluralities and non-residence; as to the former, it is a word of ill name, but not well understood; the clergy having been stripped of the greatest part of their revenues, the glebes being generally lost, the tithes in the hands of laymen, the churches demolished, and the country depopulated. In order to preserve a face of Christianity, it was necessary to unite small vicarges to make a tolerable maintenance for a minister: the profits of ten or a dozen of these unions do seldom amount to above £80 or £100 a-year. As to non-residence, I believe there is no Christian country upon earth, where the clergy have less to answer for upon that article. I am confident, there are not two clergymen în the kingdom, who, properly speaking, can be termed non-residents: for, surely, we are not to reckon in that number those, who, for want of glebes, are forced to retire to the nearest ueighbouring village for a cabin to put their heads in the leading man of the parish, when he makes the greatest clamour, being least disposed to accommodate his minister with an acre of ground. And indeed, considering the difficulties the clergy lie under, upon this head, it has been a frequent matter of wonder to me, how they are able to perform that part of their duty so well as they do."

Such was the testimony of Swift, who was not apt to flatter concerning the state of Church property in his day. But we now approach the last great act of lay spoliation, which occasioned to the clergy the loss of the

greater part of their income; which cast the payment of that income off the shoulders of the rich Protestants, and laid it as a blistering burden on the necks of the poor Romanists, which galled them more as an insulting injustice, than as a pecuniary loss, which gave a handle to every incendiary to work at for the purpose of insurrection, and which has been the excuse at least, if not the cause of all the White-boy, and Right-boy, and Rockite insurgencies, from that day to this.

The Protestant aristocracy of Ireland had just succeeded in putting the finishing statute to the penal laws, and they thought in their pride that they had cut the sinews of Popery, there to lie hamstrung and bleeding for ever. They felt assured, that what they called Protestantism, was safe, and therefore they might make short work with its ministers; and holding their religion cheap, they supposed they might have it cheap also. Therefore, resolved they, we will make the Papists pay our clergy for us, and we will pay little or nothing ourselves. And so in the year 1735,* the house of Commons, by a vote as unconstitutional, as it was unjust, passed a resolution, that any clergyman who claimed tithe of agistment, or in other words, who demanded tithe from grazing cattle, was an enemy to his country. By this vote, the clergy were deterred from demanding their just right, and the Protestant gentry, who were the great landholders and grazing farmers of the island, exempted themselves from tithe; and the poor parson was obliged to seek for his income from the patch of corn, the ridge of flax, or to the potatoe garden of the poor Romish peasant; the reason assigned for this and tyranny seldom is at a loss for a pretext was, that the Protestants were emigra ting to America, and what was, in a great measure, in consequence of their own exorbitant rents, they said was owing to the pressure of tithes. This vote of the Commons, coupled with the enactment of the Penal Laws, was of most ruinous tendency. It effectually checked the wholesome progress of the Reformation, it increased pluralities, called up the necessity of uniting whole districts of country into an union for the maintenance of the parson, and it made that parson wherever he appeared, hateful in the eyes of his Romish parishioners, doubly hateful indeed, odious in himself, and hateful in his tithe proctor, whom it was necessary to employ, in order to collect in the small payments arising from the potatoe culture and tillage of the poor. This exemption of agistment tithe was never sanctioned by a statute of the Irish Parliament, it only became the law of the land by the Act of Union.

We would now recapitulate what we have said concerning the Church property of Ireland, and request our readers to bear in mind, whilst our enemies are calling on us to do what they say the Church of Rome did formerly; that, in the first instance, we have none of her abbey lands-they are in the hands of the laity. Secondly, we have lost more than one third-nearly one half of our tithe, for six hundred and eighty parishes are in the bands of the laity. Thirdly, we have been despoiled of one thousand eight hundred of our glebes. Fourthly, we have been plundered out of two thirds of the remainder of our tithe property by the agistment enact ment. Now if the clergy of Ireland had their right, such as the Romish clergy had, they would receive £1,500,000, whereas they do not receive £400,000 -in fact they do not receive a fourth of their right. Forty-three years ago

• In order to shew what a robbery this disinterested House of Commons intended of the Church by the vote in question, it may be observed that so inconsiderable was the tillage of Ireland, that parliament offered bounties for the growth of corn; and a few years before, a bill was brought in, making it imperative for every holder of one hundred acres of land, to till five acres.

Dr. Woodward, Bishop of Cloyne, calculated the average income of each clergyman in Ireland to be £133 6s. Leslie Foster, Esq. about four years ago, calculated it at £299, and the present Bishop of Limerick at £250.— Now when it is taken into account that there are serious drawbacks from this average in the demands of charity-in which our clergy are seldom backward -and in the support of schools; it cannot be desirable that their income should be decreased, but on the contrary, it should be enlarged, if possible, considerably. As to the inequality of the distribution of this property, that is quite another matter, which ought to be, and I believe is, now a subject of serious consideration. But as it respects the burden, as it is called, on the lands of Ireland, the inequality of distribution is altogether out of the question; and, if I am right in stating, that as the income of the parochial clergy of Ireland does not amount to £400,000 per annum, and, as there are more than 11,000,000 of acres in Ireland, at this rate all that Ireland pays for the support of her Protestant parochial clergy, amounts to no more than about four pence per acre. Now, I am quite certain, that the country pays the Romish clergy more than this. I think it can be fairly assumed, that this body of celibate clergy, who have no wives or children to give as pledges to the state for love or loyalty, have better means than their Protestant rivals-whether they spend it better than we do, I do not presume to decide-but of this I am quite certain-from the information given me by intelligent Roman Catholics-that many of the parish priests in Munster receive upwards of £1000 a year; some in Tipperary we know to rejoice in £1200. Now as our clergy are often called on by Romish and liberal Protestant declaimers, to do what the old popish church did—namely, build churches, educate the people, and support the poor-why we, the Protestant clergy, are ready to undertake even this great responsibility, provided that the funds the old Romish church possessed are conveyed over to us. Give us up the old abbey lands-give up the old glebes-let the impropriators surrender their rectories-let us have the tenth of the produce of the land, whether it be in cattle or tillage-consign all this back to the Established Church, then we will support the poor, educate the people, cover the land with religious edifices, and take care of ourselves; and then with God's blessing, and while preaching his blessed Gospel, we shall not fear but that our country will prosper. But if this will not be done as questionless it will not-why let us then hear no more of being called on to fulfill four former duties, when we only have a quarter of the old means-nor let it be expected that we can draw on the old four horse coach, when we have but a single beast in the harness.

The truth is, that no minister, no parliament, would or could venture to divest the Protestant parochial clergy of their present incomes; they may interfere to regulate the inequality of its distribution, and the mode in which it is levied they may and, we think, ought to make the tithe commutation imperative throughout Ireland--they may, and, we think, ought to make the landlord pay it as he does the quit and crown rents, and not the tenant -they may, and they ought to make an adjustment of value between the landlord and the parson every seven, ten, or twenty years. Regulations such as these may, and will be soon carried into effect; but, certainly, unless it is intended that Protestantism shall be extirpated out of Ireland, the Church property will not be lessened.

C. O.

ON SELF DECEIT.

TO THE EDITOR OF The christIAN EXAMINER.

SIR-Encouraged by the insertion of my former and first article on religious feeling, I now venture to present you with another sketch taken from the same extensive field. I am afraid that your readers may suspect me of a tendency to caricature. It may be so, for portraits in print have very much that tendency-but surely if I exaggerate, it is not with an intent to be severe or wantonly satirical upon the most sacred of all professions. And surely on the solemn subject of man's feelings towards his Maker and Judge, the reins of levity ought to be held in. If I fail, therefore, in the present attempt, let me at least receive the credit of having" set down nought in malice."

In all ages and in all climes, depraved man has manifested by his conduct, that the law written on his heart proclaims in ineffaceable characters to the eye of the mind, his alienation from God. The rudest nation on the face of the earth, has bad some idea of a medium of intercession; and the priests of all religions, standing as it were between the offenders and the offended, bring a testimony even from nature of the truth of that glorious corner-stone of the Christian faith-the great high priest who hath walked within the veil, and appears in the presence of God for us. It is this feeling which has exalted the ministers of every false religion into such power, and given them an influence which they use so effectually for the degradation of their spiritual vassals; and it is this feeling allowed to operate occasionally among the lovers of pure and undefiled religion, which so frequently produces re-actions that throw men into the opposite extreme of priest-daring infidelity. The day is fast going down in which the clerical station was considered sufficient of itself to secure respectability for its occupant. From henceforward would we fondly hope that the Protestant clergy will deprive their adversaries of even the shadow of a shade of accusation-maintaining the respectability of their station, by the respectability of their individual characters-neither lording it over God's heritage, nor sewing pillows to all arm-holes-wielding a moral influence, by standing forth as the messengers of Christ, and seeking not the fleece but the flock. Oh, let them leave it to others to exhibit the marks of a false priesthood-let them leave it to others to stand crying from morning even until noon, "Oh, Baal hear us !"-and though the dark clouds of change and revolution overhang the horizon, and though the trench round the altar should be overflowed, let them manifest to the multitude around that the fire of heaven is descending on their sacrifices, until they be constrained to fall on their faces and cry, "Jehovah, he is the God!-Jehovah, he is the God!"

Now, in this day of stir and agitation, dogmatism is branded with the mark of "the beast ;" and yet strange to say, dogmatism walks in the highest spiritual places, and sways his sceptre over congregations heady and high-minded. The commanding influence which the pastor exercises, who possesses the happy junction of the graces of the head and the heart-for whom the Fountains of mind have flown forth sparkling with taste and genius; and the Source of holiness with piety and zeal-is perverted, just as every blessing of the God of heaven is perverted, by the very creatures to whom they are given for good. The man becomes idolised, and sometimes forgets himself -we run to hear him more for a mental feast than for spiritual edification