blished Church of England a theory is current, at least among the clergy, that tithes are not a tax imposed by the State, which it is lawful for the State to remit or divert to other objects, but a vast aggregate of private endowments given to the several parishes by a multitude of private benefactors, whose wills or other instruments of foundation have been inadvertently mislaid. The refutation of this theory, as applied to the case of any Established Church whatever, is complete for those whose minds are open to receive it. That tithes were not the spontaneous gift of individual landlords, but a general impost enforced by a central authority, is proved, among other things, by the nature of many of the titheable articles, which were such that they could not possibly have formed part of a landowner's benefaction. "Will any man in his senses pretend that pious lords of manors, of their own private will, gave to the clergy the right for all future time to mulct the artificers resident in their parishes of a tenth of their wages? or assigned to the Church the tenth of the fish caught in the sea? or subjected millers to the ecclesiastical impost from A.D. 1315? or gave a tenth of the spoils of all hawking, hunting, fishing, and fowling ?"* But in the case of the Irish Church there can be no mistake about the matter. The institution of tithes is not, in this case, shrouded in those mists of the "prehistoric foretime," in which mythical theories find an asylum. The national Church of Ireland, in the days before the Norman invasion, was irregular in many respects to the strict ecclesiastical eye. These irregularities were corrected by the reforming synod of Cashel, which forbad marriages within the degrees prohibited by the Church, exempted the property of ecclesiastics from all contributions to lay chiefs, enforced the regular celebration of infant baptism according to the orthodox form, and enjoined the payment of tithes. What Henry II. enjoined, it is, we presume, competent for the legislature of the present day to abrogate or change.

Paley begins his chapter on Moral and Religious Philosophy by broadly laying it down, "that a religious establishment is no part of Christianity, it is only the means of inculcating it." "The authority," he says further on, "of a church establishment is founded in its utility; and whenever, upon this principle, we deliberate concerning the form, propriety, or comparative excellency of different establishments, the single view under which we ought to consider any of them is that of a ' scheme of instruction;' the single end we ought to propose by them is, 'the preservation and communication of religious knowledge. Every other idea, and every other end, that has been mixed with this-as the making of the Church an engine, or • Title-deeds of the Church of England, by Miall, p. 52.

even an ally, of the State; converting it into the means of strengthening or diffusing influence; or regarding it as a support of regal in opposition to popular forms of governmenthave served only to debase the institution, and to introduce into it numerous corruptions and abuses." He also admits in plain terms that if the dissenters from the Establishment become a majority of the people, the Establishment itself ought to be altered or modified. Considering that Paley upheld, on the ground of general expediency, anomalies which it would have been thought a man of his sense could scarcely have endured; considering that he upheld the constitution of the unreformed Parliament, and the judicial authority of the House of Lords, -his chapter on religious establishments and toleration will be found pretty plain-spoken. If such an institution as the Irish Establishment is to be maintained, it must be maintained, not on the ground of general utility, according to the great master of that philosophy, but upon some ground more divine.

If we are asked what is the great mischief the Irish Establishment does, the answer is easy and short: it connects the government, in the eyes of the great mass of the Irish people, with rank injustice, and makes it, and will continue to make it, an object, not of confidence and attachment, but of well-deserved suspicion and disaffection. It is vain to think that the government will ever take root in the affections of the Irish people until it ceases to trample on the national religion, and to impose by force an alien religion upon the nation. We should be sorry indeed to think that a government persisting in such a system ever could acquire the attachment of the people; for if it could, we should be compelled to believe that a nation had ceased to choose between right and wrong, and that the hearts of men were to be won by injustice.

Let the Protestants suppose, if they can, the tables turned, and the position of the two religions reversed. Let them suppose that they were the majority of the people in Ireland, and the Roman Catholics were the majority of the people in England; and let them suppose that this Roman Catholic majority established by force the Roman Catholic church, though that of the minority, in Ireland. What would their feelings be in this case? Would they not be in a constant state of disaffection to the government? Would they not be constantly resisting it, and caballing and conspiring against it ten times more than the Roman Catholics now do? Let them try to put themselves for a moment into the situation in which they think the other party ought so meekly to acquiesce. But the truth is, that by long habit the Irish Protestant has learnt to hold, that he is himself entitled, as of divine right, to indulge in the insolence and turbu

lence of the slave-owner, and that the Catholic ought to be too happy to be allowed to exist, on condition of accepting with dutiful humility the position of a slave.

The evil extends to the Parliament of the United Kingdom. We have there a large body of members who represent an oppressed and degraded interest, and who, as far as the interests of the United Kingdom are concerned, do not know, and till the wrongs of their community are redressed never will know and never ought to know, what patriotism means. Nothing can be imagined more fatal to the well-being of a state than the existence of a large class of this kind, smarting under political wrong, stung with political degradation, yet armed with political power. Suppose we were to get into a conflict with any nation which could effectually appeal, as Spain and France appealed in former times, to the sense of injury among the Catholics of this country, what would be the state of our national councils under such circumstances as these?

If the Protestant landlords of Ireland knew their own interests, as proprietors, they would support instead of opposing the abolition of the Irish Establishment. The one thing necessary to raise the value of property in Ireland to its natural level, and to secure all the interests which depend upon it, is the restoration of concord and tranquillity among the people. But the Establishment organises and keeps up in their sharpest form the old antipathies between the two churches and the two races which those churches represent. It stands in its towering injustice the sumptuous trophy, to use once more Macaulay's happy phrase, of the conqueror over the conquered, rallying round it all the tyrannical pride and fanatical bitterness of one party, and arraying against it all the hatred and vindictiveness of the other. Mere difference of religion, not sharpened by the existence of an establishment, would not long divide and distract a country, socially and politically, as Ireland is now divided and distracted. In the United States there are plenty of Roman Catholics, living in the same community with Protestants, the descendants of the Puritans; yet De Tocqueville has observed that the difference of religion causes no social divisions, and that the Protestant minister and the Catholic priest meet as a matter of course on the same platform for all social and philanthropic objects. In Canada there is, unhappily, an offset of the Orange faction, which imitates in violence and absurdity its counterpart in the mother country. There is a graver source of disturbance in the political antagonism between the upper province which is Protestant, and the lower province which is Roman Catholic. Yet even in Canada nobody speaks of the religious difference between Roman Catholics and Protestants as being a fountain

of bitterness and peril, like the same religious difference in Ireland. The truth is, that religious fanaticism has been charged with a good deal in the way of wars and divisions among mankind, which ought rather to be set down to the account of political tyranny, using religious fanaticism as its pretext, and perhaps as its ally.

There are few people who in the present day would not shrink from avowing that they wished to keep up the Irish Establishment of Ireland, a nominally religious institution, for a political purpose, as the means of securing the English interest in Ireland. But if there are any who avow this object, or covertly entertain it, they are very short-sighted politicians. For whatever may be the attractive influence which the Establishment exerts on the few who benefit by it, it may be safely said to be cancelled ten times over by its repulsive influence on the many to whom it is a standing wrong.

The Roman Catholic clergy have hardly ever been the direct instigators of sedition. In their natural tendencies they are conservatives in only too high a degree. They were not only totally guiltless of Whiteboyism and Rockism, and all the other agrarian conspiracies, but they were themselves sufferers by those conspiracies; for the fees of the priest were the object of Whiteboy attacks as well as the tithes of the parson. The rebellion of 1798 was got up, not by Roman Catholic priests, but by Protestant republicans at Belfast. The Roman Catholic priests of Ireland, like their brethren on the Continent, abhorred the French Revolution and all its works, and they would have arrayed themselves on the side of the government, if the government had not spurned them from it, and driven them to the other side. In struggling under O'Connell for Catholic Emancipation, they struggled for an object which the legislature at last sanctioned, and which every right-minded man now admits to have been lawful and not seditious.

Still, though not authors of sedition, nor obnoxious on that account to any injurious treatment, they are, from the very nature of their position, and while the present state of things last will continue to be, obstacles in the way of reconciliation between the government and the people. They are a peasant clergy; they live among the people, are their social guides and advisers, and form their feelings and ideas to a much greater extent than they would if they belonged to a different class. They feel the injustice with which they are treated, they feel their own degradation, they are inevitably enemies of the government by which they are wronged; and though they may have no formed design of exciting rebellion, they naturally and inevitably infuse their own bitter feelings into the breasts

of the people. We are by no means disposed to dwell upon the services which a clergy may render as upholders of a particular social order, or a particular form of government. We do not wish to recommend the ministers of Christianity in the character of "black police." But those who rely upon them as a conservative element in politics may perceive that in Ireland this potent engine, in its most potent form, is transferred by their policy from the conservative to the destructive side. A government has need to be very able, and very beneficent in other respects, to preserve civil peace in a country where it persists in placing the natural leaders of the people on the side of civil war.

The hope that the Establishment will, by its missionary exertions, convert the Irish people from the errors of Popery to the Protestant truth, must have by this time sunk in despair. Sir Robert Peel had used his eyes while he was living in Ireland as Irish Secretary, and he afterwards meditated on what he had seen; the fruit of which meditations, if he had lived and returned to power, might possibly have been something beyond Catholic Emancipation. Somebody was once defending the Irish Establishment to him as a means of converting the Irish from Popery; he replied by putting the awkward question, Can you claim a balance of two hundred converts during the course of the last two hundred years?

The papacy in its expiring hour receives but cold sympathy, and feeble assistance, from the great Catholic monarchies, where its religion has been established with boundless wealth and unlimited power. The government, nominally Catholic, which supports it, does so merely for political ends. The people of its own city, the seat of its pomp and of its lavish expenditure, would rise, if they could, and pluck it from its throne. In Ireland, where its votaries have but just escaped from the last of the penal laws, where they still lie under the Ecclesiastical-Titles Act, and where the profession of its faith has been the badge of poverty and degradation, it still retains the enthusiastic devotion of the people, and receives from them all the aid which their helplessness can afford. Such is the practical result of propagating the true religion after the method of Lord Eldon and King George III. Error by itself has never been a match for truth; but it has often been more than a match for truth and power."

The personal influence of the Roman Catholic clergy over their flocks, the object of so much dread, has been increased by the same auspicious policy; while, at the same time, their poverty and consequent want of high education as a class, have rendered it impossible that they should exercise that influence for enlightened objects of a social and economical kind.