potatoes; so much for wheat; so much for oats; so much for hay -all exorbitant; and after a long list of unconscionable demands for the parson, comes in a peculation for the proctor: two shillings in the pound for proctorage-that is, for making a charge, for whose excess and extravagance the proctor ought not to have been paid, but punished.

As to potatoes, the clergyman ought not to proceed with reference to the produce, but the price of labor: in the parts of which I have been speaking, the price of labor is not more than 5d. a day the year round; that is, £6 4s. the year; supposing the laborer to work every day but Sunday, making an allowance for sickness, broken weather, and holidays, you should strike off more than a sixth: he has not in fact more than £5 a year by his labor; his family average about five persons, nearer six, of whom the wife may make something by spinning (in these parts of the country, there are considerable manufactories). Five pounds a year, with the wife's small earnings, is the capital to support such a family, and pay rent and hearth-money, and in some cases of illegal exaction, smoak-money to the parson.-When a gentleman of the church of Ireland comes to a peasant so circumstanced, and demands 12s. or 16s. an acre for tithe of potatoes—he demands a child's provision-he exacts contribution from a pauper --he gleans from wretchedness—he leases from penury—he fattens on hunger, raggedness, and destitution. In vain shall he state to such a man the proctor's valuation, and inform him that an acre of potatoes, well tilled, and in good ground, should produce so many barrels; that each barrel, at the market price, is worth so many shillings, which, after allowing for digging, tithes at so much.

The peasant may answer this reasoning by the Bible; he may set up against the tithe-proctor's valuation, the New Testamentthe precepts of Christ against the clergyman's arithmetic; the parson's spiritual professions against his temporal exactions, and in the argument, the peasant would have the advantage of the parson. It is an odious contest between poverty and luxury; between the struggles of a pauper and the luxury of a priest. Such a man making such a demand, may have many good

qualities; may be a good theologian; an excellent controversialist; deeply read in church history; very accurate in the value of church benefices; an excellent high priest-but no Christian pastor. He is not the idea of a Christian minister-the Whiteboy is the least of his foes-his great enemy is the precept of the gospel and the example of the apostles.

A tenth of your land, your labor, and your capital, to those who contribute in no shape whatsoever to the produce, must be oppression; they only think otherwise, who suppose, that everything is little which is given to the parson; that no burthen can be heavy, if it is the weight of the parson; that landlords should give up their rent and tenants the profits of their labor, and all too little; but uncertainty aggravates that oppression; the full tenths ever must be uncertain as well as oppressive, for it is the fixed proportion of a fluctuating quantity, and unless the high priest can give law to the winds, and ascertain the harvest, the tithe, like that harvest, must be uncertain; but this uncertainty is aggravated by the pernicious motives on which tithe frequently rises and falls. It frequently rises on the poor; it falls in compliment to the rich. It proceeds on principles the reverse of the gospel; it crouches to the strong, and it encroaches on the feeble; and is guided by the two worst principles in society, servility and avarice united, against the cause of charity, and under the cloak of religion.

The apostles had no tithe, they did not demand it; they, and He whose mission they preached, protested against the principle on which tithe is founded; "Carry neither scrip, nor purse, nor shoes; into whatsoever house ye go, say, Peace."

Here is concord, and contempt of riches, not tithe. "Take no thought what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink, nor for your bodies, what ye shall put on;" so said Christ to his apostles, Does this look like a right in his priesthood to a tenth of the goods of the community?

"Beware of covetousness; seek not what ye shall eat, but seek the kingdom of God."

"Give alms; provide yourselves with bags that wax not old, a treasure in heaven which faileth not." This does not look like a

right in the Christian priesthood to the tenth of the goods of the community exacted from the poor's dividend.

“Distribute unto the poor, and seek treasure in heaven.”

"Take care that your hearts be not charged with surfeiting and drunkenness, and the cares of this life."

One would not think that our Saviour was laying the foundation of tithe, but cutting up the roots of the claim, and prophetically admonishing some of the modern priesthood. If these precepts are of divine right, tithes cannot be so; the precept orders a contempt of riches-the claim demands a tenth of the fruits of the earth for the ministers of the gospel.

The peasantry, in apostolic times, had been the object of charity, not of exaction. Those to whose cabin the tithe-farmer has gone for tithe of turf, and to whose garden he has gone for the tithe potatoes, the apostles would have visited likewise; but they would have visited with contribution, not for exaction; the poor had shared with the apostles,—they contribute to the church

man.

The gospel is not an argument for, but against the right-divine of tithe; so are the first fathers of the church.

But there is an authority still higher than the opinions of the fathers; there is an authority of a council; the Council of Antioch, in the fourth century, which declares that bishops may distribute the goods of the church, but must take no part to themselves, nor to the priests that lived with them, unless necessity required them justly; "Have food and raiment; be therewith

content."

This was the state of the church, in its purity; in the fifth century, decimation began, and Christianity declined; then, indeed, the right of tithe was advanced, and advanced in a style that is odious. The preachers who advanced the doctrine, placed all Christian virtue in the payment of tithe. They said, that the Christian religion, as we say the Protestant religion, depended on it. They said, that those who paid not their tithes, would be found guilty before God; and if they did not give the tenth,—that God would reduce the country to a tenth. Blasphemous preachers!—gross ignorance of the nature of things-impudent familiarity with the ways of God

-audacious, assumed knowledge of his judgments, ar1 a false denunciation of his vengeance. And yet even these rapacious, blasphemous men, did not acknowledge to demand tithe for themselves, but the poor-alms!-the debt of charity-the poor's patrimony.

It was not the table of the priests, nor his domestics, nor his apparel, nor his influence, nor his ambition, but a Christian equipage of tender virtues—the widow, the orphan, and the poor; they did not demand the tithe as a corporation of proprietors, like an East India Company, or a South Sea Company, with great rights of property annexed, distinct from the community, and from religion; but as trustees, humble trustees to God, and the poor, pointed out, they presumed, by excess of holiness and contempt of riches. Nor did they resort to decimation, even under these plausible pretensions, until forced by depredations, committed by themselves on one another. The goods of the church, of whatever kind, were at first in common distributed to the support of the church, and the provision of the poor-but at length, the more powerful part, those who attended the courts of princes -they who intermeddled in state affairs, the busy high priest, and the servile, seditious, clerical politician; and particularly the abbots who had engaged in war, and had that pretence for extortion, usurped the fund, left the business of prayer to the inferior clergy, and the inferior clergy to tithe and the people.

Let bigotry and schism, the zealot's fire, the high priest's intol erance, through all their discordancy, tremble, while an enlightened parliament, with arms of general protection, over-arches the whole community, and roots the protestant ascendency in the sovereign mercy of its nature. Laws of coercion, perhaps necessary, certainly severe, you have put forth already, but your great engine of power you have hitherto kept back; that engine, which the pride of the bigot, nor the spite of the zealot, nor the ambition of the high, nor the arsenal of the conqueror, nor the inquisition, with its jaded rack and pale criminal never thought of:— the engine which, armed with physical and moral blessing, comes forth, and overlays mankind by services; the engine of redressthis is government; and this the only description of government

rth your ambition. Were I to raise you to a great act, I should not recur to the history of other nations; I would recite your own acts, and set you in emulation with yourselves. Do you remember that night, when you gave your country a free trade, and with your hands opened all her harbors? That night when you gave her a free constitution, and broke the chains of a century; while England, eclipsed at your glory, and your island, rose as it were from its bed, and got nearer to the sun? In the arts that polish life; the inventions that accommodate; and the manufactures that adorn it; you will be for many years inferior to some other parts of Europe; but, to nurse a growing people-to mature a struggling, though hardy community; to mould, to multiply, to consolidate, to inspire, and to exalt a young nation; be these your barbarous accomplishments!

I speak this to you, from a long knowledge of your character, and the various resources of your soul; and I confide my motion to those principles not only of justice, but of fire, which I have observed to exist in your composition, and occasionally to break out in a flame of public zeal, leaving the ministers of the crown in eclipsed degradation. It is therefore I have not come to you furnished merely with a cold mechanical plan; but have submitted to your consideration the living grievances; conceiving that anything in the shape of oppression made once apparent-oppression too of a people you have set free-the evil will catch those warm susceptible properties which abound in your mind, and qualify you for legislation.

CURRAN ON THE TRIAL OF ROWAN.

WHERE the press is free, and discussion unrestrained, the mind, by the collision of intercourse, gets rid of its own asperities, a sort of insensible perspiration takes place, by which those acrimonies, which would otherwise fester and inflame, are quietly diss ›lved and dissipated. But now, if any aggregate assembly shall meet, they are censured; if a printer publishes their resolutions, he is