COUNSEL FOR THE CLERGY. 



sects and opinions, in short the intellectual and moral exultation of the 

 species. What a triumphant reply would not this work be to those 

 who so confidently assert that the clergy of the establishment, both as 

 preachers and pamphleteers, have been, and are, indefatigably sedulous 

 in propagating all manner of narrow and illiberal opinions, both in 

 religion and politics ; and that the House of God has much oftener rung, 

 and the press laboured, with effusions of a bitter, intolerant spirit, than 

 with the enforcements of the evangelic lessons of peace and charity. 



Fourthly. An immediate publication, to be called Ecclesiastical 

 Biography, giving a copious and faithful narrative of the lives of those 

 countless numbers of the clergy, particularly the dignitaries of the 

 church, whose piety, simplicity, meekness, disinterestedness, and free- 

 dom from vulgar prejudices, and mean passions, are at present less 

 known to the great majority of the Christian world than the abstrusest 

 branches of modern mathematics. This work, no matter how great 

 the extent to which the nature of the subject and the mass of materials 

 may prolong it, appears to us to be indispensable. A few pages at the 

 end might, for the sake of candour, be devoted to the memoirs of Laud, 

 Magee, Philpots, Bloomfield, and the other two or three additional 

 exceptions, that by close research may possibly be found in the annals 

 of English episcopacy. 



Fifthly. Since the characters of the English and Irish establishments 

 are intimately bound up together, it would be adviseable to publish a 

 more full and satisfactory vindication of the latter, than the multiplicity 

 of their pastoral cares has up to the present moment enabled its own 

 clergy to furnish to the press. All that is necessary is to remove certain 

 gross mistakes, which it is evident have taken hold of the public mind 

 upon this subject ; for instance, that Ireland is a Catholic country ; 

 that the population is too poor to support two churches ; that the 

 wealth of the establishment is exorbitant ; that a great majority of the 

 clergy dine every day upon a larger number of dishes than there are 

 Protestants in their respective parishes; and that there are twenty 

 parsons like Mr. Boyton, for one like like one is so bewildered in 

 Ireland amongst thousands of exemplary clergymen, that it is impos- 

 sible to remember the name of a single instance. 



Sixthly. A well-drawn picture of the melancholy state of Scotland, 

 titheless, deanless, bishopless as she is, might do a great deal of service. 

 There is a hasty but vivid sketch of her appalling situation in a printed 

 speech of the present lord high chancellor, which drawn out into more 

 detail might answer the purpose. A view of America under the same 

 calamitous aspect is also a great desideratum. 



Seventhly. It is a bold proposition we are about to make, and we 

 have little hope that it will receive encouragement. Let the whole 

 machinery of the establishment be stopped for the space of one year. 

 During that interval let there be, as it were, no such thing as a mitre 

 in the land, no dignitary, not so much as a rural dean, no payments of 

 tithes, no receiving of rents, no renewing of leases, no hiring of cooks, 

 no stocking of cellars, no building of barracks, no charging with 

 cavalry, no shooting of farmers and their sons and daughters, no Stanley 

 legislations, no Anglesey " gun-brigs," no white-foot insurrections ; 

 let the establishment cease to work through all its departments, religious, 

 civil, and military, for one calendar year it would be cruel to punish 

 a whole nation for a longer period let there be a general stoppage of 



