1832.] Tithe versus Rent. 77 



there is a demand for masculine piety, and talents and acquirements in 

 a clergyman, the supply will commence, and rapidly increase. At pre- 

 sent, decency and demureriess of manner, and tameness of spirit (with- 

 out which a man will hardly suffer himself to be sufficiently cheated out 

 of), punctuality in attendance on the formalities of church service, sanc- 

 tified abhorrence of mirth on Sundays, comparative easiness as to mis- 

 chief and vice on working days. At present, these are the only quali- 

 fications absolutely required by public opinion in a clergyman. What 

 right, then, has the public to complain, if the parsons are not so robust 

 as they might be ! but only about twenty times as useful as the landed 

 proprietors ! 



35. With the public is lodged the power of calling forth to its use, 

 through the instrumentality of the provision of tithe, due to the public 

 from the landed proprietors, a class of masculine Christians, and scholars, 

 and philosophers, such as no nation without equal funds at its disposal, 

 ever could possess a class of men, independent of the ignorant, and 

 puling, and canting pretension to piety, by which men, supported by 

 the voluntary tithe contributions of a Christian society of the present 

 day, must be obstructed in the wish of elevating the moral character of 

 a population a class of men to whom, as it would be expected of them, 

 the education of the poor might best be entrusted, in the full assurance 

 of the greatest benefit to be derived from their exertions. 



36. The attention of the writer of this article was excited, and his 

 spirit roused to defend the poor parsons on grounds, beyond all candid 

 denial, free from exception, by an article on Tithes, in a late number of 

 the Westminster Review. Nothing can be fairer than that the writer 

 of that article should, if he thinks parsons worse than devils, deny them 

 that due to which even devils are by fair men considered entitled. It 

 is not perhaps too much, as the article alluded to evinces a coherent and 

 sane mind, to conclude, that the writer has not yet reached this extreme 

 point of error, in judgment, respecting parsons, however disposed, not- 

 withstanding, to hate them, as if he had. The writer of the present 

 article knows very well that hard names are even a worse species of 

 argument than hard blows : their logical insufficiency being the same, 

 while their conclusions are not nearly so convincing. He will not him- 

 self resort to such bad arguments while he has better to use, but he 

 cannot help half asserting, that if any fighting parson of the land should 

 take occasion to cast Bully and Sycophant in the teeth of the Westmin- 

 ster Reviewer, he might perhaps be not altogether without justification. 

 Bully, for his ferocious attack upon men comparatively, at this juncture, 

 defenceless ; Sycophant, for his gross attempt to curry favour with the 

 landed proprietors, of whom it is impossible he can approve, by sug- 

 gesting that the property of the parsons shall be sacrificed to that 

 overloaded and greedy class, to make them amends for the necessary 

 abrogation of the corn laws Mala mens, malus animus. The man must 

 have known better. A silly man could not have written the article 

 alluded to. It betrays hatred savage hatred throughout. He wrote 

 not because he loved the poor; riot because he liked the rich; but because, 

 though he cared little for the first, and hated the second, he hated the 

 parsons still more. 



