1830.] [ 427 ] 



FATHER MURPHY'S DREAM. 



I AM tempted, by the publication of a work entitled " The Divines 

 of the Church of England/' to undertake " The Priests of the Papist 

 Church of Ireland/' My materials are voluminous, and of a nature quite 

 new and strange to religious readers. I am satisfied that the originality 

 would be altogether on my side. What is Bishop Sherlock in compa- 

 rison with Bishop Doyle ? Will Atterbury bear comparison with Keogh ? 

 Will not Hurd and Paley sink into insignificance before O'Gallagher 

 and Mullowney ? We have euphony as well as theology in our favour. 

 When Clarke, the celebrated linguist, discovered in " Genesis" that the 

 serpent was condemned, as a punishment for his primeval crime, to 

 " creep upon his belly," he very naturally concluded that he must have 

 originally walked upon his tail : so we, seeing that it has been thought 

 necessary to collect the works of the English Divines, in order that the 

 public may be put in possession of them, concluded that the public 

 must have hitherto known nothing about them. Now the works of the 

 Irish Priests have never been collected, which we take to be a satisfac- 

 tory proof, agreeably to this mode of reasoning, that the public are inti- 

 mately acquainted with their beauties. This consideration leads us to 

 think, that a selection of picked excellences, by way of a pocket com- 

 pendium of priestly divinity, would be more useful than an elaborate 

 edition of the whole. People who will not read encyclopedias are some- 

 times induced to peep into anthologies. The man who wants courage to 

 scale Mount Olympus may, if he be in a sunny mood, ascend the little 

 hill in Greenwich Park, to have a peep at the sky through the pension- 

 er's telescope. Our divine scraps, therefore, shall be of this accessible 

 kind. They shall not present the difficulties of the encyclopedia, or the 

 toils of Olympus : they shall be brief, and easy of attainment. 



As the old French priesthood declined, in consequence of the encou- 

 ragement given to the home-breed by the establishment of Maynooth 

 College, the appearance of what is for convenience called a gentleman 

 became a great rarity amongst the Irish Catholic divines. Any set of 

 people who are determined to make the most of an evil which they can- 

 not avert, will readily find an excuse for putting up with it, or of even 

 sophisticating themselves into a belief that it is a positive good. So the 

 Catholics, even of the better order, console themselves for the vulgarity 

 and mauvaise honte of their priesthood, by the reflection that their king- 

 dom is not of this world, and that their deficiencies in the mere cere- 

 monials of society are caused by their devotion to their religious duties. 

 This kind of apology for secular deformities, is but an ingenious assump- 

 tion of superior clerical perfections ; while it skilfully involves a sly 

 satire upon the Protestant clergy, who, it must be presumed, cannot be 

 very spiritual, since they are gentlemen in their temporal intercourse. 

 Indeed, to affect the gentleman would be a dangerous experiment for a 

 priest. He would lose caste by it. His influence in the next world 

 would cease if he attempted to act with any deference towards the 

 refinements of this. There are certainly some few awkward Pelham-like 

 persons in the priesthood ; but they are either pronounced to be good- 

 natured and harmless, or they are tolerated for the sake of young ladies, 

 who may, it is supposed, " commit flirtation" with a beau of that inno- 

 cent description with impunity. But even amongst these solitary excep- 

 tions to the general mass of illiterateness and coarseness, the more ele- 



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