1830.] The English and Irish Church Establishment. 179 



subsist among an uncivilized people. The state of Ireland, for a long 

 succession of centuries, a state of almost total anarchy, left the Irish 

 church to the spoiler. Henry VIII. was a robber and a murderer, and 

 the confiscator of the church in England was not likely to be restrained 

 where confiscation found pretexts under prerogative and national insecu- 

 rity, and where the punishment of the rebel was so easily alleged for the 

 plunder of his property. 



The natural operation of popery to amass wealth in monkish hands, 

 had in Ireland singularly combined with the circumstances of the time, 

 to leave the church open to plunder. In the long course of furious civil 

 wars, the parish clergy had to a great extent fled to the protection of the 

 monasteries. The return for this protection was in general a bestowal of 

 their tithes upon the monasteries ; which, for the purpose of receiving 

 those tithes, and performing the necessary duties of the livings, sent out 

 clerical agents, or vicars of their own, to superintend the livings, endow- 

 ing those vicars with a portion of the tithes, thence called vicarial. 

 Henry VIII.'s sweeping plunder came ; he extinguished the monasteries, 

 and seized upaii the tithes in their possession. The greater portion of 

 those tithes he gave away or sold among his lords and courtiers ; and 

 thus lay proprietor or impropriators, as they are called, possess to this 

 day, about half the whole of this ancient provision for the Irish clergy, 

 with more than half the livings in England as adowsons, or privately dis- 

 posable property. In Ireland the imperfect reception of protestantism 

 even among the nominally reformed, degraded the church more and 

 more in the eyes of England, and her governors and deputies in Ireland ; 

 and the despatches of those officers to their successive sovereigns, from 

 the days of Edward VI. and Elizabeth, down to William III., give the 

 most melancholy details of the poverty, obscurity, and general dilapi- 

 dation of the church. Bedell, the excellent and able Bishop of Kilmore 

 in 1630, gives a picture of his diocese to the celebrated Archbishop 

 Laud, that resembles the picture of the early Christian church under the 

 pagan emperors. 



The Irish clergy, depressed as they were, by the excesses of the time, 

 yet made frequent remonstrances to the English viceroys; and their 

 declarations contained in Lord Straiford's correspondence with his short- 

 sighted and unfortunate master, convey the strongest feelings of injury 

 and desertion. They solemnly adjure the monarch, in an address from 

 the whole of the archbishops, bishops, and clergy, to look upon their 

 sufferings, " to which in all the Christian world there is no equal, for 

 the extremity of contempt and poverty to which the clergy have been 

 reduced, by the perpetual spoliations of the laity and the crown by so 

 frequent appropriations, and violent intrusions into their rights in times 

 of confusion ; having their churches ruined, their habitations left deso- 

 late, their glebes seized, and by inevitable consequence, an invincible 

 necessity of a general non-residency, whereby the ordinary subject had 

 been left destitute of all possible means to learn true piety to God. "* 



A large portion of the evils of the Irish church, in times chiefly subse- 

 quent to the reign of William III., or the period of Protestant ascend- 

 ancy in Ireland, also resulted from the system of unions. Those unions 

 were of two kinds ; perpetual, which were effected by the consent of all 

 the parties concerned, patron, parson, bishop, archbishop, and privy 



* Lord Stafford's Letters, Vol. 1. pp. 382, &c. 



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