182 The English and Irish Church Establishment. [FEB. 



means of entering advantageously into life, no less than 312,000 human 

 beings ! the boundless majority of whom must, otherwise, have been 

 abandoned to impiety, impurity, and rebellion. 



We must not forget that all this has been effected with remarkably 

 disproportionate means ; the average income of 250/. a year being 

 palpably inadequate to the support of a gentleman and his family, let 

 the colour of his coat be what it may ; much less to give room for the 

 distribution of extensive charity. A few of the benefices are large; but 

 their size implies only the greater poverty of the rest. To what exer- 

 tions of public good, and individual charity, the Irish church might be 

 willing to give itself, if its whole lawful income, an income to which it 

 undoubtedly has as much right as the Duke of Bedford or Devonshire 

 has to his rental, must be conjectured from what it has done under pri- 

 vation ; for, at this hour, one half of the property of the Irish clergy is in 

 the hands of laymen ; the number of six hundred and eighty parishes 

 being wholly in lay possession, and their tithes amounting to no less a 

 sum than 300,000/. a year, exacted too with a strictness which makes a 

 striking contrast to the mode of obtaining clerical dues. And to this 

 monstrous usurpation, we must remember to add the lay possession of 

 1,480 church glebes ! 



We are no advocates for the abuses of the Irish church, if abuses they 

 be ; nor are we inclined to doubt Lord Mountcashel's good intentions. 

 There must be, in every human system, matters requiring public vigi- 

 lance. But the friend of his country will pause before he desires to 

 overthrow an establishment, from which so much public service has 

 been derived, and from which so much more may be rationally expected. 

 Nothing is easier than to attract popularity by the old declamations 

 against ecclesiastical sluggishness or sleekness ; but unless these de- 

 claimers can bring themselves to believe that Christianity can be learned 

 by instinct, or that it is no matter whether it is learned or not that 

 children shall not be baptized, nor marriages solemnized, nor the dead 

 buried with decency, there must be a class of men appointed to per- 

 form all these things. The declaimers may think that all ceremonial and 

 all doctrine are idle, that man is soulless, and, being thus degraded to 

 the brute, may be left to the impulses of the brute during life, and, on 

 his death, may be flung into the first ditch. But the example of this 

 philosophy, even so near us and our time as France and the French Re- 

 volution, shows the physical peril of such conceptions ; and that, where 

 .man is a brute in his death, his living instincts may be furiously turned 

 to bloodshed, plunder, and the general subversion of society. The 

 whole experience of mankind is in favour of some public system of reli- 

 gion. From the most ancient and cultivated nations, to the least refined, 

 all equally formed for themselves a priesthood, a body of men educated 

 for the support of worship in its doctrines and forms, and sufficiently set 

 apart from the secular struggles of life, to give up their whole mind to 

 the maintenance of a religious feeling among the people. 



A priesthood we must have, in some form or other; and the sole ques- 

 tion remaining is, whether we shall have it on the model approved by 

 the oldest authority, and sustained by means acknowledged by our 

 habits and laws ; or, breaking up the whole fabric which our forefathers 

 raised, summon a new and untried race from the multitude into the 

 temple, and commence a new career of public religion by robbery, 

 under the guidance of usurpation, popular rashness, and sullen infi- 

 delity. 



