1830.] Lord Mountcashel and the Church. 613 



them both. If we would pay the natural respect to the dead, whom we 

 honoured and loved in life ; or if we look upon the body, that is yet to 

 rise and be glorified, as worthy of more consideration than the body of a 

 wild beast, we must have men to perform the decent ceremonial of the 

 grave. For all those offices, and for many more than those, we must 

 have a clergy. 



But the outcry of the radical and the atheist is, that the clergy have 

 usurped too large a portion of the property of the state ; that their pay- 

 ment is injurious to public prosperity ; that the establishment is nothing 

 more than a ponderous contrivance to pamper indolence ; and that the 

 state, as having given the property, has a right to modify, to diminish, or 

 take it away altogether. Every one of those assertions is a prejudice, an 

 error, or an absurdity. 



The revenues of the establishment are not paid by the people. The title 

 of the establishment to its lands and revenues is older than that of any 

 other institution in the empire. Its revenues were not taken from any 

 man's estate, for they have subsisted for ages previous to the existence of 

 that estate ; and they have existed by the most natural and intelligible of 

 all rights, the right of private ownership to dispose of its property. This 

 right is more sacred than the right of the nation to dispose of property, 

 because that process implies violence, or revolution ; and what one revolu- 

 tion may do, another may be entitled to undo. It is more sacred than 

 the right of kings to confer property, because that right may often be the 

 mere work of tyranny. Thus the right of the church to its possessions is 

 the most ancient, simple, and solid of all the right of the individual who 

 has acquired property, to dispose of it according to his own good will. 



The first edifice assigned for Christianity in England was in Canter- 

 bury, the gift of Ethelbert, the king of Kent, in the sixth century. As the 

 British people were then heathens, the priests who had come with Austin 

 travelled through Ethelbert' s kingdom, preaching Christianity. The first 

 assemblages of their converts were in private houses. When those assem- 

 blages became too numerous for meetings in the cottages of those semi- 

 barbarians ; regular, though rude, places of worship, called prayer-houses, 

 or oratories, were appointed for the service. Still, the service was only 

 occasional ; the preacher was an itinerant missionary ; and the population 

 was, in a great measure, deprived of religious instruction. 



But Christianity, by the labours of those zealous and saintly men, made 

 rapid progress. The Saxon chieftains were successively led to listen to 

 Divine truth, and were naturally urged to provide for the religious in- 

 struction of their vassals. The oratories were few and mean ; the mother 

 church, or cathedral, was distant ; and they erected churches on their 

 own lands, and fixed a permanent minister of religion beside the church, 

 for the perpetual maintenance of its worship ; endowing him generally 

 with a portion of land, and besides, in all instances, with that portion of the 

 products of the estate, which we now call tithes. This was the state of 

 church property before the Conquest. 



The Gorman invasion extended the system of granting land to the 

 great officers and feudatories of the crown ; and they, in their turn, 

 repaid the services of their chief retainers by minor grants. A vast 

 number of those possessors, each desiring to have for his vassals and te- 

 nantry the same advantages of church service, and the residence of a 

 clergyman upon his estate, which existed in the case of the higher lords 

 of the soil, erected churches, and placed clergy upon their property. 



