luxury and law; conceive a war of citations, contempts, summonses, civil bills, proctors, attorneys, and all the voluminous train of discord carried on at the suit of the man of peace, by the plaintiff in the pulpit, against the defendants, his congregation. It is a strong argument against the tenth, that such claim is not only inconsistent with the nature of things, but absolutely incompatible with the exercise of the Christian religion. Had the apostles advanced among the Jews pretensions to the tenth of the produce of Judea, they would not have converted a less perverse generation; but they were humble and inspired men; they went forth in humble guise, with naked foot, and brought to every man's door in his own tongue the true belief. Their word prevailed against the potentates of the Earth; and on the ruin of barbaric pride and pontific luxury, they placed the naked majesty of the Christian religion.

This light was soon put down by its own ministers, and on its extinction a beastly and pompous priesthood ascended-political potentates, not Christian pastors, full of false zeal, full of worldly pride, and full of gluttony, empty of the true religion; to their flock oppressive, to their inferior clergy brutal, to their king abject, and to their God impudent and familiar; they stood on the altar as a stepping-stool to the throne, glozing in the ear of princes, whom they poisoned with crooked principles and heated advice, and were a faction against their king when they were not his slaves, the dirt under his feet, or the poinard in his heart.

Their power went down-it burst of its own plethory—when a poor reformer with the Gospel in his hand, and with the inspired spirit of poverty, restored the Christian religion. The same principle which introduced Christianity guided reformation. What Luther did for us, philosophy has done in some degree for the Roman Catholics, and that religion has undergone a silent reformation; and both divisions of Christianity, unless they have lost their understanding, must have lost their animosity, though they have retained their distinctions. The priesthood of Europe is not now what it was once; their religion has increased as their power has diminished. In these countries particularly, for the most part they are a mild order of men, with less dominion and more piety, therefore their character may be, for the most part, described in a few words—morality, enlightened by letters and exalted by religion. Such, many of our parochial clergy, with some exceptions however, particularly in some of the disturbed parts of the kingdom-such, some of the heads of the church-such, the very head of the church in Ireland. That comely personage who presides over a vast income, and thinks he has

great revenues, but is mistaken, being in fact nothing more than the steward of the poor, and a mere instrument in the hand of Providence, making the best possible distribution of the fruits of the Earth.

"Of all institutions", says Paley, "adverse to cultivation, none so noxious as tithe, not only a tax on industry, but the industry that feeds mankind".

It is true, the mode of providing for the church is exceptionable, and in some parts of Ireland has been, I apprehend, attended with very considerable abuses: these are what I wish to submit to you. You will inquire whether, in some cases, the demands for tithes have not been illegal, the collection of them oppressive, the excess of demand uncharitable, and the growth of it considerable and oppressive. Whether, in all cases, the tithe-farmer has been a merciful pastor, the tithe-proctor an upright agent, and even the vicar himself an unbiassed judge.

In this inquiry, or in forming some regulations for this inquiry, you will not be withheld by the arguments of pride, bigotry, and prejudice. That argument which, reflecting on God, maintains the sacred rights of exaction; that other argument which, reflecting on Parliament, denies your capacity to give redress; that other argument which, reflecting on human nature, supposes that you inflame mankind by redressing their grievances; that other argument which. traduces the landed interest of Ireland as an extortioner, and belies One part of the community to continue the miseries of the other-an argument of calumny, an argument of cruelty. Least of all should you be withheld by that idle intimation stuffed into the speech from the throne, suggesting that the church is in danger, and holding out: from that awful seat of authority, false lights to the nation, as if we had doted back to the nonsense of Sacheveral's days, and were to be ridden once more by the fools and bigots. Parliament is not a bigot; you are no sectary, no polemic; it is your duty to unite al men, to manifest brotherly love and confidence to all men. The parental sentiment is the true principle of government. Men are ever finally disposed to be governed by the instrument of their happiness -the mystery of government, would you learn it? Look on the Gospel, and make the source of your redemption the rule of authority; and, like the hen in the Scriptures, expand your wings and cover all your people.

Let bigotry and schism, the zealot's fire, the high priest's intolerance, through all their discordancy tremble, while an enlightened Parliament, with arms of general protection, overarches the whole community, and roots the Protestant ascendency in the sovereign

I

mercy of its nature. Laws of coercion, perhaps necessary, certainly severe, you have put forth already, but your great engine of power you have hitherto kept back; that engine, which the pride of the bigot, nor the spite of the zealot, nor the ambition of the high priest, nor the arsenal of the conqueror, nor the inquisition, with its jaded rack and pale criminal, never thought of; the engine which, armed with physical and moral blessing, comes forth and overlays mankind by services the engine of redress; this is government, and this the only description of government, worth your ambition. Were I to raise you to a great act, I should not recur to the history of other nations; I would recite your own acts, and set you in emulation with yourselves. Do you remember that night when you gave your country a free trade, and with your own hands opened all her harbours?that night when you gave her a free constitution, and broke the chains of a century, while England, eclipsed at your glory and your island, rose as it were from its bed, and got nearer the sun? In the arts that polish life, the inventions that accommodate, the manufactures that adorn it, you will be for many years inferior to some other parts of Europe; but to nurse a growing people, to mature a struggling though hardy community, to mould, to multiply, to consolidate, to inspire, and to exalt a young nation, be these your barbarous accomplishments!

I speak this to you, from a long knowledge of your character, and the various resources of your soil, and I confide my motion to those principles not only of justice, but of fire, which I have observed to exist in your composition, and occasionally to break out in flame of public zeal, leaving the ministers of the crown in eclipsed degradation. Therefore I have not come to you furnished merely with a cold mechanical plan, but have submitted to your consideration the living grievances, conceiving that anything in the shape of oppression made once apparent-oppression too, of a people you have set freethe evil will catch those warm, susceptible properties which abound in your mind, and qualify you for legislation.

April 14, 1788.

The next resolution relates to the sustenance of the poor, as the two others relate immediately to their industry. It is proposed to put the poor of the south on the same footing with the poor of the north, east. and west, by exempting his potato-garden from tithes

When we state that potatoes are the food of the poor, we understate their importance; they are more, they are the protection of the rich against a poor-rate, and therefore invaluable to you as well as to the peasant.

"Resolved-That potatoes are the principal subsistence of the poor in Ireland, and are, in a great part of the kingdom, most fortunately exempt from tithe".

"Resolved-That it would much contribute to relieve the poor of the south of this kingdom, if the benefit of said exemption was extended to them; and if it shall be made to appear that the owners of tithe shall suffer thereby, this House will make them just compensation".

In three-fourths of this kingdom potatoes pay no tithe in the south they not only pay, but pay most heavily. They pay frequently in proportion to the poverty and helplessness of the countryman; for in the south it is the practice to crouch to the rich, and to encroach upon the poor; hence, perhaps, in the south, the mutability of the common people. What so galling, what so inflammatory, as the comparative view of the condition of His Majesty's subjects in one part of the kingdom and the other. In one part their sustenance is free, and in the other tithed in the greatest degree; so that a grazier coming from the west to the south shall inform the latter, that with him neither potatoes nor hay are tithed; and a weaver coming from the north shall inform the south, that in his country neither potatoes nor flax are tithed; and thus are men in the present unequal and unjust state of things, taught to repine, not only by their intercourse with the pastor, but with one another.

To redress this requires no speculation, no extraordinary exercise of the human faculties, no long fatiguing process of reason and calculation, but merely to extend to the poor of the south the benefits which are enjoyed by His Majesty's subjects in the other parts of Ireland it is to put the people of the south on a level with their fellow-creatures. If it shall be said that such an exemption would cause a great loss to the parson, what a terrible discovery does that objection disclose! that the clergy of the south are principally supported by the poor-by those whom they ought, as moral men, to relieve, and Christian men, support, according to the strictest discipline of the church.

To excite a certain quarter to this principle, perhap the best method would be the stimulation of example. I shall accordingly produce two examples one example drawn from the country supposed to be the most bigoted in Europe, and the other from that man

supposed to be the most prone to clerical avarice and ambition; The first, the kingdom of Spain, the latter is the Pope. In 1780, Pope Pius VI. sends a brief to the King of Spain, enabling him to dispose of one-third of ecclesiastical estates and benefices in his presentation, to which no cure of souls was annexed, in charity; and further sets forth in his brief this reason, that the relief and succour of the poor was particularly incumbent on him. The King of Spain, in 1783, pursuant to this brief, published his edict, reciting the brief, and appointing a commission to dispose of the third, as above recited, in the support of the poor, and then he specifies the objects: endowments of all kinds of retreats and receptacles for the poor, such as hospitals and houses of charity, foundations for orphans and foundlings. The better to enforce the execution of the first edict, the King of Spain publishes another, commanding in a peremptory inanner the execution of the first; and he adds a principle inseparable from the claims of tithes that such charitable aids peculiarly belong to ecclesiastical rents, according to the most sound and constant discipline of the church.

Here are the Sovereign Pontiff of the Catholic faith and the Catholic King of Spain distributing one-third of a part of the revenres of their church for the poor; and here are some of the enlightened doctors of our church deprecating such a principle, and guarding their riches against the encroaching of Christian charity. I hope they will never again afford such an opportunity of comparing them with the Pope, or contrasting them with the apostles. I do not think their riches will be diminished; but if they were to be so, is not the question directly put to them, which will they prefer? their flock or their riches? for which did Christ die, or the apostles suffer martyrdom, or Paul preach, or Luther protest? Was it for the tithe of flax, or the tithe of barren land, or the tithe of potatoes, or the tithe-proctor, or the tithe-farmer, or the tithe-pig? Your richeare secure; but if they were impaired by your acts of benevolence. does our religion depend on your riches? On such a principle your Saviour should have accepted of the kingdoms of the Earth and their glory, and have capitulated with the Devil for the propagation of the faith. Never was a great principle rendered prevalent by power or riches? low and artificial means are resorted to for the fulfilling the little views of men, their love of power, their avarice, or ambition; but to apply to the great design of God such wretched auxiliaries, is to forget His divinity and to deny His omnipotence. What! does the word come more powerfully from a dignitary in purple and fine linen, than it came from the poor apostle with rothing