mation marry two Protestants, or, a Protestant and Catholic, he is liable to a penalty of £500, or, according to a decision of an Orange Chief Justice, he is liable to suffer DEATH. The clergy are not allowed to officiate in any place with steeple or bells; they are prohibited from appearing abroad in the costume of their order; they cannot be guardians, nor receive the personal endowment of any Catholic chapel, school-house, or other pious or charitable foundation. If they do not disclose the secrets of auricular confession, which their religious tenets prohibit them to disclose, they are liable to imprisonment; if a Jesuit enter the kingdom he may be banished for life, and any persons entering such religious order is guilty of a misdemeanor.* No Catholic in Ire

land is allowed for his defence to have arms in his house, unless he have a freehold of £10 a-year or £300 personal property. And, though he is liable to parish cess, he is disabled from voting at vestries, on questions relating to repairs of churches. Lastly, no Catholic of the United Kingdom is eligible to the offices of Lord Chancellor, Keeper or Commissioner of the Great Seal, Lord-lieutenant, Deputy or Governor of Ireland, or High Commissioner in Scotland; nor to any office in the ecclesiastical courts; in the universities, the colleges of Eton, Westminster, and Winchester.

The Catholic clergy are in number between 2000 and 3000, constantly residing among their flocks and ministering to their spiritual comforts. From the absence of any permanent provision for maintainance, and the general poverty of their followers, they live in indigence and hardship. Their chief dependence is on fees for burials, marriages, and christenings, gifts on confessions, and bequests for the celebration of masses for the repose of the dead. Hence they have seldom the means of comfortable subsistence, are often without a decent place for religious worship, are overpowered by calls for religious exertion, live in misery, and die at last without ever tasting those emoluments which formerly belonged to their church, and are now showered on the Jocelyns, Laurences, Plunkets, Beresfords, Magees, and Trenches of the Establishment.

Management of the First Fruits Fund.

With so large a portion of the national wealth placed at the disposal of the clergy, the very least we might have expected the Legislature to do was to enforce the payment of all the taxes to which by law the Church was liable. We have already seen by what artifice the English ecclesiastics avoided contributing their full share to the First Fruits Fund; we shall now show that a similar but more flagrant evasion of their pecuniary obligations has been long tolerated on the part of the Irish clergy. Having already explained the nature of the annats (page 61) it will be only necessary here to remark that a similar

Catholic Relief Act, 10 Geo. IV. c. 7, ss. 29-36.

usage

formerly prevailed in both England and Ireland; with this difference, that the Irish clergy paid in lieu of a tenth, only a twentieth of the annual value of each benefice to the Pope. In the reign of Henry VIII. when the papal rights were extinguished, an act passed for annexing to the crown the revenue arising from first fruits and tenths, and the same provision was made, as in England, for ascertaining, from time to time, their real annual value. This arrangement continued till the year 1710; when Queen Ann, acting under the advice of her Tory ministers, remitted the twentieths to the clergy, rich and poor, without distinction, and gave the first fruits, alone, to form a fund for building churches, purchasing glebes and glebe-houses, augmenting poor livings, and other ecclesiastical improvements. The management of the fund was vested in trustees, consisting of the higher dignitaries of the church, and principal law-officers of the crown, who were empowered to "search out the just and true value" of the benefices of which they were to levy the first year's income from each incumbent who came into possession. The valuation under which the first fruits were levied when they were given to the trustees, was the same as in the time of Henry VIII. and was not only very low, but did not include more than two-thirds of the benefices of Ireland. It was of course the duty of the Board of First Fruits to promote the objects of the fund, to have remedied the inaccuracies, and supplied the omissions in the original valuation; but this has never been done, and up to this day the first fruits are levied according to the defective valuation at the time of the Reformation. Owing to this mode of procedure, instead of the produce of the first fruits being the real worth of every vacant benefice and dignity, it is a mere nominal sum paid by the clergy. The bishop of Derry, with a revenue of £12,000, paid only £250 first fruits; the see of Clogher, worth £7000, pays only £350; and the see of Cloyne, worth £6000, pays only £10:10s. It is calculated that, at a fair valuation of Irish benefices, omitting those under £150 a-year, the first fruits would produce £40,000 a-year: whereas, in the ten years ending January, 1830, they produced only £5,142: 15s; from which £740 was to be deducted for salaries. During this period of ten years, fifteen bishoprics and four archbishoprics had become vacant, and the successors thereto liable to the payment of first fruits.

Can it be believed that the Imperial Parliament would sanction such an evasion of their duty by the rich clergy of Ireland? Such, however, has been the fact. Sir JoHN NEWPORT, every session for the last twelve years, has been making motions to establish the integrity of the First Fruits Fund; but his laudable endeavours have seldom met with support of more than thirty or forty honourable members. But this is not the worst trait in the proceedings of the Collective Wisdom of the Nation: they have actually voted large sums out of the pockets of the people for the very objects for which this fund was appropriated. In

* Votes and Proceedings of the House of Commons, May 18th, 1830.

the twenty years ending in 1822, the grants of parliament to the trustees of First Fruits in Ireland, towards building new churches, glebehouses, and purchasing of glebes, amounted to £686,000. Thus has £34,300 a-year been levied on this tax-paying aristocratic gulled nation, merely to save the richest church in the world from contributing to its own necessities. How much more has been levied by parochial taxation on the unfortunate population of Ireland, for the repair of churches and cathedrals, we have not the means of estimating. It is well known the sums raised for this purpose constitute one of the many grievances of the sister kingdom, the hardship of which is aggravated by the Catholics being excluded from voting in parish vestries when the church-cess is imposed. Had the Commissioners of First Fruits done what the law not only authorized, but required them to do, there would have been no need of church-rates, nor grants from parliament. Why the Commissioners have not done their duty and made a fair valuation of benefices is manifest enough; they are the patrons, holders, or expectants of large preferments, and a just valuation would be a tax upon THEMSELVES! Ought, however, "the Guardians of the Public Purse" to have sanctioned this selfish breach of trust? Ought they, whose business is to watch over the interests of the people, yearly to have voted away the public money, for objects for which there was already a legal and adequate provision? No innovation, nothing untried was to be attempted; the only measure requisite was that they should enforce the law of the land, for which, on other occasions, they profess such profound veneration. It is to the deficiences of First Fruits, and the consequent non-residence of the clergy, for want of parsonage-houses and glebes, that the decay of Protestantism has been ascribed by their servile defenders: hence a regard to the interests of our "holy religion" one would have thought a sufficient motive for our virtuous representatives to interfere.

The most curious incident regarding the annats is the result of the endeavours of Mr. Shaw Mason to obtain a more authentic valuation. When the subject began to excite attention, this gentleman, the words of whose patent empowered him "to collect, levy, receive, and examine the just and true value of first fruits," preferred a memorial to the Board, setting forth his authority and expressing his willingness to exercise it as his duty required. The announcement caused not a little alarm, the four archbishops at the time not having paid in their arrears. A report was made to the local government who, after referring the matter to the attorney and solicitor generals for their opinion, intimated to Mr. Mason if he persevered in his design of enforcing the payment of first fruits at their real value, they would deprive him of his patent office, which he held at the pleasure of the Crown.* So the matter ended; the rich clergy enjoy, undiminished, their princely revenues, and the public remains liable to the burthen of contributing towards the

Mr. Spring Rice, House of Commons, May 18, Session 1830.

purchase of glebes and houses for Irish parsons, many of whom have already half a dozen houses, residing in none of them, and 4000 acres of glebe.

Intolerance towards Dissenters and Roman Catholics.

Before concluding our account of the United Church of England and Ireland, we cannot help shortly adverting to the slow steps by which religious toleration has been established in this country. Looking back to the history of the Dissenters, we see with what difficulty freedom of thought has been wrung from the prosecuting grasp of what is considered a reformed Establishment. It was not till the Revolution of 1688 that the public worship of the Dissenters was tolerated; and the Act of Toleration at that period required them to take certain oaths and subscribe to the doctrinal articles of the Church of England. The same act, so much extolled, requires the places of worship to be registered, and the doors kept unlocked during the time of service. Even liberty of worship, under these suspicious and odious restrictions, it was subsequently attempted to abridge. In the latter part of Queen Ann's reign, an act passed, called the Occasional Conformity Bill, making it a crime in any person, in any office under government, entering a meeting-house. Another bill, denominated the Schism Bill, passed in 1714, suffered no Dissenter to educate his own children, but required them to be put into the hands of a Church of Englandist, and forbad all tutors and schoolmasters being present at any dissenting place of worship.

The last attempt upon this body was the memorable bill of Lord Sidmouth in 1810. This meditated encroachment upon their liberties was worthy of the sinister statesman from whom it emanated. The Dissenters, to their immortal honour, rushed forward at once to repel this aggression on their rights. Had they suffered their ministers to be placed at the mercy of the Quarter Sessions, the magistrates, no doubt, would not only have judged of their fitness for the ministry of the Gospel, but also of their fitness for the ministry of the Boroughmongers.

This disgraceful spirit of legislation is now only matter for history. The repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts and the Catholic Relief Act have scarcely left any trace of the formidable penal code which, for a long time, interdicted to a large portion of the community not only the enjoyment of their civil immunities, but the free disposal of their persons and property. The Dissenters may still complain of being excluded from the national universities; they may also think it a hardship in case they fill any judicial, civil, or corporate office, that they cannot appear in their official costume, nor with the insignia of their office at their own places of worship; but these are trifling grievances, scarcely worth mentioning. They are subject to no test on account of religious belief; and it may be now truly said that, with the exception of Jews and openly professing INFIDELS, the honours and advantages of

the social state-so far, at least, as spiritual dogmas are concernedare fairly opened to every candidate.

For this salutary triumph we have been indebted solely to secular wisdom, not to any generous concessions or enlightenment proceeding from our established instructors. The Church has always shown itself more tenacious of its monopoly than even the Aristocracy. Of the lofty tone of intolerance maintained by some of our high dignitaries, to a recent period, we have a rather amusing instance, in the conduct of DR. KIPLING, the late Dean of Peterborough, and which we shall shortly relate. The Rev. Mr. Lingard, the distinguished Roman Catholic historian, had, it seems, in his Strictures on Professor Marsh's "Comparative View," &c. used the words " new Church of England" once, and oftener "the modern Church of England." To consider the Church of England 66 new," or "modern" appeared a mortal offence in the eyes of Dean Kipling. He wrote a furious letter to Mr. Lingard; quoted a passage from Hawkins; and threatened to prosecute him if he did not, within a limited time, prove what the Dean intimated it was impossible for him to prove. Whether the Dean afterwards relented, or whether Mr. Lingard proved that the Church of England, as being the offspring or daughter of the Church of Rome, which, in many respects, she so much resembles, was new," we are ignorant Did our limits permit, we would insert the Very Rev. Dean's loving epistle. It would show what a meek, gentle, Christian spirit may still rankle in the hearts of some of our church dignitaries. It would show to what expedients these worthies would resort to uphold their faith, or, more correctly, their temporalities, were they not restrained by the march of philosophy and the public mind. It is impossible to read Dean Kipling's letter without feeling persuaded that, had Mr. Lingard had no better barrier for his personal safety than the tolerent spirit of the writer, he might still be liable to be hung up by the middle, with an iron chain, and roasted before a slow fire, according to the orthodox piety of olden time.

66

Men ought always to set their faces against prosecution for opinions, whether instituted under pretence of heresy, sectarianism, Judaism, or even infidelity. Under any of these forms it is the same mischievous and dogmatical principle. What difference, for instance, is there in the principles of a prosecution instituted at this day for Judaism or infidelity, and a Popish prosecution instituted in the reign of Queen Mary on account of the real presence. In both cases difference of opinion is combated by corporeal infliction; the Papist punished by fire, the modern intolerant by fine, imprisonment, or civil disability. The difference in the punishment makes no difference in the motive; in both cases it is combating mind by physical force, and he who employs such a weapon is as deeply immersed in the night of Popery, as Bishop Bonner, who laboured to convert the miserable victims of his cruelty by a vigorous application of birch to the posteriors.

The ingenuous mind revolts from the idea of maintaining opinions by force, to say that any class of opinions shall not be impugned, that their truth shall not be called in question, is at once to declare that these