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taught him to consider as fair fighting as Cæsar's, puts a merciless driver hors de combat, or pushes a middleman's middleman off his step in the ascending scale of tyrants, he is a ferocious, brutal and irreclaimable savage. This my father could never understand; and if he was wrong, his betters are to blame, not he.

Voltaire is of opinion that all the united vices of all ages and places would not equal the miseries inflicted by one single campaign. What, then, is to be said of Ireland, whose whole history, from beginning to end, is but one, long, continued campaign—a warfare, too, combining both the sources of misery mentioned by Voltaire, since it has brought the vices of each party into play, as well as their swords!

To reproach a country thus trained, with its riotous and sanguinary habits-to expect moderation from a people kept constantly on the rack of oppression, is like Mercury, in Eschylus, coolly lecturing Prometheus on the exceeding want of good temper and tractableness he exhibits-while the only grievance, forsooth, he has to complain of, is being riveted by his legs and arms to a rock, and having a wedge of eternal adamant driven into his breast!

CHAPTER VIII.

The Captain's opinions of Church Establishments in general-of that of Ireland in particular.—Archbishops and shoulder-knots.-Increase of the Catholic population.—Diminution of the Protestant.—Wealth of the Church.-First Fruits. - Church Rates. — Preliminary articles of a negotiation between the Captain and the Church.

"By Jupiter Ammon," says Clincher junr. in the play, "all my religion is gone, since I put on these fine clothes;" and just so has it happened, since the time of Constantine, to every creed that has assumed the pomp and splendour of Establishment :—what it has gained in wealth and worldly power, it has lost in purity and spiritual usefulness.

That principle of exclusion too, on which all sects are more or less founded, though comparatively harmless when applied to the world to come, is, when brought into play in the concerns of this life, and backed by the strength of a secular ally, productive of no ordinary inconvenience and mischief.

As long as l'opery had the whole Christian world to herself, and the same livery of belief was worn

by all, this peculiar evil of Establishments had not yet developed itself. But when the Reformation, unclasping the sacred book, invited every man to read it by the light of his own reason, such a multiplicity of creeds and opinions sprung up through Europe, as made the selection of any one, to be the sole, exclusive partner of the State, a choice as pregnant with discord as that of the shepherd of Ida himself.

And here began the interminable mischief of Establishments. The Romish Church, strong in primogeniture and possession, held fast by her majorat of power wherever she could, and employed all her old inquisitorial arts to maintain it. The Reformed Faith, while professing to stand up for freedom of opinion, still retained the old Popish antipathy to dissent; and when she said, "I leave you free to interpret the Scriptures as you think proper," added, "but I will disfranchise, imprison, and occasionally burn you, if you do not interpret them in the same sense that I do."

Hence sprung those struggles between rulers and their subjects-that war of the two principles, Force and Opinion, which, at first religious, and then, by a natural transition, political, has spread itself like wildfire every where, and is at present agitating the whole world.

From this statement it will readily be concluded, that I consider a Church Establishment eminently calculated to serve the cause of discord, in whatever form it exists, and as it exists in Ireland supereminently so. In all other countries, the laws of reason and nature are so far consulted in this institution, that the creed of the majority of the people has been the religion adopted by the State; and so essential does Paley consider this arrangement to the first object of an Establishment-the religious instruction of the people *—that, according to this sensible Divine," it is the duty of the magistrate, in the choice of the religion which he establishes, to consult the faith of the nation, rather than his own;" and-still more strongly to the point in question-" if the Dissenters from the Establishment become the majority of the people, the Establishment itself ought to be altered or qualified."+

*

Because, as he justly says, 66 more efficacy is to be expected from an order of men appointed to teach the people their own religion, than to convert them to another."

Warburton, too, lays down the same self-evident rule, that "where there are several religions existing in a State, the State should naturally ally itself with the largest.”—Alliance between Church and State.

The Bishop of Cloyne (Woodward), in quoting this opinion, considers it "decisive against the Protestant Church in Ireland."

In Ireland, however,-where every thing is done (as astronomers say) in antecedentia, or, contrary to the order of the signs,-so completely has this obvious policy been reversed, that the Church of about 500,000 persons out of a population of seven millions, is not only chosen and crowned as the sole Sultana of the State, but the best interests of the State itself are sacrificed to her pride, and a whole people turned into slaves and beggars for her triumph.

The present Archbishop of Dublin, in his celebrated Charge, pronounces the Roman Catholic Church of Ireland to be "a Church without a Religion,"-meaning, I presume, not that such names as Fenelon and Sir Thomas More are to be erased altogether from the page of Christianity, but that we poor Irish Papists, having no wellpaid Archbishoprics, are therefore without a religion-" That fellow has no soul,-where is his shoulder-knot?"

But what will such haughty Ecclesiastics say, when, by the operation of causes, which seem as progressive as time itself, this people of Catholics whom they insult so wantonly,-whose number is at this moment as great as that of the Protestants of England in 1688, and who are, in spite of misery and Malthus, every hour increasing-shall,

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