come to the pious munificence of her own prelates. Service rendered by Bishop Bramhall, &c. Such muni ficence not Ireland the Reformation would have been more truly called the confiscation. There is at this moment scarcely an Irish nobleman, inheriting an ancient property, who does not owe the bulk of it to the confiscated lands of the Church . . . And what was the consequence? The accounts given (in the extant Episcopal visitation returns) of the spiritual destitution of the Irish parishes, and of the miserable poverty of the clergy in the two centuries which followed the Reformation, are truly marvellous: churches ruined, glebe lands violently seized, the clergy without houses, their lives threatened by the landowners, lest they should perchance reside, although without houses, and thus recover the spoliated property, or prevent further encroachments; such was the state of the Irish Church in the time of Bramhall. To that great prelate we owe the re-establishment of discipline and order, and the blessing of uniformity with the Church of England. To the bishops who have succeeded him too, we owe the re-endowment of the Church, the measures which have enabled us to see a glebe house and land in almost every parish, (although there are still numerous exceptions,) and which have provided for the repair or rebuilding of many of our churches; and all this, (as might easily be shewn,) has been effected by the munificence of individuals, bishops, as well as inferior clergy-individuals who have done their good works so secretly, that their very names are known to but few; and yet people now talk as if the endowments of the Church of Ireland had been [wholly] conferred upon her, in times gone by, by Parliament or by the State."* Nor has such munificence on the part of her yet extinct. prelates, though opposed by many a heavy blow and great discouragement from the secular See the Irish Eccl. Journal for July, 1845, (No. 61) p. 198. powers, been as yet quenched in the Irish Church. Of one of her two highest dignitaries the writer here quoted justly observes, that Lord Pri mate of all Ireland; "not content with having rebuilt his cathedral at an Case of the expense to his own private fortune of upwards of present £30,000, he is known to employ more than £2000 per annum in the support of poor clergymen, and other pressing wants of his diocese; and this without counting his contributions to benevolent and literary institutions less closely connected with the Church, without counting either those almost countless private charities, of which it can be most truly said, that his left hand knoweth not what his right hand doeth. And this prelate, be it remembered, is the only Irishman (with one exception) who has held the see of Armagh since the days of Ussher, a period of 200 years!" second chief Church. The unsparing munificence of the individual and of the who occupies the second place in the Irish prelate of Church at present is also sufficiently well known; the Irish (not to refer to others,) so that, whatever slanderous envy may suggest relative to the overgrown revenues of our prelates, it is happy for churchmen to be able to reflect, that not only are those large incomes in the possession of their only right and lawful inheritors, but that in the most remarkable instances of them, here noticed, they could not possibly be in the hands of individuals more worthy to hold them, so far as that worthiness is to be judged of by their generous readiness to make use of them, without Origin of the Tithe system in Ireland. Statement of the late Dr. Doyle on the subject. Mr.Phelan's grudging, for works of piety and benevolence in the household of God. As to the TITHE property of the Irish Church. This appears, according to all the best informed writers on our ecclesiastical affairs, to have originated in the twelfth century; any payment of such an impost in previous ages, if at all practised in this island, having been confined to a few particular persons, times, and places, in the country. The following statement on the subject, from the pen of a late eminent Roman Catholic prelate of Ireland, the famous Dr. Doyle, in a letter to the Marquess Wellesley, while containing some errors, is in part true, and altogether worthy of notice :-* "Tithes in this country, my Lord," says he, "should always have been odious; they were the price paid by Henry II. and the legate Paparo to the Irish prelates, who sold for them the independence of their native land, and the birthright of their people: until that period, tithes were almost unknown in this country, and from the day of their introduction, we may date the history of our misfortunes; they were not the only cause, but they were an efficient one, of all the calamities which followed; and whilst they subsist, peace and concord will not be re-established in Ireland." Mr. Phelan's eloquent reply to the letter from our Church which this latter extract is taken, has been al account of See Mr. Phelan's Declan Letter, ut sup. p. 12. from the commence Tithe ready quoted in the present article. From the property, same reply are taken the subjoined passages relating to the same subject, from the time when ment of the the tithe system originated in Ireland. They system. occur immediately in connection with that cited in p. 1061, sup. ; and will be found to contain some useful and important observations. "The ambition of the Vatican had long been mortified by the existence of one recusant Church in the West; and the opportunity of triumph which now offered, was improved with even more than papal skill. Yet half a century elapsed [A.D. 1106–1148] before the Irish clergy could be induced to capitulate. At length however, matters became ripe for negociation; the terms were of course, submission on the weaker side, and protection on the stronger; and as these terms could not be secured, without the intervention of secular power, Henry was invited by the Pope, and admitted by the bishops, to be come a party to the contract. "The first act of the new sovereign was to ratify the proceedings of a synod, which among other things, passed the two following decrees : "That all the faithful do pay to their parish Church, Acts of the the tithe of animals, fruits, and other increase. Cashel "That ecclesiastical lands be free from the exactions of onectio the laity. In particular that no prince, count, or other with this powerful man in Ireland, or their sons or families, do pre- subject. sume to exact, as was usual, victuals or entertainments in the demesnes of the Church; and that those detestable contributions which were wont to be levied from Church lands four times in the year be levied no more. "Such my Lord, as accurately as can be described in a small compass, is the history of the origin of our Tithes the most ancient land land. Church Establishment. It will be important to keep in mind, that the act from which it is dated, is the very first act of the English dynasty. All property in this country is the creation of some English king; and the rents in Ire- first property so created is that of the Church. When the Synod of Cashel was held, none of the native landholders had as yet been ejected; but since that time every foot of Irish territory has been frequently forfeited to the Crown. The Norman and English knights, as they successively came into possession, and the Irish chieftains, as they were readmitted under a new tenure, received their princely portions with a reservation of this original grant. However the present landlords may have acquired their properties, the acquisition extended only to nine-tenths of the produce, and their title to it, when traced to the source, originates in the bounty of the Crown of England "The law,' says Blackstone, has wisely ordained that the parson (quatenus a parson) shall never die, any more than the king, by making him and his successors a corporation. By which means all the original rights of the parsonage are preserved entire to the successors; for the present incumbent, and his predecessor who lived seven centuries ago, are in the law one and the same person, and what was given to the one was given to the other.'-[Book 1, cap. 18.] It follows therefore that in the spirit of the Constitution, the clergy of the present day have been presented to their livings by Henry II.; that they have the same rights, which they ever had, to a tenth of all increase, and that no series of illegal vexations can accumulate into law against their original claims. It is an ignorant and false assumption that the tenure of the clergy is the same as that of military or fiscal officers. Such persons are supported On the meaning and extent of the property called a tithe, see the observations of his Grace the Lord Primate, quoted a little farther on. |