could not maintain him long; and, in the midst of his distress, a demand was made upon him by one of his hearers, which was not likely to give him a favorauble opinion of the national character. This man, perceiving that Taylor was a bad singer, and frequently embarrassed by being obliged to sing the Scotch version, (because the people knew nothing of the Methodist hymus,) offered his services to act as precentor, and lead off the psalms. This did excellently well, till he brought in a bill of thirteen and four pence for his work, which was just four pence a time the poor preacher paid the demand, and dismissed him and the Scotch psalms together. Taylor's perseverance was not, however, wholly lost. Some dissenters from the kirk were then building what is called in Glasgow a Kirk of Relief, for the purpose of choosing their own minister. One of the leading men had become intimate with him, and of fered to secure him a majority of the voters. This was no ordinary temptation: comfort, honour, and credit, with £140 a-year, in exchange for hunger and contempt: but there was honour also on the other side. The preacher, though he was alone in Glasgow, belonged to a well-organized and increasing society, where he had all the encouragement of co-operation, friendship, sympathy, and applause. He rejected the offer; and, before the spring, he formed a regular society of about forty persons, who procured a place to meet in, and furnished it with a pulpit and seats. When they had thus housed him, they began to inquire how he was maintained; if he had an estate; or what supplies from England. He then explained to them his own circumstances, and the manner in which the preachers were supported, by small contributions. This necessary part of the Methodist economy was cheerfully established among them; and, when he departed, he left a certain provision for his successor, and a flock of seventy souls. But, even in this populous city, Wesley, upon his last visit to Scotland, when his venerable age alone might have made him an object of curiosity and reasonable wonder, attracted few hearers. The congrega

tion," he says, "was miserably small, verifying what I had often heard before, that the Scotch dear- ✓ ly love the word of the Lord-on the Lord's day. If I live to come again, I will take care to spend only the Lord's day at Glasgow."

CHAPTER XXIII.

METHODISM IN IRELAND.

MELANCHOLY and anomalous as the civil history of Ireland is. its religious history is equally mournful, and not less strange. Even at the time when it was called the Island of Saints, and men went forth from its monasteries to be the missionaries, not of monachism alone, but of literature and civilization, the mass of the people continued savage, and was something worse than heathen. They accommodated their new religion to their own propensities, with a perverted ingenuity, at once humorous and detestable, and altogether peculiar to themselves. Thus, when a child was immersed at baptism, it was customary not to dip the right arm, to the intent that he might strike a more deadly and ungracious blow therewith; and under an opinion, no doubt, that the rest of the body would not be responsible at the resurrection, for any thing which had been committed by the unbaptized hand. Thus, too, at the baptism, the father took the wolves for his gossips; and thought that, by this profanation, he was forming an alliance, both for himself and the boy, with the fiercest beasts of the woods. The son of a chief was baptized in milk; water was not thought good enough, and whiskey had not then been invented. They used to rob in the beginning of the year as a point of devotion, for the purpose of laying up a good stock of plunder against Easter; and he whose spoils enabled him to furnish the best entertainment

at that time, was looked upon as the best Christian. -so they robbed in emulation of each other; and reconciling their habits to their conscience, with a hardihood beyond that of the boldest casuists, they persuaded themselves that, if robbery, murder, and rape had been sins, Providence would never put such temptations in their way; nay, that the sin would be, if they were so ungrateful as not to take advantage of a good opportunity when it was offered them.

These things would appear incredible, if they were not conformable to the spirit of Irish history, fabulous and authentic. Yet were the Irish, beyond all other people, passionately attached to the religion wherein they were so miserably ill instructed. Whether they were distinguished by this peculiar attachment to their church, when the supremacy of the Pope was acknowledged throughout Europe, cannot be known, and may, with much probability, be doubted; this is evident, that it must have acquired strength and inveteracy when it became a principle of opposition to their rulers, and was blended with their hatred of the English, who so little understood their duty and their policy as conquerors, that they neither made themselves loved, nor feared, nor respected.

Ireland is the only country in which the Reformation produced nothing but evil. Protestant Europe has been richly repaid for the long calamities of that great revolution, by the permanent blessings which it left behind; and even among those nations where the papal superstition maintained its dominion by fire and sword, an important change was effected in the lives and conduct of the Romish clergy. Ireland alone was so circumstanced as to be incapable of deriving any advantage, while it was exposed to all the evils of the change. The work of sacrilege and plunder went on there as it did in England and Scotland; but the language of the people, and their savage state, precluded all possibility of religious improvement. It was not till nearly the middle of the seventeenth century, that the Bible was translated into Irish, by means of Bishop Bedell, a man

worthy to have Sir Henry Wotton for his patron, and Father Paolo Sarpi for his friend. The church property had been so scandalously plundered, that few parishes* could afford even a bare subsistence to a Protestant minister, and therefore few ministers were to be found. Meantime the Romish clergy were on the alert, and they were powerfully aided by a continued supply of fellow-labourers from the seminaries established in the Spanish dominions; men who, by their temper and education, were fitted for any work in which policy might think proper to employ fanaticism. The Franciscans have made it their boast, that, at the time of the Irish massacre, there appeared among the rebels more than six hundred Friars Minorite, who had been instigating them to that accursed rebellion while living among them in disguise.

Charles II. restored to the Irish church all the impropriations and portions of tithes which had been vested in the crown; removing, by this wise and meritorious measure, one cause of its inefficiency.When, in the succeeding reign, the civil liberties of England were preserved by the Church of England, the burden of the Revolution again fell upon Ireland. That unhappy country became the seat of war, and, from that time, the Irish Catholics stood, as a political party, in the same relation to the French as they had done during Elizabeth's reign to the Spaniards. The history of Ireland is little else but a history of crimes and of misgovernment. A system of half persecution was pursued, at once odious for its injustice, and contemptible for its inefficacy. Good principles, and generous feelings, were thereby provoked into an alliance with superstition and priestcraft; and the priests, whom the law recognized only for the purpose of punishing them if they discharged the forms of their office, established a more absolute dominion over the minds of the Irish people, than was possessed by the clergy in any other part of the world.

*The best living in Connaught was not worth more than forty shillings a year; and some were as low as sixteen!

Half a century of peace and comparative tranquillity, during which great advances were made in trade, produced little or no melioration in the religious state of the country. Sectarians of every kind, descript and non-descript, had been introduced in Cromwell's time; and what proselytes they obtained were won from the Established Church, not from the Catholics, whom both the Dissenters and the clergy seem to have considered as inconvertible. In truth, the higher orders were armed against all conviction by family pride, and old resentment, and the sense of their wrongs; while the great body of the native Irish were effectually secured by their language and their ignorance, even if the priests had been less vigilant in their duty, and the Protestants more active in theirs. Bishop Berkeley (one of the best, wisest, and greatest men whom Ireland, with all its fertility of genius, has produced) saw the evil, and perceived what ought to be the remedy. In that admirable little book, the Querist, from which, even at this day, men of all ranks, from the manufacturer to the statesman, may derive instruction, it is asked by this sagacious writer, "Whether there be an instance of a people's being converted, in a Christian sense, otherwise than by preaching to them, and instructing them in their own language? Whether catechists, in the Irish tongue, may not easily be procured and subsisted? and whether this would not be the most practicable means for converting the natives? Whether it be not of great advantage to the Church of Rome, that she hath clergy suited to all ranks of men, in gradual subordination from cardinals down to mendicants? Whether her numerous poor clergy are not very useful in missions, and of much influence with the people? Whether, in defect of able missionaries, persons conversant in low life, and speaking the Irish tongue, if well instructed in the first principles of religion, and in the Popish controversy, though, for the rest, on a level with the parish-clerks, or the schoolmasters of charity-schools, may not be fit to mix with, and bring over our poor illiterate natives to the Established Church? Whether it is not to be wished