duing the Irish, and possessing themselves by the right of compact or conquest (the only rights almost, by which any country in Europe is held) of the lands or cities they had obtained or won, they transferred the Church property, from its ancient possessors to those new adventurers, who had come here in the name of CHRIST, to watch the baggage and collect the spoils They did so, no doubt, on the supposition that the religion of the country would change here as it has done in England, (and where the transfer of Church property, on that account, was reasonable) and that these holy harpies who flocked about them, would one day be transformed into the pastors of their subjects. This was, or ought to have been the end of the Law which gave the possessions and tithes of the Irish Church to the Protestant Clergy; to suppose any other would not be reasonable, and if the Law had any other end but this, it wanted the essential conditions of a Law; namely, that it should be enacted by a competent authority, and be just, equal, permanent, regulated in all its details by commutative or distributive justice, and tending to the public good....." P. 34.

".... What then! is the property of the Church to revert to its former proprietors ? Yes it belongs, my Lord, to the State, which holds Ireland by the right of conquest or of compact, or by that supreme and best of all rights, the "Salus Populi."

L

"The foregoing argument affects the transfer itself; but were we to consider the circumstances in which it was made, and the consequences following from it, the necessity of re-touching it," (re-touching it so this Popish Bishop calls his proposed spoliation)" would more clearly appear. When the lands and tithes composing the Establishment were given to their présent proprietors, the value of them could not be ascertained, on account of the unsettled state of the country: and as far as it was ascertained it was small, owing to the state of devastation and ruin to which the country was reduced by the civil wars. It continued so for a con, siderable time. Cattle, not crops, were the produce of Ireland, and the Irish Commons, by a wise vote, secured their grazing lands against the inroads of the parson. Had they foreseen the future state of this country, when by tillage she was to be rendered the granary of the empire, and to export, after maintaining her own vast population, corn to the value of several millions sterling annually, would they have assigned the tenth of this immense produce with all her princely domains to the Church?" - P. 35.

“I should suppose not, unless British wisdom and British justice designated other qualities then than they do now, or if they did, they would have guaranteed a competent support to the of ficiating Clergy, necessary repairs for the parsonage and church, and some support for the naked widow and shivering orphan they would not have left the poor destitute, until their blood would be changed to water, and their faces become burnt,' as the Prophet expresses it, before the face of the tempest of hunger; whilst they assigned their patrimony to a Pastor, who was not to be their

Pastor, that he might be surfeited, that the train of his wife might be borne by some pampered slave, and the crowd of his offspring followed by a retinue of servants. They would not have done so, had they foreseen that all their own future efforts to harmonize and improve and enrich the country, were to be marred by the very men they were enriching; and that murders and atrocities which would for ever stain the character of the nation, harden its heart, and brutalize its feeling, as well as the most unheard of op pressions, were to be occasioned or committed by the agents of this pery priesthood."

This is the first information we have received of the dreadful" murders" which, it seems, the agents of the ESTABLISHED CLERGY Committed in Ireland. No doubt the Romish Dr. Doyle states this, not only from his disposition to tell truth, but from his anxiety to tranquillize, and to aid by his humble efforts what he praises as "the system of promoting mutual forbearance and conciliation amongst all classes of the Irish people." P. 3.

But we have heard sometimes of Proctors or agents of the established clergy being murdered by popish peasants: and possibly it is to these murders that Dr. Doyle refers, giving in his confusion a wrong reading" committed by the agents," instead of the correct statement-" committed upon the agents." He proceeds to answer certain objections to his plan of despoiling the Church in Ireland of her property.

"But then," continues this popish Bishop, meeting at once the objection so strongly asserted and maintained by Mr. Plunkett and other great and most distinguished legal authorities," it is objected to any encroachment on the property of the Church, that if it be meddled with, no other is secure: silly objection!" foolish Mr. Plunkett! silly Lord Eldon! Ŏ ye poor dolts and blockheads that sit on the judicial benches of England and of Ireland, and that hold the highest rank, and bear the greatest names, at the bar in both countries! Ye are a silly set of fellows!

"The tenure by which it, viz, the property of the Church is held, is different, as has been shewn, from that of every other: the nature of it is a public fund always at the disposal of the State, entrusted to a corporation for certain services to be performed: only let it always be employed for public purposes and the public good, and the modifications of its use will never excite a just alarm.

5

"But the Church and State are inseparably connected. This can only be true of her constitution; it is not possible that the state could be connected with her wealth or possessions."

i

醯

"But how could the patronage she affords be dispensed with? This, no doubt, if not the best, is her strongest defence, this is the very citadel of her strength. Every free government, my Lord, has two supports besides its own virtue and wisdom; the first and best is public opinion, the second is a just patronage, but what is gained by the latter through the Church (in this country) is lost in the former, the ESTABLISHMENT being opposed to the interests of the entire community, and to the feelings and opinions of a vast majority of them. In an empire like ours, sources of patronage can never fail: they are furnished by the army, the navy, the revenue, the state, employments at home and abroad. Here our nobles may trade, our colonies are immense, &c." P. 37.

"But by diminishing the property of the Church, you abolish a class of middling gentry, and thereby dissolve one of the few links which keep the frame of our society from falling to pieces. "Gentry, my Lord, to be useful, must be comparatively great, entirely exempt from petty feelings, and above such interests as only poor men, or low minds, can descend to: but a gentry, whose income only raises them to a middling rank-who possess only a life interest in their property--who cannot transmit it to their children who are constantly scraping together some little store for their families-who are invested with an odious privilege, and exhibiting always to the people what is most hateful in the laws; such a gentry can never knit society together: such moral ties as subsist between a landlord and his tenantry, between a pastor and his people, will never be found to unite the minister of the esta. blishment and the catholic cottager......to seek to govern Ireland by such a gentry, is to work against the torrent; they are incapable of serving you, my Lord, even were they well disposed; they must injure you. Their esprit de corps-the prejudices which encompass them-their family circumstances-the insolence, often, and immorality of their sons-the pomp and vanity of their wives and daughters," (what mean and rankling envy the popish law of calibacy excites and fosters!)" their ephemeral and transitory rank-unfit them for the office of gentry." P. 38. !...

"But how is the church to be wrestled with? some hundreds to be displeased, the fears of others to be excited, or their prejudices to be shocked?"

J

"When a country, my Lord, is to be regenerated, a long system of mis-rule to be corrected, and the reign of equitable and just laws to be established, something must be encountered. But, when a government is engaged in such a work, it should deliberate like the Areopagus, almost in the dark, and with closed doors: it should be inaccessible to friends and connexions, and have hung before it the naked image of its suffering country; the records of justice only, should be opened or consulted. Should you, my Lord, and those who administer the public interests with you, act so, you might displease a few, but your decisions would be hailed like the oracles of heaven by the nation, and you would conduct

the faithful people of this desert country, now pathless and without water, into a land flowing with milk and honey: your name would be more glorious than of Numa or Lycurgus, and you would be venerated as the MOSES of the Irish people."

If Lord WELLESLEY would but act by the advice of this would-be privy counsellor, and aid in the plunder of the Protestant Church, and the destruction of the Protestant Establishment, the Pope himself might do him the honour to entitle him the Irish Moses.

"It might be asked, why I have dwelt so long on the concerns of the church? I did so, my Lord, because we catholics are accused with wishing to subvert it; that I might repel so foul a charge, and declare fully, that my hostility is not to the Doctrine or Constitution of the Church, but to her present ESTABLISHMENT, which I consider opposed to all the interests of Ireland." P. 39.

1.

It is but a few years, since one of our popish priests preached and published that the Protestant Doctrine of our Church was a pestilential and damnable heresy that the Protestant Clergy were, on account of the Doctrine, which, they taught, not only emissaries of the spirit of darkness and disciples of the father of lies; but that they were the greatest curse with which Heaven in its anger could visit any country-that it would be dealing more mercifully with the people of Great Britain, to devastate their country with pestilence, fire, and sword, than to curse them with preachers of protestant doctrine. Such was the substance, of a part of his preaching and of his publication, the whole of which was lauded and sanctioned by the highest popish authorities, from the palace of the pope, and since received with peculiar favour and approbation by popish bishops in Ireland. Similar sentiments are taught to the Roman Catholics in the notes of their Romish Testament recently re-publishedsimiliar sentiments are inculcated by some of the principles maintained even in the Divinity Class-Book of their collegiate seminary at Maynooth. But now, it seems, notwithstanding all this, we are called on to believe another popish priest, who assures us on the part of his religious community, that they do not object to our Church on account of its Protestant doctrine! No, this is a matter to them and their Church, of perfect indifference! to this they have no hostility! But, with all their extreme religious toleration and liberality, their, patriotic feelings are too deeply wounded by witnessing the sufferings of the people from the burden of tithes paid to Protestant Clergy, that they have a determined enmity to the Protestant Church

Establishment, and earnestly, but at the same time most modestly, advise the representative in Ireland, of the head of the Protestant Church Establishment, to contribute all his efforts to put it down! any part of the CORONATION OATH OF HIS MAJESTY, to the contrary notwithstanding!

If this new warfare of our Popish priests against tithes be in direct opposition to decrees of their own Councils, it is, however, in perfect consistence with the known principle of Popery, to yield to present circumstances for the interest of the Church. Provided this temporary surrender of the Popish principle of the divine right of the Church of Rome to tithes shall contribute to advance the interests of that Church, and to aid her efforts to undermine and overthrow the Protestant Establishment in Ireland, and to weaken and injure the Establishment in England; then, indeed, such a temporary surrender is exactly in accordance with the principle of the Church of Rome, to which we have adverted, with her artful and worldly policy. And the very same principle, and the same policy, may, under altered circumstances, lead her again to claim the right which at present she affects to abandon.

The Popish Doctor Doyle, however, appears very anxious to persuade us, that his tirade against the tithes now paid to Protestant Clergy is not a second edition of the exclamation of the fox in the fable. He assures Lord WellesLEY and the public, that "the Catholic Clergy are generally satisfied with what they receive, and the mode of obtaining it;" and adds, "acquainted as I am with their sentiments generally, I could assert on their behalf, that so far from desiring the possessions of the Establishment, they would not accept of the tithes with all the odium which accompanies them." (P. 40.) Does he here write with a salvo for the expected removal of the odium by transferring tithes in Ireland to Romish priests?

Our quotations from the other parts of this Popish Doctor's publication shall be brief. Speaking of Protestants in Ireland, who have ventured to oppose the late Romish impostures about the Hohenloe miracles, he says, "if they could but exclude us from freedom, and perpetuate our slavery, they care but little whether we adopted the superstition of Juggernaut, or the religion of St. Paul." And having given this, amongst other similar proofs of his efforts to conciliate, to allay animosity, and render the Roman Catholic populace patient and tranquil, he soon after asks, whether," since the conquest" of Ireland by England has been completed, whether" by force, or fraud,

12