trouble. The Roman church asserts, as I have shown, a divine right to tithes; but her example is not followed by the church of England and Ireland; nor, indeed, is such a right in any respect necessary. The title of the Irish church ought not to be compared with that of the Jewish: each is to be compared with the title of the laity, under their respective constitutions. . . .

"But the main force of the demonstration' has not yet appeared. To say the truth, it lies in ambush, being concealed by the felicities of our author's stile; and were it not for the treachery of some clever writers of his school, I should have fallen upon it unawares. No one has better reason, than J. K. L., to say, Pereant, qui, ante nos, nostra dixerunt.'

"This power in reserve is as follows. The Jewish priesthood descended in a family, among the children of Levi, who had equal rights to the inheritance of Jacob,' but these rights cannot extend to the Christian priesthood, which is continued in a different manner, after the order of Melchisedec.' Mr. O'Connell and his association have declared this argument to be at once novel in its nature,' and ' demonstrative' in its cogency. Its conclusiveness is a question of considerable moment, its novelty, of none. The learned gentlemen, however, are mistaken equally in the law, and in the fact. The thing is a poor sophism, and J. K. L. has not the humble merit of its invention.

"In the first place, neither the church in the aggregate, nor the parson of any particulàr parish, claims tithes as hereditary. The reason is, because, in the contemplation of the law, neither the church nor the parson ever dies; and where there is no demise, there can be no inheritance. The church, collectively, is a corporation; so is every parson separately; and by being so, they maintain a perpetual succession, and enjoy a kind of legal immortality * This personification, and consequent perpetuity, is a principle admitted in all law, divine, civil, and international. It is thus that a state, as one person, transmits to posterity, rights and obligations, pleads and acknowledges the faith of ancient treaties. As the state, so the church, is one person to the constitution. Communities of Christians, not incorporated in a connexion with the state, are voluntary societies, which, in the contemplation of the legislature, have no vital principle of unity or continuation. But the act, which annexes one of them to the state, endows it with a participation of its own unchanging identity. The living organization is one and indivisible, although communicated successively to different masses; and all the individual members, that have existed from the foundation to the present time, or that ever shall hereafter exist, are but one person in law, a person that never diest.'

"Besides aggregate corporations, there are others, called sole, as consisting, at a given time, of a single individual. By the act of

* Blackstone, Book I. Cap. 18.

+ Blackstone, ibid.

incorporation, these legal persons, like the former, are exempted from mortality, and invested with rights as perpetual as their existence. Such is the King, who to the Constitution, never dies. Such too, is the Parson of every Parish. 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 successor; for the present incumbent, and his predecessor, who lived seven centuries ago, are in law one and the same person, and what was given to the one, was given to the other *.' It follows, therefore, that in the spirit of the constitution, the clergy of the present day have been presented to their livings by Henry the Second; 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 of these writers, that the tenure of the clergy is the same as that of military or fiscal officers. Such persons are supported by taxes; the clergy by their own property. A tax is that portion of the property of the subject, which is levied by the state, according to its exigences. The income of the clergy is no deduction from such property; tithes never were part of any proprety now in existence; and were the clerical order abolished, they would remain without a legal claimant. Those who call themselves landed proprietors, would have no more right to them, than a horde of Cossacks. On the other hand, tithes are, in the strictest sense, the property of the Church. By history, as well as by the genius of the Constitution, all property in Ireland is the gift of the British Crown; the first gift was to the Church. Again, civil, military, and fiscal functionaries have never been formed into corporations; they have no franchises-no succession -no existence in the sight of the Constitution. Had such corporations been endowed in the days of Henry Plantagenet, and continued to the present time, then, indeed, they would be analogous to the clergy, but then, it would not suit the purposes of those writers, to institute a comparison. In these days of military and financial importance, corporations of soldiers and fiscal officers, projected into society from the imposing back-ground of seven centuries of antiquity, would produce upon a more robust statesman than the author of the state of Ireland, an awe, if not religious, at least sufficiently reverential to check all intermeddling.

"It is an error common to all these writers, to confound inheritance, in general, and inheritance by family descent. There may be various modes of incorporation, by which the several natural persons are successively transfused into that legal person, whom, for the time being, they represent, But this variety does not affect the continued individuality of that legal person, or the continued right by

which it is accompanied. Nothing more is necessary for securing these objects, than that due provision should be made for the appointment of a successor to the demised individual-this being done, the person created by the law, is imperishable. There is no peculiar virtue, as is pretended by J. K. L. and those from whom he borrows, in succession or inheritance, by family descent. Without the benefit of a social convention, such inheritance has no existence. A family, considered as the possessor of property, is not a being of nature, but the creature of the law. It is, indeed, a maxim of the law, that lands are not naturally descendible.' It is the province of law, to determine the order, in which the various members of a family shall succced. Whether females shall inherit

The very words, heir' and inheritance,' as they are used by J. K. L. and others of his school, are sophisms in themselves. They insinuate that consanguinity is an indefeasible right to inheritance, neither requiring law to confirm, nor admitting law to annul, its validity. Substitute for heir, the full term hear at law,' and what is the amount of their arguments? The new bishop or rector is as much the heir at law of his predecessor, as a Levitical Minister was among the Jews, or, as with us, the young squire is, of his father or uncle.

Law, then, is decisive against the hypothesis, that lands descend in families, by natural necessity, or divine right: nor will history be found more favourable.”

Here Declan further enforces his argument by a reference to History, and adds,

"Neither is it unknown, (although there is a decorum in true allegiance, which, except on grave occasions, will not suffer it to be recollected,) that the throne itself, the source of all property, does not descend in necessary connexion with the course of blood. Our Sovereigns inherit, according to the statute of William and Mary, for settling the succession to the Crown.' The succession is fixed in a family; but the order of succession is determined, neither by divine right, nor by the course of nature, nor by the line of descent in private families, but by the special provisions of the

statute.

By this last consideration, the argument of J. K. L. and his predecessors is brought-where, doubtless, they did not intend to place it into downright Jacobinism. . . . . .

"I have now, my Lord, brought the church establishment to the time of the Reformation; and, as I trust, brought it in safety. After all, I do not apprehend, that so far, I shall find a very serious antagonist in J. K. L. He speaks of the possessions of the ancient Irish church,' in terms of such softened animosity, that we may easily believe him rather in sorrow than in anger.'

་

Henceforward, he is quite in earnest. His object is to prove, that the title of the ancient church,' whatever it might be, has not legitimately descended to the Protestant clergy: he does not like to call the establishment a church.

"A very brief answer might suffice for this objection. Failure of title must arise from one of two causes; the one, a legal forfeiture; the other, a chasm in the legal line of succession. The former of these operated to the removal of the Roman clergy: let us see whether the latter can be asserted of the reformed. The case will stand thus.

"The church of Ireland, on submitting to the Pope, was invested with certain temporalities by Henry II. Again:

"The church of Ireland, on renouncing the Pope, was confirmed in its temporalities by Henry VIII.

If the investiture were valid, there is no reason for objecting to the re-investiture. This admission, and the renunciation of Papal supremacy were equally essential, or equally unessential things; and if the church survived the one, we may be allowed to believe that it was not annihilated by the other. There was no disruption of continuity at the Reformation; the prescribed changes were adopted by a number of the bishops and clergy, quite sufficient to preserve the derivative character of the priesthood, and maintain the requisite unity of organization. These circumstances, sufficient (as they would be) to prove the continued catholicity of the church, are abundantly conclusive for its continued identity, as a legal and constitutional incorporation.

"J. K. L. rather insinuates, than presses, an objection to thi identity; doubtless, however, it was intended to have its force® The church, before the Reformation, is called the Irish, the ancient Irish church; but from the time of Henry the VIIIth. to that of William the IIId., it is said to have been composed of new adventurers and holy harpies' from England. The argumentative value of this objection is worthy of the spirit from which it proceeds; but it gives an opportunity for a few remarks. That many of the reformed clergy were Englishmen is true; but it is an opprobrium which they share with multitudes of their predecessors. Any, who look at the lists of our bishops and abbots before the Reformation, will find a great proportion of Norman and English names. Those who have read our history must remember, that the countries were connected but a very short time, when the native clergy complained of the number of foreigners.

"The foreigners would have been multiplied, in the interval referred to by J. K. L., even had there been no change of religion in England.... But, if in England religion wanted to be reformed, in Ireland it wanted to be humanized; the abuses were of such a naturę, and so inveterate in the national habits, that they could not have been reclaimed, even to the popery of a civilized kingdom, without the removal of many of the priesthood. In this case, as well as in that which happened at the Reformation, custom, obstinacy, pride of country, or personal attachment to particular ecclesiastics, might have prevented the adoption of the regenerated form.

"These things are not mentioned, either, from, a spirit of polemical recrimination, or from a sense that they are necessary to the

argument. But they are truths-they have been suppressed by J. K. L. and he may justify the suppression if he can.

"There remain now, my Lord, only two things to be esta blished.

"That the unreformed clergy were constitutionally ejected. "That this ejectment does not either invalidate the right of property in the church, or imply a right of resumption in the crown,

The ejectment was constitutional. This, I presume will scarcely be questioned even by J. K. L. and the Catholic Association.? It was the genius of popery in those days to deny the sovereignty of a merely secular prince. The distinctions, between temporal and spiritual supremacy, which J. K. L. and his brethren have discovered, (but have not defined,) were then unknown. The Papal clergy of Ireland believed and taught, that the King was the liege vassal of the Pope; that he held his thrones as fiefs from the Holy See, and might be dispossessed at the pleasure of his Lord. A connexion was impossible, between such a church, and a state which aspired to be independent.

"It is, indeed, pretended by J. K. L. that the Crown transferred church property from the Papal to the reformed clergy, upon u supposition, which has not since been realized. This is slily aimed, but it does not penetrate. The deprivation of the Papal clergy is one thing-the transfer of their property to another class is quite another. The positive good of the new order of things was a matter of calculation, of wrong calculation, if J. K. L. will have it so: but the positive evil of the old order of things was a matter of experience. The new priesthood was, at all events, negatively good; and surely the state gained something when, instead of a restless and traitorous faction, it acquired a body of servants, who gave their allegiance without reservation or alloy.

"The history of the times presents us with an analogous case. Within the same period which J. K. L. deplores, as the era of the ejectment of the ancient church, all, or nearly all, the lay proprie tors of the country were dispossessed, and for a similar reason. Like the clergy, they had violated the conditions, which the state found to be essential to its well-being: both were corrupt masses within the body politic, and, after a long struggle, both were finally thrown off by the vis medicatrix of the constitution. Accordingly, both classes were alike disinherited; the Crown re-entered upon its original rights, and exercised anew its prerogative of donation. What positive advantages the state derives from the new proprietors, may be equally questioned in both cases. J. K. L. probably believes, that my Lord Lansdown, who is an absentee, or the farmers of Covan, who are Orangemen, are no less useless-no less pernicious--members of society, than Dr. Magee' himself. Still the ejectment, in both cases, was just and necessary, and restoration hopeless. The ancient church, and the ancient families, are equally extinct as landed proprietors: they were lovely in their lives, and in death they are not divided.'

“I have now arrived, my Lord, at the second proposition; that