e able to acquire; and
receiving orders at home, were sent abroad to obtain a clerical
education. By officiating in petty chaplainships, and performing now and
then certain offices of religion for small gratuities, they received the
means of maintaining themselves until they were able to complete their
education. Through such difficulties and discouragements, many of them
have arrived at a very considerable proficiency, so as to be marked and
distinguished abroad. These persons afterwards, by being sunk in the
most abject poverty, despised and ill-treated by the higher orders among
Protestants, and not much better esteemed or treated even by the few
persons of fortune of their own persuasion, and contracting the habits
and ways of thinking of the poor and uneducated, among whom they were
obliged to live, in a few years retained little or no traces of the
talents and acquirements which distinguished them in the early periods
of their lives. Can we with justice cut them off from the use of places
of education founded for the greater part from the economy of poverty
and exile, without providing something that is equivalent at home?

Whilst this restraint of foreign and domestic education was part of an
horrible and impious system of servitude, the members were well fitted
to the body. To render men patient under a deprivation of all the rights
of human nature, everything which could give them a knowledge or feeling
of those rights was rationally forbidden. To render humanity fit to be
insulted, it was fit that it should be degraded. But when we profess to
restore men to the capacity for property, it is equally irrational and
unjust to deny them the power of improving their minds as well as their
fortunes. Indeed, I have ever thought the prohibition of the means of
improving our rational nature to be the worst species of tyranny that
the insolence and perverseness of mankind ever dared to exercise. This
goes to all men, in all situations, to whom education can be denied.

Your Lordship mentions a proposal which came from my friend, the
Provost, whose benevolence and enlarged spirit I am perfectly convinced
of,--which is, the proposal of erecting a few sizarships in the college,
for the education (I suppose) of Roman Catholic clergymen.[27] He
certainly meant it well; but, coming from such a man as he is, it is a
strong instance of the danger of suffering any description of men to
fall into entire contempt. The charities int