e council of Trent under Pope Pius the fourth, in the
year 1560, which was, that they were due by divine right. In the course
of forty years after the payment of tithes had been forced by
ecclesiastical censures and excommunications, prescription was set up.
Thus the very principle, in which tithes had originated, was changed.
Thus free will-offerings became dues, to be exacted by compulsion. And
thus the fund of the poor was converted almost wholly into a fund for
the maintenance of the church.

Having now traced the origin of tithes, as far as a part of the
continent of Europe is concerned, I shall trace it as far as they have
reference to our own country. And here I may instantly observe, and in a
few words, that the same system and the same changes are conspicuous.
Free will-offerings and donations of land constituted a fund for the
poor, out of which the clergy were maintained. In process of time,
tenths or tithes followed. Of these, certain proportions were allotted
to the clergy, the repairs of the churches, and the poor. This was the
state of things in the time of Offa, king of Mercia, towards the close
of the eighth century, when that prince, having caused Ethelbert, king
of the East Angles, to be treacherously murdered, fled to the Pope for
pardon, to please whom, and to expiate his own sin, he caused those
tithes to become dues in his own dominions, which were only at the will
of the donors before.

About sixty years afterwards, Ethelwolf, a weak and superstitious
prince, was worked upon by the clergy to extend tithes as dues to the
whole kingdom; and he consented to it under the notion, that he was thus
to avert the judgments of God, which they represented as visible in the
frequent ravages of the Danes. Poor laymen, however, were still to be
supported out of these tithes, and the people were still at liberty to
pay them to whichever religious persons they pleased.

About the close of the tenth century, Edgar took from the people the
right of disposing of their tithes at their own discretion, and directed
that they should be paid to the parish churches. But the other
monasteries or lay-houses resisting, his orders became useless for a
time. At this period the lay monasteries were rich, but the parochial
clergy poor. Pope Innocent, however, by sending out his famous decree
before mentioned to king John, which was to be observed in England as
well as in other places under his jurisdiction, and by which it wa