at that
period, he will unquestionably find that what ought to have been a
spiritual, pure, holy, self-denying, and zealous Church, was
neither more nor less than an overgrown, proud, idle, and indolent
Establishment, bloated by ease and indulgence, and corrupted almost to
the very core by secular and political prostitution. The state of the
Establishment was indeed equally anomalous and disgraceful. So jealous
was England, and at the same time so rapacious of its wealth, that it
was parcelled out to Englishmen without either shame or scruple,
whilst Irish piety and learning, when they did happen to be found, were
uniformly overlooked and disregarded. All the ecclesiastical offices of
dignity and emolument were bestowed upon Englishmen; upon men who lived
here with reluctance, and but seldom--who had no sympathy with the
country or its inhabitants--nay, who looked upon us, in general, with
feeling of hostility and contempt; and who, by example or precept,
rendered no earthly equivalent for the enormous sums that were drawn
from a poor and struggling people. It is idle to say that these
prodigious ecclesiastical revenues were not paid by the people, but by
the landlord, who, if the people had not paid them, would have
added them to the rent. But even so--the straggling peasant reasoned
naturally, for he felt it to be one thing to pay even a high rent to the
landlord, whose rights, as such, he acknowledged, but a very different
thing to pay forth out of his own pocket a tenth of his produce to the
pastor of a hostile creed, which had little sympathy with him, for
which he received no spiritual equivalent, and on which, besides, he was
taught to look as a gross and ungodly heresy.

But this was not the worst of it. In the discussion of this subject, it
is rather hazardous for the champion of our former Establishment to make
any allusion to the landlord at all; the fact unfortunately being, that
in the management and disposal of land, the landlords, in general, were
gifted with a very convenient forgetfulness that such a demand as tithe
was to come upon the tenant at all. The land in general was let as if it
had been tithe-free, whilst, at the same time, and in precisely the same
grasping spirit, it so happened, that wherever it was tithe-free the
rents exacted were also enormous, and seen as--supposing tithe had
not an existence--no country ever could suffer to become the basis
of valuation, or to settle down into a syste