The Sun.
London, England, 1833-10-08 00:00:00

tribute the " Godly gains" of ft sinecure
office to maintain the cause of stall-fed theology.
We have heard one, and but one, defence of
Ecclesiastical sinecures, even from the most
zealous opponents of Church reform, and that
is, that they are intended to be a provision for
Divines of superior piety and learning, who are
without other preferment. It would not be
difficult to prove, that when the Church was
truly in a state of Christian purity, no such
things as pluralities and sinecures existed ; and
it requires no ordinary assurance, at the present
day, to defend things as necessary to the Church
establishment in any respect against which such
orthodox and distinguished prelates as Bishops
Burnet and Sherlock lifted up their voices. We
are told that the Bishop of Hereford, being the
brother of the Premier, is the gravamen of the
present charge. Not so. It is only an aggra-
vation of the charge. The charge is the filling
up the sinecure at all, or, the filling up in such a
way as to make it an appendage to the Ecclesi-
astical preferment of one already amply provided
for. When a sinecure is filled up, a substantial
if not an insurmountable obstacle to its abolition
is then raised, for he who would abolish
it after that is met by the potent plea
of " vested rights." The same plea would be'
advanced if an attempt were made to abolish that
civil sinecure of some 2,0001. a year in the
household of the Irish Viceroy, which Lord
Grey has just now given to another brother,
being resolved that, for whatever services he may
have done the State, he and his family shall be
well paid ; for the barren glory of disinterested
patriotism does not seem to be a thing which the
Whigs hold in more admiration than the
Tories. We deny not the respectability of
the Bishop of Hereford ; on the contrary, we
consider him in talents 'and clerical conduct a
Prelate who has merited his promotion, as far
as the see of Hereford is concerned ; but we
think he might be satisfied with that, and for
his brother's sake—for that of the Church and
his own, he ought to have declined the sine-
cure office of a stall in Westminster, while
so many clergymen, eminent for learning,
virtue, and piety, are labouring in the vine-
yard upon a stipend which cannot afford them
a decent subsistence. The Treasury writer
dragged the family of the Bishop of Hereford
before the public by making a charitable appeal
for his twelve children. We fear the Malthusian
would not be so indulgent to the large family of
some industrious but unpatronised curate. Our
ingenious friend of the Treasury, in his zeal for
the Grey portion of the Church establishment,
outruns the game, by endeavouring to prove too
much. He has the modesty to represent the
bishopric of Hereford as -an inconvenience,
forced, as it were, upon the learned incumbent
of that see, which has made him poorer than he
was. We suppose the Premier forced it upon
him for the purpose of giving him a place in
the House of Lords to oppose his administration,
as he has done, and then rewarded him for
voting against the reform Ministry by an unre-
formed sinecure ! It was kind and fraternal of
him thus to favour a political opponent in the
person of a brother ; but it is easy to be gene-
rous at the expense of the country.—]horning
Herald.

h would appear from the Dublin papers that
no great sensation has been produced through-
out Ireland by the return of Lord Wellesley to I
that country as Chief Governor. The Dublin
corporators have, indeed, been indulging a feeble
imitation of their former spiteful pranks against
the Lord-Lieutenant, having contrived on Friday
last to evade the Lord Mayor's summons, issued
for convening a Common Council, to discuss
the propriety of addressing Lord Wellesley on
his assumption of the Government. The mem-
bers did not meet, as is stated, in sufficient
numbers to " make a house," and so the address,
which is usually a matter of course, may be said
to have miscarried. But as for the value of the
proposed compliment, considering the political
merits of the body whence it was to have pro-
ceeded, it will be felt by most people that Lord
Wellesley has gained something by the affected
slight, while it must be owned that the cor-
poration has lost no character by the unprovoked
indecency. When the Noble -Marquis was ap-
pointed Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland about the
year 1821 or 1822, his arrival in Dublin was
hailed by the great bulk of the people as the
harbinger, not merely of a more equal admini-
stration of the laws, but of certain improved
principles of legislation. It is no more than
truth to acknowledge, what we at that period
distinctly and repeatedly observed, that the law,
as it existed, had never before been so impartially
executed as during the viceroyalty of Lord
Wellesley,—that a more wholesome and states-
manlike spirit was then infused into the general
action of the Government,—and that, instead of
purchasing the nominal subjugation of the whole
of Ireland by letting loose the ferocity of one
barbarous faction at its rival, and thus joining
with Orangemen in a league of which the implied
condition should be, a common crusade against
the constitutional rights of Catholics, the execu-
tive power professed to impose upon itself the
novel task of protecting each party from the
outrages of its ancient enemy. In the same
year it put down the Orange processions of
the north ; and the insurrection of the Mun-
ster peasantry ; nor can we wonder that by the
calm redress of injury, and disappointment of
lawless retaliation, it should often have incurred
the animosity both of the wrongdoer and the
avenger. The main difficulty of Lord Welles-
ley's former administration, however, was not of
Irish growth ; he was fettered by the Home-
office in Whitehall. Mr. Peel was Secretary of
State, and his creature, Mr. Goulburn, was
Secretary (in official phrase) to the Lord Lieu-
tenant, but aimed, in truth, at being Secretary
over the Lord Lieutenant—giving ear to the old
ascendancy men, Manners, Gregory, and Saurin,
excluding Lord Wellesley and Mr. Plunket,
though Attorney-General, from his confidence,
while he enjoyed exclusively that of Mr. Peel,
poisoning by his partisanship the reputation of the
whole Government, and frustrating, by hisnarrow,
bigotteti pedantry, the restorative influence of the
best conceived and most comprehensive measures.
In the Tithe Composition Act, for instance,
as originally framed by Lord Wellesley, was a
clause or clauses, compelling the clergy to accept
a composition for their tithes. Had this com-
pulsory clause been brought into operation, the
whole of Ireland would, within a year or two,
have enjoyed the benefits of the most salutary
amendment that ever was ingrafted upon the
tithe system, and the pecuniary relation between
clergymen and their parishioners must have been
universally fixed upon a footing which would
have driven the agitators to some other plea for
disturbing the public peace; for let it be under-
stood, that although the hostility to tithe has at
length embraced the parishes where a composi-
tion had been established, as well as thos.e
where the clergy had refused one, the tithe