The Sun.
London, England, 1829-11-12 00:00:00

TO THE EARL OF MOUNTCASHEL.

DUBLIN, NOVEMBER 6, 1829.
MY LORD,—A letter purporting to have been
written by your Lordship, and addressed to me,
having appeared in the newspapers, I feel it a duty
which I owe to the cause I have undertaken to de•
fend, to give it an immediate answer.--I must begin
by expressing my surprise that your Lordship has
not made some attempt at explaining your having
published the first letter, which I had the honour to
address to you, without that ►which contained my
consent to its being published, and which attached
to that consent the condition of publishing also the
letter in which it was given. lam obliged al•o to
obseive that I do not find any notice taken of my
observations upon your Lordship's having, in two
most important instances, given ( l would not use
the epithet if I knew any word to substitute for it)
garbled extracts from my first letter, by omitting
passages in which were contained, as by anticipa-
tion, the answers to the very harsh remarks your
Lordship made upon those parts which you chose
to select. Let me also call your Lordship's atten-
tion to the two positions which my letters were de-
signed to maintain. They are that abuses are not
creeping in to our Church Establishment, but that,
for a long series of years, the most active exertions
have been made to increase the effectiveness of that
Establishment by every means which the Bishops
have been enabled to use. And, secondly, that if
the Bishops had been as negligent as the proofs I
have given show them to have been active, yet the
means resorted to by your Lordship not only were
not the best within your power, but such as expe-
rience had proved to be the most dangerous both
to the Church and to the State. The facts
which I have adduced in support of these positions
I do not find that your Lordship bas controverted,
except so far as by denying that the proceedings
with respect to the Church in the beginning of
the 17th century, similar to those at Cork, were
chiefly instrumental in promoting the success of the
great Rebellion. But, in truth, all that your Lord-
ship has said amounts merely to this, that they were
not the sole cause of the popular discontents. I
never said that they were—l never represented them
as the causes of the Rebellion, but as the means of
its success—as the first of that series of attacks upon
the Church, which ended in the exclusion of the
Bishops from the House of Lords, then threw off
all disguise and overwhelmed that House, and with
it the Constitution of England. Your Lordship,
indeed, in the close of your first paragraph, admits
what I am contending for; you say—" That the
cause of the Revolution (I protest against the word,
it belongs to an event far different from the Rebel-
lion of 1641) is to be traced to another source, and
that religion will be found only to have been one of
the weapons used in the contest." I perfectly agree
with your Lordship, and have only to add, that the
first mode in which that weapon was employed was
exactly similar to the proceedings at Cork. But
your Lordship states, that the laity formerly took an
active part in the affairs of the Church. That, by
27th Henry VIII. c. 15., " Sixteen of the Laity,
as well as sixteen of the Clergy, were appointed to
examine and report even to (upon, it should be) the
Car►ons of the Church. And that again, in the
reign of King Edward VI., you find a similar num-
ber and proportion of the Laity appointed for a like
purpose.—(See 3d and 4th Edw. VI. c. 11.)"
And your Lordship names "John Lucas and Rich.
Goodrich, Esqrs., as having been two of the Lay-
men appointed in the time of Edward the Sixth."
Truly, my Lord, this is a curious argument. Because
Acts of Parliament have appointed Commissioners
to examine the Canons, and among them were some
Laymen, therefore any Laymen may at any time
voluntarily appoint themselves as a Committee of
Church Grievances, and call upon all others to act
in a similar mariner ! But let us see what these ap-
pointments of Laymen really were. In 1534 the
Convocation petitioned Parliament, that since many
Canons were found prejudicial to the King's prero-
gative, contrary to the laws of the land, and heavy
to the subject, a Committee should be formed, of
16 of the Clergy and 16 Members of Parliament,
with power to abrogate or confirm Canons, as they
found expedient. An Act was then passed con-
formable to this petition. The proceedings in Ed-
ward's reign were only a continuance of this plan to
form a body of Canons, arid the Laymen then ap-
pointed were eight civilians and eight common law-
yers, of which latter eight Lucas and Goodrich
were two. These Commissioners, and the pur-
poses for which they were appointed, are so entirely
different from the meeting at Cork, that I really have
not ingenuity enough to discover wherein consists
the resemblance. As little can I discover how the
gentlemen of Cork are concerned with my asserting
" that the statements made at the Cork meeting
were not grounded in facts." By referring to my
first letter it will appear that I directed my atten-
tion solely to your Lordship's speech, and I have
not since travelled out of it. I have employed my-
self in stating facts directly opposite to the charges
against the Clergy and the Establishment which
were made by your Lordship, and I cannot
find that those facts have been controverted.
Your Lordship goes on to say, that " not
satisfied with your• declaration that there was little
in your speech intended exclusively for Ireland, I
endeavour to prove that you must have almost
entirely excepted England." I beg leave to reply,
that I did not endeavour to prove any such thing,
and had your Lordship taken the trouble of reading
what I had written a second time, you must have
seen that I did not. My words were, " that I did
not enter into any discussion as to the intentions of
your Lordship's speech ; I only stated that, what-
ever they were, the whole of the speech would be
considered as limited to Ireland." And I also
stated that it would be impossible to make it be be-
lieved in England that the Cork meeting did seri-
ously think of extending their views to that country,
let their language be what it might. But the truth
spoken at Cork is as much truth as if spoken in
London. Certainly. But surely your Lordship is
not serious in putting forth that truism as an argu-
ment. As to the appointment of Bishops, I have
already stated the period within which such bar-
gains with boroughowners, as your Lordship de-
scribed, have not taken place—and yet your Lord-
ship now makes that assertion in a stronger form
than at first; you say that you are satisfied in your
own mind that "in modern times" Bishops, with
few exceptions, are appointed through political in-
trigue. This is in effect asserting that the evil is
one of modern times—i. e. existing now, and the
impression produced will be, that it has increased
instead of diminishing. It is certain that if the ap-
pointment rests with the Crown, it will be exercised
by the Minister, and therefore that political influ-
ence must always remain possible. Does your
Lordship propose that it should be taken from the
Crown ? Would you have the Bishops elected by
the Clergy, or by committees of Laymen ? And
can your Lordship he blind to the dreadful extent
of corruption and simony that would arise from such
elections ? Your Lordship thinks " that the state
of England was more revolutionary in 1628, when
it was preparing to shed a Monarch's blood, than
now; and Ireland then looking forward to the
awful rebellion which broke out but thirteen years
after." Your Lordship will find, on looking into
the history of the time, that neither was Ireland
looking forward to the rebellion of 1641, nor Eng-
land to the murder of the King, at the period to
which I have so often referred. In England there
does not appear to have been any apprehension of a
civil war• till after the meeting of the Long Parliament;
arid the Irish historians inscribe the country at the
time immediately preceding the rebellion of 1641
as particularly prosperous and tranquil. Would
such a description suit Ireland now ? Your Lord-
ship's attack upon u part of the Clergy of Cork as
not being " really pious," 1 doubt riot will be ani-
madverted upon by some abler pen than mine. I
shall only observe that such attacks upon.the Clergy
who do not belong to a particular class are amongst
the very strongest proofs that a spirit now exists
exactly similar to that which prevailed in the un-.

happy times preceding the grep. ril,ellion in !',g-
land. That too many v.r contributed to
pasoing what is called the Relief Hill would be true
had but one contributed. 'What lof to was
the language used by your Lordship, which implied
that it had been earlier! by the votes of the Bishops
as well as by those of the lay Lords, It•hen it wat
notorious that a ;:reat majority of them had voted
against it, and when in Ireland 16 out of 22 had
given it all the opposition in their power. The quo•
ration yutr Lordship makes from the words used in
the Act of Parliament does really astonish me. Surely,
my Lord, you know that they would have been
used if not a single Bishop had voted for the Bill.
To a person unacquainted with our laws it would
appear, from your Lordship's expressions, that these
words signify that a majority of the Bishops and
also a majority of the lay Lords had voted for the
Bill. It is unguarded or your Lordship to.put such
words into a newspaper which will be read by thou-
sands who are so ignorant that they will certainly
be deceived by them. Your Lordship knows that
the Bill was carried against the advice of two-thirds
of the Bishops. It is with great regret that I come
now to remark in the manner in which I must re-
mark upon what your Lordship says as to the parish
of Moviddy. In answer to troy assertion that the
Bishops have no longer the power of uniting pa-
rishes, you say, " that you know of one in the
county of Cork, the parish of Moviddy, united so
late as the year 1818, and that you leave me to find
out who got it." My Lord, I did not say that
Bishops had not the power of forming unions in the
year 1818—I said they had it not now. The Act,
which made the consent of the Privy Council ne-
cessary to confirm an episcopal union, passed in
1827. It is the 7th and Bth Geo. IV. c. 48, which
I should have supposed your Lordship would have
been acquainted with, as you were in Parliament
when it passed. But this is comparatively unim-
portant. The union of Moviddy was given to the
Rev. Thomas St. Laurence in 1818. Your Lord-
ship's words signify that the Bishop of Cork made
the union that year for his son. Now the fact is,
that he never made it at all. It appears from the re-
turns to Parliament in 1696, that the union of
Moviddy, Aglish, and Kilbonane had existed from
time immemorial, and, therefore, it was not dissolved
by the death of the incumbent in 1818. That in-
cumbent had alto held with Moviddy, Aglish, and
Kilbonane, the parish of Inniskenny, by an episcopal
union made in 1768, and the Bishop of Cork dis-
continued that union, and gave the living of Innis-
kenny, in 1818, to the Rev. William Meade. Thus,
instead of making an union for his son, the Bishop
broke one that had been made long before, and gave
a part of it to a stranger. I really regret that your
Lordship should have pledged yourself by asserting
that the union of Moviddy had been made in 1818,
and by insinuating that it had been made for Mr,
St. Laurence. Upon another Bishop of our Church,
now no more, your Lordship has made a still severer
attack. You say, " that it is well known how un-
true some of his Lordship's statements were." The
Prelate thus held up to infamy by your Lordship
was, to use the words of Dr. Parr, that most
amiable man and most accomplished scholar, Doctor
Bennett. The name of Bishop Bennett is so inter-
woven with the literary history of the last century,
that I should think it an insult to his memory were
I to attempt a vindication of him from the charge of
falsehood. As to the "livings attached to Deane-
ries, Canonries, Prebends, &c.," they are either the
Rectorial tithes, with vicarages endowed, and no
more connected with the cure of souls than the
impropriate tithes which your Lordship holds ; or
they are, as is the case almost universally in Ire-
land, parishes with cure of souls, upon which the
incumbents, spite of their Deaneries, Canon-
ries, or Prebends, are bound to reside, and do, in
fact, reside, just as if they held HO chapter situa-
tion, such situations being attended in general with
no other emolument than the living attached to
them, and connected with no duty except preaching
in the cathedral, a duty performed almost always by
a deputy, paid by the individuals for whom he offi-
ciates. Our Chapter situations, in general, are a
burden instead of a benefit, and even the Treasurer
would often he glad that he had no other denomi-
nation than that of Rector of his parish. As to the
list of unions which your Lordship has in your pos-
session, of parishes which had previously supported
separate Clergymen and separate churches, it would,
I think, not be fair to withhold it till the time to
which you allude, as, by so doing, the inquiry into
the facts will come too late to remedy the evil which
the statement will produce. Take but the example
of Moviddy. Suppose it not to have been brought
forward till that future day, and what a sensation
would the statement of facts, happening in your
own county, made within your own knowledge,
produce ? Believe me, my Lord, you will find many
cases like Moviddy in your list- To what purpose,
my Lord, do you enumerate the number of unions
in the diocese of Clonfert, or of Cloyne, or of Cork ?
Did I ever deny that unions of parishes existed in
Ireland ? My argument has been very different—l
asserted that many of the unions were necessary,
and that to remove those which are found in-
expedient the best measures have been al-
ready taken by the proper authorities. But
" the stress which I lay upon these shadows
of parishes mentioned by the Bishop of Lime-
rick is laughable." My Lord, to enumerate those
shadons among the parishes which form any union,
and to found upon that enumeration a complaint o

unions as grievances, is calculated to excite a sen-
sation far different from laughter. You must be
aware that the Bishop of Limerick stated that he
could add many similar cases. I shall now add two
more from my own diocese. To the living of Wex-
ford, already consisting of four parishes, I united
two more, the parishes of St. Iberius and St. Sels-
kar. This your Lordship, in your zeal against
unions, must consider a monstrous abuse of the
episcopal powers I then possessed. Now, what is
the result ? The parish of St. Iberius gives to its
incumbent nothing, and the parish of St. Selskar,
one pound, three shillings, and one penny per annum;
and in each of them there is a large church, so that
the Rector is obliged to keep two additional Cu-
rates for their service. By heaping livings upon
the Rector of Wexford I therefore diminished his

income 1481. per annum. Another pluralist to
a Clerp yman holding two parishes which
extended over a considerable tract of country,
I gave a third. The former two were impropriate,
and the incumbent received twenty-four pounds per
annum from the lay Rectors. I really did not con-
ceive this an excessive provision, and added a Vica-
rage, with about forty pounds per annum, in which
there was no church. This man will therefore
swell the list of Irish abuses, and while it will be
. .

_ _ __ ..... ~..
noised abroad that three livings are held by the
same person, the circumstance will be industriously
concealed that the income is but sixty-four pounds
per annum. If your Lordship call upon me lam
ready to go on with the list. In the mean time,
yon must acknowledge that there are parishes still
worse than the " two laughable shadows in Cork."

It is unnecessary to inform your Lordship that the
Act relating to Curates salaries does not extend to
those of impropriators. The Rector of an adjoining
parish may attend to one, the whole tithes of which
are impropriate, without receiving any remunera-
tion; and even a Prebendary has done such duty for
three pounds a year. Your Lordship is aware of
this. Your Lordship's next subject of laughter is
my adverting to tithes in lay hands. Certainly your
Lordship must feel more pleasantly upon that sub•
ject than any Churchman can, under the sanction
of an old proverb. But on the paragraph which
commences with this observation of your Lord-
ship's, I have some remarks to make ; and
first as to Protestant lands, so called in the Down
survey. Your Lordship assumes that they were
lands inhabited by Protestants. If you take the
trouble of making inquiry about them, you will find
that they were lands, which being the property of
Protestants, were not forfeited in the rebellion.
Does your Lordship suppose that all the tenamts of
a Protestant landlord were also Protestants ? These
are minor matters. Your Lordship next lends your-•
self to the propagation of a slander, which, though

yo say yon • tir: 1 artily credit it, receives a formi-
dable support rime i.s Being thought deserving of
tphoer t ed, ''
Board you
First, Fruits, t; Inch lint c licter been accounted for."
say,ben g" I s i;:tsj tts.ll::lrsi rib esertilt with
ft surely is rest possible that your Lordship can be
so ignorant of the trimmer hi st Inch the public ac-
counts art. cenducted, tis not to know that the ac-
intuits of that Board are :atonally audited by the
Commissioners of Accounts. Did your Lordship
ever mention tO any member of that Board, that
such an accusation had been made against it ? If
not, where will your Lordship find an excuse for
setting afloat such a rumour, at a time when you
knew that your authority will be quoted by every
Radical in this country and in England ? My
Lord, the report is false, utterly false. The
mention of the First Fruits leads your Lordship
to propose that they should be le'vied w the
full salue of every ecclesiastical preferment,
as originally intended.—littended by whom ! It
appears that your Lordship is utterly unacquainted
with the origin of that imposition called the First
Fruits. You are not aware that it was a tax levijd
by the Pope, of his own authority. Thus founded
in robbery and ustirpatioti, it became the pity of
Henry VIII. when he dethroned the Pope from his
dominion in England and Ireland, and it continued
in the Crown till Queen Anne bestowed it upon the
Church. 1 hat a man should pay the first year's in-
come of an ecclesiastical preferment as the price of
his obtaining it, seems any thing but reasonable,
and would produce consequences extremely inju-
rious, were not the sums so levied small. With re-
spect to the Curates' Act, I know not what more
could be done that would not be injurious to the
Church and to the Curates themselves. Were the
salaries of Curates where Rectors reside, to be
raised, many Rectors who now keep Curates would
do their own duty. Would that be advantageous,
and if not, how could it be remedied ? Your Lordship
concludes that paragraph with very remarkable words,
they are these—" To your Lordship's theory I
assert that present practice is opposed, and will
your Lordship in your next dare me to the test." I
do. Your Lordship begins the next paragraph in a
very extraordinary manner—" Your Lordship hav-
ing set aside all higher motives for adopting the
profession of the Church, as being unconnected with
the secular interests now under consideration, it was
natural I should follow the example, and con-
fine myself to the three degrees of comparison you
declare to possess such powerful attractions." My
Lord, what I complained of was, your having repre-
sented me as looking to secular advantages as the
only motives for taking Holy Orders, and your hav-
ing done so by omitting a paragraph which expressly
showed that I did not. The same thing has been
done in your last letter by a very adroit separation
of the words you formerly omitted, so contrived as
to impress the same idea that your omission of them
before excited,—namely, that I thought only of
secular inducements. With respect to those in-
ducements being powerful, as compared to the
higher motives, I said nothing whatever. Had I
done so, I must have deviated from the line of argu-
ment pursued in your Lordship's speech. That
line of argument obliged me to compare the effects
of secular inducements of one sort with those of
another—equal incomes with unequal. Your Lord-
ship seems to think poverty useful to the Church ;
nay, if I understand your manner of expressing your-
self, even persecution. That the Church would
triumph over both I know;—but her progress in
any particular country might be greatly impeded by
either. It seems, also, that your Lordship does not
look very favourably upon education as aiding a
Clergyman in his Ministry. Yet he to whom
the care of all the Churches was entrusted was
a man who had received the best education
which this age and country could afford, and
the scribe instructed unto the kingdom of heaven is to
bring forth out of his treasure things new and old.
That education is necessary for a Clergyman is
really so manifest to me, that I think it lost time to
enter into an argument upon the subject. As to
Bishops' leases, your Lordship asks, " How shall
we account for Bishops running their lives at them
if profit is not to be obtained ?" My Lord, my
statement, that profit is not to be obtained, rested
upon a known law, and upon plain numerical calcu-
lations. Any one who pleases may try them. A
Bishop's lease may run out without his being either
" griping or covetous." I doubt not but that your
Lordship, collecting grievances, may have two in-
stances representing me as having run my life against
leases; I plead guilty, and can only regret that dis-
putes among my tenants, which should not be set-
tled, have made me feel sensibly the truth of the
calculations to which I have referred your Lordship.
I come next to the charge against me, of regarding
only the temporal interests of the Clergy, and of
disregarding the spiritual wants of their congrega-
tion. And here I must again complain of a garbled
quotation. You give my words, " there is no part
of my letter which has any connection with the
subject, except that which relates to the incomes of
the Clergy," and, stopping there in your quotation,
you proceed to say that " I have in these words,sup-
plied an answer to my own question." Is
this, my Lord,' fair dealing ? Is not the sen-
tence you have selected followed by these
words—" And in referring to my letter, you
will find that I view their incomes only as they
may be the mean of inducing a class of persons to
enter into orders who are educated men, and as such
calculated to be useful members of the Church. I
argue against an equal distribution of those incomes
only on the ground of its tendency to diminish the
number of well-qualified ministers! What is there
in this that can support the accusation made against
me of considering only the Clergy and disregarding
their congregations. What but the spiritual wants
of the people am I considering when providing that
the Clergy shall be duly qualified ?" This omission
of an important sentence requires no comment. It
admits not of any in which I should be able to re-
frain from expressions Ido not wish to use. On
the number of the Clergy, and the circumstances to
be considered in increasing it, I have fully expressed
myself, and your Lordship has not said any thing
in reply that requires an observation from me. But
your Lordship has given as a reason for Clergymen
attending to their Roman Catholic parishioners,
that " they contribute towards his income." Our
Clergy ought to attend to their Roman Catholic
parishioners, when they show any disposition to
attend to their instructions, because it is their duty.
But I am much surprised, indeed, at your Lord-
ship saying that "the Roman Catholics contri-
bute to the support of our Clergy." Undoubt-
edly they do not. Their tithes are but a part
of the rent of their land : were it set to them
tithe free the rent would be increased, as is
quite notorious, and that by a sum much greater
than the charge for tithe. Surely your Lordship
cannot but remember the words of Edmund Burke—
" The revenues of the Church are taken from no
man ; they are incorporated and identified with the
mass of private property, of which the State is not
the proprietor for use or dominion."— With respect
to the education of the lower order of Protestants,
your Lordship tells me " I may say what I please
about their being well taught, but that the contrary
is so notorious that you will not condescend to prove
it." My Lord, I stated strong facts, proving the
care taken by the Established Clergy of the educa-
tion of their parishioners. I stated the progress
made in that important work. These strong facts
cannot be put down by the summary process to
which your Lordship resorts. My Lord, you avoid
grappling with such facts, because you are quite
aware that you would be defeated in the contest. I
re-assert, supported by those facts, that the educa-
tion of the lower order of Protestants is not in any
respect neglected. I re-assert that the foul stain of
ignorance and immorality, which your Lordship would
atlix to the Protestants of Ireland, is not upon
them. With respect to the vice and immo-
rality your Lordship alleges to prevail among
the Clergy, I cannot he silent. Your Lord
ship had said that it was so excessive that
" you knew of various petitions against immoral
Clergymen representing facts revolting to humanity,

and disgraceful to the parties accused." It appears
decidedly that your Lordship did not know even of
one such petition to either House of Parliament
against any Clergyman l►t Irehtod, and but of one
lin England. I rely upon this as sufficient to deprive
your Lordship's general charge of all the weight to
which it might have been supposed entitled. Re-
peating that individuals unquestionably will be
found attiong a body which I toted formerly at
12,000, but am now Jed to believe mount to
18,000; such taint not the general, the almost uni-
versal gocd character of the body. I have been con-
tent to b prolix in this letter, rather than to incur
the charge of haVing omitted to answer anything.
important. Mid your Lotdship confined yourself
to the two questions really at isti.ftil tt►ttch that is

not of real importance to the controversy might
have been spared. That I have not expressed my-
gel!' more strongly than a defence against some of
your Ldi•dship s attacks upon me demanded, I con-
fidently trust.—l have the hdnuur to be, my Lord,
your Lordship's most obedient humble sertantf
THOMAS, FERSS4