body's opinion, could have been lost by no other person than he who was then tenant, and happened to be very ungracious in his county. In the present bishop of Meath's case that plea did not avail, although the lease were notoriously unstatutable; the rent reserved being, as I have been told, not a seventh part of the real value; yet the jury, upon their oaths, very gravely found it to be according to the statute; and one of them was heard to say that he would eat his shoes before he would give a verdict for the bishop. A very few more have made the same attempt with as little success. Every bishop and other ecclesiastical body reckon 407. in a 1007. to be a reasonable half value; or if it be only a third part, it seldom or never breeds any difference between landlord or tenant. But when the rent is from five to nine or ten parts less than the worth, the bishop, if he consults the good of his see, will be apt to expostulate; and the tenant, if he be an honest man, will have some regard to the reasonableness and justice of the demand, so as to yield to a moderate advancement, rather than engage in a suit where law and equity are directly against him. By these means the bishops have been so true to their trusts as to procure some small share in the advancement of rents; although it be notorious that they do not receive the third penny (fines included) of the real value of their lands throughout the kingdom.

I was never able to imagine what inconvenience could accrue to the public by 10007. or 20007. a-year being in the hands of a Protestant bishop, any more than of a lay person. The former, generally speaking, lives as piously and hospitably as the other; pays his debts as honestly, and spends as much of his revenue among his tenants; besides, if they be his immediate tenants, you may distinguish them at first sight by their habits and horses; or, if you go to their houses, by their comfortable way of living. But the misfortune is, that such immediate tenants, generally speaking, have others under them, and so a third and fourth in subordination, till it comes to the welder (as they call him), who sits at a rack-rent, and lives as miserably as an Irish farmer upon a new lease from a lay landlord. But, suppose a bishop happens to be avaricious (as being composed of the same stuff with other men), the consequence to the public is no worse than if he were a squire; for he leaves his fortune to his son or near relation, who, if he be rich enough, will never think of entering into the church.

And as there can be no disadvantage to the public in a Protestant country that a man should hold lands as a bishop any more than if

he were a temporal person, so it is of great advantage to the community where a bishop lives as he ought to do. He is bound in conscience to reside in his diocese, and by a solemn promise to keep hospitality; his estate is spent in the kingdom, not remitted to England; he keeps the clergy to their duty, and is an example of virtue both to them and the people. Suppose him an ill man; yet his very character will withhold him from any great or open exorbitancies. But in fact it must be allowed that some bishops of this kingdom, within twenty years past, have done very signal and lasting acts of public charity; great instances whereof are the late [Dr. Marsh] and present [Dr. Lindsay] primate, and the lord archbishop of Dublin [Dr. King] that now is, who has left memorials of his bounty in many parts of his province. I might add the bishop of Raphoe [Dr. Forster], and several others: not forgetting the late dean of Down, Dr. Pratt, who bestowed 10007. upon the university; which foundation, (that I may observe by the way,) if the bill proposed should pass, would be in the same circumstances with the bishops, nor ever able again to advance the stipends of the fellows and students, as lately they found it necessary to do; the determinate sum appointed by the statutes for commons being not half sufficient, by the fall of money, to afford necessary sustenance. But the passing of such a bill must put an end to all ecclesiastical beneficence for the time to come; and whether this will be supplied by those who are to reap the benefit better than it has been done by grandees of impropriate tithes, who received them upon the old church conditions of keeping hospitality, it will be easy to conjecture.

To allege that passing such a bill would be a good encouragement to improve bishops' lands is a great error. Is it not the general method of landlords to wait the expiration of a lease, and then cant their lands to the highest bidder? and what should hinder the same course to be taken in church leases, when the limitation is removed of paying half the real value to the bishop? In riding through the country, how few improvements do we see upon the estates of laymen, further than about their own domains? To say the truth, it is a great misfortune, as well to the public as to the bishops themselves, that their lands are generally let to lords and great squires, who, in reason, were never designed to be tenants, and therefore may naturally murmur at the payment of rent as a subserviency they were not born to. If the tenants to the church were honest farmers, they would pay their fines and rents with cheerfulness, improve their

lands, and thank God they were to give but a moderate half value for what they held. I have heard a man of 10007. a-year talk with great contempt of bishops' leases, as being on a worse foot than the rest of his estate; and he had certainly reason: my answer was, that such leases were originally intended only for the benefit of industrious husbandmen, who would think it a great blessing to be provided for, instead of having their farms screwed up to the height, not eating one comfortable meal in a year, nor able to find shoes for their children.

I know not any advantage that can accrue by such a bill, except the preventing of perjury in jurymen and false dealings in tenants; which is a remedy like that of giving my money to a highwayman before he attempts to take it by force; and so I shall be sure to prevent the sin of robbery.

I had wrote thus far, and thought to have made an end, when a bookseller sent me a small pamphlet, entitled "The Case of the Laity, with some Queries;" full of the strongest malice against the clergy that I have anywhere met with since the reign of Toland, and others of that tribe. These kinds of advocates do infinite mischief to OUR GOOD CAUSE, by giving grounds to the unjust reproaches of TORIES and JACOBITES, who charge us with being enemies, to the church. If I bear a hearty unfeigned loyalty to his majesty king George, and the house of Hanover, not shaken in the least by the hardships we lie under, which never can be imputable to so gracious a prince; if I sincerely abjure the pretender, and all popish successors; if I bear a due veneration to the glorious memory of the late king William, who preserved these kingdoms from popery and slavery with the expense of his blood and hazard of his life; and, lastly, if I am for a proper indulgence to all dissenters, I think nothing more can be reasonably demanded of me as a WHIG, and that my political catechism is full and complete. But whoever, under the shelter of that party denomination, and of many great professions of loyalty, would destroy or undermine, or injure the church established, I utterly disown him, and think he ought to choose another name of distinction for himself and his adherents. I came into the cause upon other principles, which, by the grace of God, I mean to preserve as long as I live. Shall we justify the accusations of our adversaries? Hoc Ithacus velit. The Tories and Jacobites will behold us with a malicious pleasure, determined upon the ruin of our friends. For is not the present set of bishops almost entirely

of that number, as well as a great majority of the principal clergy? And a short time will reduce the whole by vacancies upon death.

:

An impartial reader, if he pleases to examine what I have already said, will easily answer the bold queries in the pamphlet I mentioned he will be convinced that the reason still strongly exists for which that limiting law was enacted. A reasonable man will wonder where can be the insufferable grievances that an ecclesiastical landlord should expect a moderate or a third part value in rent for his lands, when his title is at least as ancient and as legal as that of a layman, who is yet but seldom guilty of giving such beneficial bargains. Has the nation been thrown into confusion, and have many poor families been ruined by rack-rents paid for the lands of the church? does the nation cry out to have a law that must in time send their bishops a-begging? but, God be thanked, the clamor of enemies to the church is not yet the cry, and I hope will never prove the voice, of the nation. The clergy, I conceive, will hardly allow that the people maintain them, any more than in the sense that all landlords whatsoever are maintained by the people. Such assertions as these, and the insinuations they carry along with them, proceed from principles which cannot be avowed by those who are for preserving the happy constitution in church and state. Whoever were the proposers of such queries, it might have provoked a bold writer to retaliate, perhaps with more justice than prudence, by showing at whose door the grievance lies, and that the bishops at least are not to answer for the poverty of tenants.

To gratify this great reformer, who enlarges the episcopal rentroll almost one-half, let me suppose that all the church-lands in the kingdom were thrown up to the laity; would the tenants in such a case sit easier in their rents than they do now? or would the money be equally spent in the kingdom? No; the farmer would be screwed up to the utmost penny by the agents and stewards of absentees, and the revenues employed in making a figure at London; to which city a full third part of the whole income of Ireland is annually re turned, to answer that single article of maintenance for Irish land lords.

Another of his quarrels is against pluralities and non-residence. Ás to the former, it is a word of ill name, but not well understood. The clergy having been stripped of the greatest part of their revenues, the glebes being generally lost, the tithes in the hands of laymen, the churches demolished, and the country depopulated, in order to preserve a face of Christianity, it was necessary to unite

small vicarages sufficient to make a tolerable maintenance for a minister. The profit of ten or a dozen of these unions seldom amounts to above 807. or 1007. a year. If there be a very few dignitaries whose preferments are perhaps more liable to this accusation, it is to be supposed they may be favorites of the time, or persons of superior merit, for whom there has ever been some indulgence in all governments.

As to non-residence, I believe there is no Christian country upon earth where the clergy have less to answer for upon that article. I am confident there are not ten clergymen in the kingdom who, properly speaking, can be termed non-residents; for surely we are not to reckon in that number those who for want of glebes are forced to retire to the nearest neighboring village for a cabin to put their heads in the leading man of the parish, when he makes the greatest clamor, being least disposed to accommodate the minister with an acre of ground. And, indeed, considering the difficulties the clergy lie under upon this head, it has been frequent matter of wonder to me how they are able to perform that part of their duty so well as they do.

There is a noble author [lord Molesworth], who has lately addressed to the house of commons an excellent discourse for the encouragement of agriculture; full of most useful hints, which I hope that honorable assembly will consider as they deserve. I am no stranger to his lordship; and excepting in what relates to the church, there are few persons with whose opinions I am better pleased to agree; and am therefore grieved when I find him charging the inconveniences in the payment of tithes upon the clergy and their proctors. His lordship is above considering a very known and vulgar truth, that the meanest farmer has all manner of advantages against the most powerful clergyman, by whom it is impossible he can be wronged, although the minister were ever so ill disposed; the whole system of teasing, perplexing, and defrauding the proctor or his master, being as well known to every ploughman as the reaping or sowing of his corn, and much more artfully practised. Besides the leading man in the parish must have his tithes at his own rate, which is hardly ever above one quarter of the value. And I have heard it computed by many skilful observers, whose interest was not concerned, that the clergy did not receive, throughout the kingdom, one half of what the laws have made their due.

As to his lordship's discontent against the bishops' court, I shall not interpose further than in venturing my private opinion that the clergy would be very glad to recover their just dues by a more short,