Page:A letter to the Right Hon. Chichester Fortescue, M.P. on the state of Ireland.djvu/70

 ornaments. A Roman Catholic Bishop told me that he had required a rate of five shillings in the pound on the valuation of a parish for the erection of one of these churches. The priest has often 200l. a year, and his curate 100l. In some places the Catholic rector has 500l. a year. The fee for a marriage is often 15l. or 20l. The Liberation Society propose to leave the Catholic farmer and the Catholic peasant subject to all these exactions, but in compensation the Protestant rector is to disappear. The farmer will find no demand for his eggs and butter from a resident Protestant clergyman; the peasant will have no charitable assistance from the wife and daughters of the clergyman. What will be the result? The voluntary, or rather necessary, payments of the Catholic farmer will continue; the purchases in the market and the alms in the hand of the country gentleman in a black coat will cease.

The balance can only be a considerable loss. Yet if we decline to adopt this plan, we must not suppose that the existing evil would be remedied were the revenues of the southern benefices carried over to Down, Armagh, and Antrim. Let us hear Sir George Lewis on such partial reforms:—

The true ground of complaint is that the State, having a certain endowment for ecclesiastical purposes at its disposal, selects one religious persuasion as the object of its favour, and that one the persuasion of only a tenth part of the community. It is ever to be remembered, in discussing the ecclesiastical state of Ireland, that the objections of the Roman Catholics to the Established Church of that country, are not of more or less; that they would not be removed by