Page:A letter to the Right Hon. Chichester Fortescue, M.P. on the state of Ireland.djvu/74

 more productive, excluding any regard to its more equitable application for the benefit of the Irish people, would be quite unsatisfactory and quite useless. But if it is contemplated as the present Primate of Ireland once contemplated to have fewer clergymen and larger unions in the South and West of Ireland, and to transfer the revenues thus procured to benefices in the North, where the Protestant congregations are considerable, I must say that, in the view of the 'benefit of the Irish people,' such a transfer would be positively mischievous.

The best character an Irish Protestant clergyman can assume, that which Dean Swift gave him in the last century and which the Bishop of Killaloe gives him in the present, is that of a resident country gentleman in a black coat.

But if you carry away this resident country gentleman from counties where the revenue accrues, where country gentlemen are scarce, and the example of a man of education conversant with justice, and of his family conversant with charity, is really useful, and divert his income derived from the parish or parishes in his neighbourhood to another parish or parishes in a distant county, in order to relieve the great lords and rich proprietors of the north from the obligation of augmenting, out of their own pockets, the means of clergymen who give spiritual instruction to their neighbours in Armagh, in Antrim, and in Down, you will heighten the injustice and aggravate the evils of the Irish Church established by law.

But, say some sanguine persons, the Reformation