Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 3.djvu/242

234 whose purchase is not reckoned above one third less than land of the same yearly rent, should not pay a twentieth part annually (which is half tithe) to the support of the minister. One thing I could wish, that in fixing the maintenance to the several ministers in these new intended parishes, no determinate sum of money may be named; which, in all perpetuities, ought by any means to be avoided; but rather a tax in proportion to the rent of each house, although it be but a twentieth, or even a thirtieth part. The contrary of this, I am told, was done in several parishes of the city after the fire, where the incumbent and his successors were to receive for ever a certain sum; for example, one or two hundred pounds a year. But the lawgivers did not consider, that what we call at present one hundred pounds, will not in process of time have the intrinsick value of twenty; as twenty pounds now, are hardly equal to forty shillings, three hundred years ago. There are a thousand instances of this all over England, in reserved rents applied to hospitals, in old chiefries, and even among the clergy themselves, in those payments which, I think, they call a modus.

As no prince had ever better dispositions than her present majesty for the advancement of true religion, so there never was any age that produced greater occasions to employ them on. It is an unspeakable misfortune, that any design of so excellent a queen should be checked by the necessities of a long and ruinous war, which the folly or corruption of modern politicians have involved us in, against all the maxims whereby our country flourished so many hundred years: else, her majesty's care of religion, would certainly have reached even to her American tations.