of the kingdom, for many reasons purely secular; and that this last attempt for repealing the test did much more affect at present the temporal interest than the spiritual; yet the whole body of the lower clergy have, upon both those occasions, expressed equal gratitude to that honourable house for their justice and steadiness, as if the clergy alone were to receive the benefit.
It must needs be therefore a great addition to the clergy's grief, that such an assembly as the present house of commons, should now, with an expedition more than usual, agree to a bill for encouraging the linen manufacture, with a clause whereby the church is to lose two parts in three of the legal tithe in flax and hemp.
Some reasons why the clergy think such a law will be a great hardship upon them are, I conceive, those that follow. I shall venture to enumerate them, with all deference due to that honourable assembly.
First, the clergy suppose that they have not by any fault or demerit, incurred the displeasure of the nation's representatives: neither can the declared loyalty of the present set, from the highest prelate to the lowest vicar, be in the least disputed: because there are hardly ten clergymen through the whole kingdom, for more than nineteen years past, who have not been either preferred entirely upon account of their declared affection to the Hanover line, or higher promoted as the due reward of the same merit.
There is not a landlord in the whole kingdom residing some part of the year at his country seat, who is not in his own conscience fully convinced, that the tithes of his minister have gradually sunk for some years past one third, or at least one fourth, of their former value, exclusive of all nonsolvencies.
