20
The Irish Parliament.
a borough, and have returned members to vote against Ireland."[1]
- ↑ "Irish Debates," vol. xii. p. 17, These observations, it should be remembered, are applied exclusively to the English ecclesiastics billeted on the Irish Church. The persons who speak most severely of the Anglo-Irish Bishops are loudest in their praises of the faithful, suffering, and laborious Irish clergy. Curran, in the next sentence after the one I have quoted, thus speaks: "The real duties of religion have been performed by our own native clergy, who, with all the feelings of gentlemen and scholars, have been obliged to do the drudgery of their profession for forty, or at most, fifty pounds a year, without the means of being liberal from their poverty, without hope of advancing themselves by their learning or their virtues in a country where preferment was notoriously not to be obtained by either." Grattan's celebrated panegyric on Dean Kirwan is well known. It occurs immediately before his description of the Anglo-Irish prelates, " What is the case of Dr. Kirwan? That man preferred this country and our religion, and brought to both a genius superior to what he found in either. He called forth the latent virtues of the human heart, and taught men to discover in themselves a mine of charity of which the proprietors had been unconscious. In feeding the lamp of charity he had almost exhausted the lamp of life. He comes to interrupt the repose of the pulpit, and shakes one world with the thunder of the other. The preacher's desk becomes a throne of light: around him a train not such as crouch and swagger at the levees of princes (horse, foot, and dragoons), but that wherewith a great genius peoples his own state—charity in action and will in humiliation,—vanity, arrogance, and pride appalled by the rebuke of the preacher, and cheated for a moment of their native improbity. What reward? St. Nicholas Within or St. Nicholas Without. The curse of Swift is upon him—to have been born an Irishman—to have possessed a genius, to have used his talents for the good of his country." Mr. Lecky observes that "the Catholics and Presbyterians in Ireland, though they had many grievances, had at least one inestimable advantage. The English Government had no control over the appointment of their clergy." A remarkable article of recent date, attributed to the pen of the Rev. Canon Travers Smith, ascribes to the English Government the "attempted spiritual murder of the Irish Church." (See Church Quarterly Review, January, 1885). The English interest was in truth to the Irish Church what the rotten boroughs were to the Irish Parliament, a constant source of weakness, outrage, and disgrace.
