Islanders,' attracted the notice of some distinguished members of the Irish Establishment; and suggested to them the idea of organizing an agency for the teaching of their own native population. The originator of the scheme was Dr. Maule, appointed Bishop of Cloyne in 1726.2 In 1730 it was adopted by Primate Boulter; and a memorial to the King, praying for a charter of incorporation, was signed by a large number of bishops, nobility, and gentry. In 1733 a charter was granted, constituting the Lord Lieutenant, the Lord Chancellor, the dignified clergy, and many other persons of distinction, a corporation " for promoting English Protestant schools in Ireland." The society soon obtained large funds; and the Protestant charter schools long occupied a prominent position among the educational institutes of the country. They proposed to teach the poor children of Romanists and others, free of expense, the elements of English literature-including reading, writing, and arithmetic; to procure for them instruction in husbandry, or in trades or manufactures; and especially to train them up in a knowledge of the doctrines of the Established Church. They were essentially eleemosynary and proselytizing. From the first they were viewed with a degree of jealousy and aversion by all outside the pale of the Establishment; and gross abuses gradually crept into their management.5

1 The Scottish Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge originated in 1707. In 1712 it reported to the General Assembly that it had collected £4,400, and was ready to establish schools. In 1725 George I. signified his intention of giving £1,000 a year to maintain preachers and catechists in the destitute districts of the Highlands and Islands. Cunningham's Church History of Scotland, ii. 331-2.

In 1731 he was translated to Dromore, and in 1744 to Meath, where he continued till his death in 1758. He has acquired an unhappy notoriety by his opposition to the Methodists. See Life of Gideon Ousley, pp. 30, 32, 34, 36, 42. 3 This memorial may be found in Mant, ii. 511, 513.

4 Mant, ii. 513.

:

5 In 1745 the Society stated that they had twenty-two schools containing 511 children and as almost all, if not all, were the children of papists, to prevent their relapsing into Popery they were transplanted to schools far away from their relations. Stevens's Inquiry into the Abuses of the Chartered Schools in Ireland, pp. 9, 10. London, 1818. In 1751 the Irish Parliament made a grant to them of £5,000; in 1753 another of £5,000; and in 1757 another of 12,000. In 1759 Parliament was informed that there were forty-six schools and

A. D. 1727-1760. INEFFICIENCY OF THE ESTABLISHED CHURCH. 249

When accounting for the slow progress of the Episcopal Church in Ireland, the circumstances connected with its original formation must never be overlooked. Instead of springing up out of a general demand for the reformation of religion, and instead of carrying along with it a considerable number of the clergy who had been connected with the repudiated system, it was introduced by the mere force of authority; and it had long to contend against the almost unanimous opposition of the bishops, the priesthood, and the people. It was associated from the beginning in public estimation with the hated domination of England; and the conduct of too many of its earliest representatives was ill fitted to remove the impression that it was a compound of imposture and tyranny. When Protestants in large numbers appeared in Ireland in the seventeenth century, they took possession of lands from which the natives were expelled; and it was not remarkable if the ejected owners and occupiers conceived bitter prejudices against both the settlers and their religion. The subsequent enactment of the penal lawsinvolving, as they did, a violation of the Articles of Limerick -was still further calculated to prevent high-minded Romanists from calmly considering the claims of the Reformed doctrine.1

Even in the beginning of the reign of George II. the Irish Government still continued to add to the code of penal legislation. Various impediments2 had already been contrived to prevent members of the Church of Rome from giving their suffrages at parliamentary or municipal elections; and, as their influence on such occasions was still found to be detrimental to what was called "the Protestant interest," the Irish

Ibid. pp. 12, 13. In twenty-two

1,800 children boarded, clothed and educated. years-that is, from 1745 to 1767, the Society received £112,000 from the Irish Parliament and the royal purse. Ibid. p. 19, note.

1 An Act passed in the beginning of the reign of George II. (the 3rd or George II., chap. xi.), must have greatly irritated the R.C. occupiers of land. By this law they were required to contribute to keep the parish churches in repair. 2 Such as requiring them to take the oath of abjuration six months before the time of the election. See before, p. 230. Hence the present Act is said to have been passed "for the better preventing papists from voting in elections." s. 7.

It is said that at a late election for the County of Galway they had given much

Parliament now deprived them altogether of the franchise. It was enacted that "no papist . . . be entitled or admitted to vote at the election of any member to serve in Parliament as knight, citizen, or burgess; or at the election of any magistrate for any city or other town corporate." In the same session, another Act was passed to prevent suspected Romanists from practising as barristers or solicitors. A certificate, stating that the individual named in it had received the Lord's Supper according to the rites of the Established Church, had hitherto been recognized as sufficient evidence that its possessor was a Protestant. About the time of the Revolution the profession of the law had been largely occupied by Romanists; and they were still very unwilling to relinquish its advantages. It was observed that persons, who had always before been accustomed to go to mass, suddenly professed Protestantism when ready to be admitted to the Bar or to practise as attorneys; and that, at the fitting time, they were prepared to produce the needful certificates attesting their conformity. It is not necessary to explain by what species of casuistry they tried to vindicate their hypocrisy. They did not cease afterwards to be attached to the communion of Rome, and to exert all their influence for the maintenance of its interests. "The practice of the law from top to bottom," says Archbishop Boulter, writing about this period, "is at present mostly in the hands of new converts, who give no further security on this account than producing a certificate of their having received the Sacrament in the Church of England or Ireland-which several of them, who were papists at London, obtain on the road hither-and demand to be admitted barristers in virtue of it at their arrival; and several of them have popish wives, and mass said in their houses, and breed up their children papists. Things are at present so

offence by voting against the candidate put forward by Lord Clanricarde, who had, some time before, turned Protestant. Plowden's Hist. Rev., vol. i. 270, note. 1 The Ist of George II., chap. ix. s. 7.

2 Ist of George II., chap. xx. It is a curious fact that it was not until 1737 an Act was passed in the Irish Parliament (the 11th of George II., chap. vi.), providing that all writs, processes and returns thereof, and all pleadings, indictments, and informations, must be in the English tongue, and not in Latin or French.

bad with us, that, if about six should be removed from the bar to the bench here, there will not be a barrister of note left that is not a convert." 1

It has often been remarked that " lawyers rule the world;" and the number of these most unsatisfactory converts, practising as barristers and solicitors, awakened the anxiety of Government. An Act was therefore passed making it much more difficult for such doubtful Protestants to be recognized as members of the legal profession. According to this statute "every person converted from the Popish to the Protestant religion," and called to the bar, or admitted as six clerk or attorney, must, "before taking on him to act or practise, prove by sufficient evidence, on oath, that he has professed himself, and continued to be, a Protestant for two years previously;" and, should he fail to educate all his children under fourteen years of age at the time of his admission, or born afterwards, " in the Protestant religion, according to the Church of Ireland as by law established," he was to forfeit his position.2

Those members of the Legislature who belonged to the party known as Patriots appear, in general, to have been quite as favourable, as the other Irish senators, to the enactment of the penal laws. They did not enter any protest when the Act was passed excluding all Romanists from the elective franchise, and when the greater portion of their countrymen were thus stripped of one of the chief privileges of the constitution. They exhibited an equally narrow spirit when, in the beginning of this reign, an effort was made to set aside the sacramental test, and place all classes of Protestant non-conformists in a more comfortable position. The English ministry, in acknow

1 Mant, ii. 482. Wyse states that from an early date "the bar was crowded with these adventurers. They first entered taking the oaths as . . . . converted papists; then. . . . they continued under a mongrel character, a something between papist and Protestant."-Historical Sketch of the Catholic Association, vol. i., p. 145, note.

2 In 1733 another Act (the 7th of George II., chap. v.) was passed increasing the stringency of this law. In the same session it was enacted (the 7th of George II., chap. vi.) that any convert to Protestantism, whose wife was a Romanist, and who permitted his children to be brought up in the Romish faith, was disqualified to act as a justice of the peace.

ledgment of the services of the Irish Presbyterians to the House of Hanover, wished to repeal the clause in the Act requiring all Protestants, as a qualification for any civil or military office, to partake of the Lord's Supper according to the forms of the Established Church. Instructions were sent across the Channel to the Government in Dublin to take steps accordingly; but, when the measure was mooted in the Irish House of Commons, the Patriots were among its most resolute assailants. Their leader, Dean Swift, could not mingle in the debates of the Senate-house; but he laboured, through the medium of the press, to make the proposition odious; and some of his most scurrilous and unscrupulous pamphlets now appeared. Primate Boulter, though willing to afford relief, was obliged to give way in the face of too strong an opposition and the Sacramental Test was not abolished until about half a century afterwards.

3

Though all the penal laws still remained on the Statute Book, it must be admitted that, during the reign of George II., some of them were very rarely enforced. Roman Catholic archbishops, bishops, and other dignitaries were prohibited, by Act of Parliament, from entering the kingdom; and, if found there, magistrates were required to apprehend them; but, about this period, Dr. Luke Fagan,2 Roman Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, resided for years in the Irish metropolis without molestation. In 1735 the Right Reverend James O'Gallagher, Roman Catholic Bishop of Raphoe, published at Dublin seventeen Irish sermons. When translated, shortly afterwards, to the see of Kildare, he resided, for the rest of his life, in an humble tenement in a village on the Bog of Allen. Some sixty or seventy years ago, the aged inhabitants of the district, as they looked around them, could tell stirring tales of his toils and his anxieties. "There," they would say, "he administered confirmation; here, he held an assembly of the clergy; on that hill, he ordained some young priests whom

1 Plowden's Historical Review, vol. i., p. 282.

2 He became Archbishop of Dublin in 1729, and died about 1733. D'Alton, 466.

3 D'Alton's Archbishops of Dublin, p. 466.

4 Fitzpatrick's Life of Dr. Doyle, i. 314.

5

Ibid. i. 314, 231.