Slow growth of toleration.
In Locke’s opinion ‘that Church can have no right to be tolerated by the magistrate, which is constituted upon such a bottom, that all those who enter into it do thereby ipso facto, deliver themselves up to the protection and service of another prince. For by this means the magistrate would give way to the settling of a foreign jurisdiction in his own country, and suffer his own people to be listed, as it were, for soldiers against his own government.’ Notwithstanding this consideration, which used to weigh heavily with statesmen, full legal toleration has long been achieved. Intolerance between man and man will, it is to be hoped, become less bitter and less baleful with time. Clerical influence in civil affairs will continue to diminish, but will still be strong for long years to come. In the meantime we have the three Irish Churches keeping the peace between themselves, but distinctly divided. The Protestant Episcopalians look back to St. Patrick and trace their succession to the early days of Christianity, but in modern Ireland they represent mainly the immigrants from England since the Tudor re-conquest. The Presbyterians are the Scotch colony in Ulster with some outposts in the other provinces. The bulk of the native population adheres to Rome.[295]
FOOTNOTES:
[284] Additional MSS. 38538. The report is signed William Henry, apparently he who was Dean of Killaloe in 1761; it is addressed to a duke, probably Newcastle.
[285] Patrick Adair is very hard on Taylor, showing little reverence for his learning and eloquence; as for his theology, ‘he had sucked in the dregs of much of Popery, Socinianism and Arminianism,’ True Narrative, p. 245. Later lights on Taylor’s Irish experience are in Mr. Gosse’s biography, 1903. Writing to Conway on July 4, 1665, Rawdon says: ‘His lordship is so close at his study replying to the answers to his book against Popery, that he is hardly got out of his closet,’ Cal. of State Papers, Ireland.
[286] Essex to Arlington, August 17, 1672, State Papers, Ireland; Hacket to Conway, ib. December 13. Clarendon to Hacket, May 25, 1686, in Clarendon and Rochester Corr., i. 404.
[287] Mason’s Hist. of St. Patrick’s, p. 193. ‘The numerous companies of priests and friars amongst them take care they shall know nothing of religion, but what they design for them; they use all means to keep them to the use of the Irish tongue, lest if they learn English they might be supplied with persons fitter to instruct them; the people are taught to make that also their excuse for not coming to our churches, to hear our services, or converse with us in religious intercourses, because they understand us not, and they will not understand us, neither will they learn that they may understand and live.’—Taylor’s Dissuasive from Popery, preface, Works, x. 124. Bedell said ‘Those people had souls which ought not to be neglected till they would learn English’—Two Lives, p. 41.
[288] Macaulay saw only part of the question when he wrote (chap. vi.): ‘The most absurd ecclesiastical establishment that the world has ever seen. Four Archbishops and eighteen Bishops were employed in looking after about a fifth part of the number of churchmen who inhabited the single diocese of London. Of the parochial clergy a large proportion were pluralists and resided at a distance from their cures. There were some who drew from their benefices incomes of little less than a thousand pounds a year, without ever performing any spiritual function.’ Lingard’s report to Ormonde, 1668, calendared among State Papers, Ireland, p. 674. Collier’s Ecclesiastical Hist., vii. 383. Swift to Harley, September or October 1610, in his Correspondence, ed. Ball, i. 200.
[289] A sufficient account of the Irish translation of the Bible is in Bedell’s Life, copiously annotated by the editor, T. Wharton. Jones, 1872. See also my Ireland under the Tudors, chap. liv., and the article on Andrew Sall in the Dictionary of National Biography. Irish Statutes, 28 Hen. VIII., cap. 15.