"The third clause provides that if the son of an estated Papist shall conform to the established religion, the father shall be incapacitated from selling or mortgaging his estate, or disposing of any portion of it by will. The fourth clause prohibits a Papist from being the guardian of his own child; and orders that, if at any time the child, though ever so young, pretends to be a Protestant, it shall be taken from its own father, and placed under the guardianship of the nearest Protestant relation. The sixth clause renders Papists incapable of purchasing any manors, tenements, hereditaments, or any rents or profits arising out of the same, or of holding any lease of lives, or other lease whatever, for any term exceeding thirty-one years. And with respect even to such limited leases, it further enacts that, if a Papist should hold a farm producing a profit greater than one third of the amount of the rent, his right to such should immediately cease, and pass over entirely to the first Protestant who should discover the rate of profit. The seventh clause prohibits Papists from succeeding to the properties or estates of their Protestant relations. By the tenth clause, the estate of a Papist, not having a Protestant heir, is ordered to be gavelled, or divided in equal shares between all his children. The sixteenth and twenty-fourth clauses impose the oath of abjuration, and the sacramental test, as a qualification for office, and for voting at elections. The twenty-third clause deprives the Catholics of Limerick and Galway of the protection secured to them by the articles of the treaty of Limerick. The twenty-fifth clause vests in her majesty all advowsons possessed by Papists.
"A further act was passed, in 1709, imposing additional penalties. The first clause declares that no Papist shall be capable of holding an annuity for life. The third provides that the child of a Papist, on conforming, shall at once receive an annuity from his father; and that the chancellor shall compel the father to discover, upon oath, the full value of his estate, real and personal, and thereupon make an order for the support of such conforming child or children, and for securing such a share of the property, after the father's death, as the court shall think fit. The fourteenth and fifteenth clauses secure jointures to Popish wives who shall conform. The sixteenth prohibits a Papist from teaching, even as assistant to a Protestant master. The eighteenth gives a salary of £30 per annum to Popish priests who shall conform. The twentieth provides rewards for the discovery of Popish prelates, priests, and teachers, according to the following whimsical scale: For discovering an archbishop, bishop, vicar-general, or other person, exercising any foreign ecclesiastical jurisdiction, £50; for discovering each regular clergyman, and each secular clergyman not registered, £20, and for discovering each Popish schoolmaster or usher, £10. The twenty-first clause empowers two justices to summon before them any Papist over eighteen years of age, and interrogate him when and where he last heard Mass said, and the names of the persons present, and likewise touching the residence of any Popish priest or schoolmaster; and if he refuses to give testimony, subjects him to a fine of £20, or imprisonment for twelve months.
"Several other penal laws were enacted by the same parliament, of which we can only notice one; it excludes Catholics from the office of sheriff, and from grand juries, and enacts that, in trials upon any statute for strengthening the Protestant interest, the plaintiff might challenge a juror for being a Papist, which challenge the judge was to allow."—McGee's Ireland, vol. ii. pp. 605, 608.
We may here turn from this repulsive record of tyrannous legislation to inquire into the consequences of it all at the end of the second, and once again at the end of the third century, from the reformation.
George II. came to the throne in 1727, and bequeathed it to his successor in 1760. This generation saw, therefore, the close of the second century of the great Protestant experiment; and if a centennial celebration had been proposed to them in 1751, the report of progress made must have included the following principal facts.
"We have dispossessed the Catholic proprietors of five sixths of their property during this last century; we have excluded them from the bench, the bar, and parliament; we have prohibited them being guardians or teachers of youth; we have disfranchised and disarmed their whole body, even their nobles and gentry; yet as far as the people are concerned, we labor in vain. There has been lately (1747) a census of the kingdom, and out of 4,300,000 inhabitants, 3,500,000 are returned as papists. Even in Ulster they are not supplanted; in Leinster they are three to one; in Munster, seven to one; in Connaught, twelve to one. Without property, with few priests, and scarce any bishops, still doth this perverse generation increase and multiply. What can we do with them more than we have done to convince and convert them?" To this searching question some observer more profound than the others seems to have replied, "Try education!"
The third centennial celebration of the introduction of the English liturgy into Ireland—the 51st year of the union of the two national churches—would have afforded an excellent opportunity of taking stock, humanly speaking, of the progress made in a hundred years. But no one thought of suggesting an appropriate celebration of the great event, and so, unhappily, the precious opportunity has been lost. We shall endeavor, however, to supply the want of such a comprehensive retrospect; and here, for the first time, we find the facts and figures of Mr. Godkin's book of considerable service to the subject. From the House of Commons debates of the year 1834, Mr. Godkin gives the following sketch of the arguments and illustrations used in support of "the Church Temporalities Act:"
"Lord John Russell, Lord Howick, and Mr. Sheil, while fully admitting that an establishment tends to promote religion and to preserve good order, contended that it ought not to be maintained where it fails to secure these objects, and that it must always fail when, as in Ireland, the members of the Established Church are only a minority of the nation, while the majority, constituting most of the poorer classes, are thrown upon the voluntary system for the support of their clergy. Concurring with Paley in his view of a Church Establishment—that it should be founded upon utility, that it should communicate religious knowledge to the masses of the people, that it should not be debased into a state engine or an instrument of political power—they demanded whether the Church of Ireland fulfilled these essential conditions of an establishment. They asked whether its immense revenues had been employed in preserving and extending the Protestant faith in Ireland? In the course of something more than a century it was stated that its revenues had increased sevenfold, and now amounted to £800,000 a year. Had its efficiency increased in the same proportion? Had it even succeeded in keeping its own small flock within the fold? On the contrary, they adduced statistics to show a lamentable falling off in their numbers. For example. Lord John Russell said, 'By Tighe's History of Kilkenny, it appears that the number of Protestant families in 1731 was 1055, but in 1800 they had been reduced to 941. The total number of Protestants at the former period was 5238, while the population of the county, which in 1800 was 108,000, in 1731 was only 42,108 souls. From Stuart's History of Armagh, we find that sixty years ago the Protestants in that country were as two to one; now they are as one to three. In 1733, the Roman Catholics in Kerry were twelve to one Protestant, and now the former are much more numerous than even that proportion. In Tullamore, in 1731, there were 64 Protestants to 613 Roman Catholics; but according to Mason's parochial survey, in 1818 the Protestants had diminished to only five, while the Roman Catholics had augmented to 2455. On the whole, from the best computation he had seen—and he believed it was not exaggerated one way or the other—the entire number of Protestants belonging to the Established Church in Ireland can hardly be stated higher than 750,000; and of those 400,000 are resident in the ecclesiastical province of Armagh.'"—pp. 153.
Now, for the maintenance of this church of 700,000 out of a population of 7,000,000—this church of a tenth of the people—there were then and now are held in mortmain of the best lands of the kingdom, above 600,000 acres. We are told by the poet:
"A time there was ere England's woes began
When every rood of ground sustained its man."
The Irish soil is not so nutritious; still, even there, every acre stands for a soul saved or to be saved, according to "the doctrine and discipline" of the united church. In addition to the lands and their revenues, there are also certain supplementary parliamentary grants not to be despised even by light and worldly-minded persons. Mr. Godkin enumerates, in his introduction, several of these: