get rid of the absurdity of benefices without Protestants and churches; and the cure of souls would no longer be independent of the number of souls to be cured. Under such a system as this, when the present parochial divisions were got rid of, and the tithes were paid into a common fund, there would be no difficulty in assigning a stipend to each minister according to the number of his congregation and the extent of his district, and by these means apportioning pay to duty. When the number of clergymen had been thus reduced, there would be no necessity for keeping up the Episcopal establishment contemplated by the Church Temporalities Act, viz., two archbishops and ten bishops. Probably four bishops, one for each province, would be an ample provision for the government of such a church. As the Presbyterian clergy in Ireland are maintained on the congregational system at an expense of 25,000l.

about by the force of circumstances in the ecclesiastical system of the United States. “The choice of the pastor (says Mr. Reed) is frequently spoken of as resting with the parish. The term parish, however, does not now describe, as with us, geographical limits; it denotes those persons who compose the congregation, and subscribe to the support of its institutions. In some cases the parish or congregation is allowed a confirmatory voice on the election of the church; this is not deemed desirable, but it is not found to produce any serious evil. . . I am now to refer you to the tenure of ecclesiastical property. You are to understand that there are two bodies that are recognized by the law as holding, and claiming to hold, such property. They are the church and the parish, and they are both corporate bodies. The church is precisely what it is with us. The parish denoted place as well as persons; it now, by the legal changes which have been effected, denotes persons rather than place. The persons in this relation, who are deemed the parish, are the subscribers; and the term, therefore, is nearly synonymous with our term congregation, as distinguished from church. The church has the right to choose the minister; but the parish have a vote on the choice."-Reed and Matheson's Visit to the American Churches, vol. ii., pp. 122, 129. In this phraseology, church is a select body within the congregation or parish a managing committee of the entire congregation.

a year, (the amount of the Regium Donum,) and as the Presbyterians are only about 200,000 fewer than the Episcopalian Protestants, it may be reasonably expected that between tithes and bishops' lands the surplus, after the lives of the present sinecure or nearly sinecure incumbents, would not be inconsiderable. This surplus we should propose first to devote to the endowment of the Presbyterian Church: whatever remained might, according to the ministerial project, be employed for purposes of education. The best course, indeed, would be, if as in Prussia (where education is not considered a secular purpose) the provision for religious teachers, places of worship, and schools, was made from the same fund.

Having thus briefly explained the principle of reform which ought in our opinion to be followed with respect to the Established Church of Ireland and its endowment, we proceed to trace the evils which flow from the maintenance of the Roman Catholic Church of that country by means of the voluntary system.

Preferring, as we do in general, the principle of endowment to the voluntary system, for the maintenance of religious as well as other teachers, we must begin by admitting that some objections have been strongly urged against the latter method, to which we do not consider it as justly liable. The principal of these is, the argument so much pressed by Dr. Chalmers in his work on Endowments, that society, if left to itself, will never provide sufficient means for religious worship, especially in those places where there is the greatest need of it*. He particularly instances the case of the United States; and after speaking of the desertion of

* See also Paley's Moral and Political Philosophy, book vi., ch. 10.

voluntary payments such a stipend as may enable them to move in a respectable condition of life *. It is singular, however, that before a statistical account of the religious institutions of the United States was obtained, the case of the Irish Catholic Church should not have been adverted to in reference to this question. The Irish Catholic clergy have been, since the Reformation, supported exclusively on the voluntary principle, and we never heard it alleged that there was a want of Catholic clergymen in Ireland, or that (since the abrogation of the penal laws) the people were not instructed in their religious duties; and in this case the voluntary principle has had to contend with peculiar difficulties, which are absent in the United States, inasmuch as the Irish Catholics belong, with few exceptions, to the middle and poorer ranks, and the great mass of them are in a state of extreme poverty; whereas, in the United States, every persuasion contains its fair proportion of the wealthier classes.

Other objections have likewise been made to the voluntary system, which properly apply, not to the principle of supporting the clergy by the contributions of their flocks, but to the defects in the government of those religious, communities which happen to be supported on the voluntary system. Such are, for example, the evils alleged to flow from the want of proper places of education for clergymen; the want of a regular ordination; the want of a regular hierarchy; the insufficient education of the clergy; the changeability of ministers. So far, indeed, as these evils are connected with the mode of payment, they may be considered as the vices of the voluntary system; but if they might be removed without introducing the

* See Reed and Matheson, vol. ii. pp. 452, 455, 466.

principle of endowment, it is clear that they have no necessary connexion with that system. This confusion has arisen from the circumstance that the Protestant Dissenters of England, whose ministers are supported on the voluntary system, and who are in this country the great advocates of that system against the friends of the Established Church, have also very lax systems of church government, in which the defects above pointed out prevail in different degrees, according to the different persuasions. The author of an able controversial work on the voluntary system*, recently published, has fallen into this error; and at the same time that he has pointed out many evils springing from the mode of payment, he has added others, which, whether evils or not, are at any rate altogether unconnected with the payment of the ministers, but grow out of the system of church government. In order to perceive that the absence of ordination and of hierarchy is no inseparable concomitant of the voluntary principle, it is only necessary to cast our eyes upon the Irish Catholic church, which, though its clergy are solely supported by the gifts of their flocks, yet is governed with the same strictness of discipline, and the same subordination of powers, as in countries where Catholicism is the religion of the state, and where the standard of orthodoxy is maintained by the terrors of the Inquisition t. For this purpose the Irish Catholic Church

* The Voluntary System. By a Churchman. In Seven Parts. Published by Rivington.

The Commissioners of Public Instruction, in their late perambulation of the country, appear to have only met with one schismatic Roman Catholic chapel in all Ireland. This was in the parish of Birr, in King's County, in the diocese of Killaloe. See their First Report, p. 218. The attendance is stated to be considerably less than at the orthodox chapel in the same parish.

furnishes a test, an instantia crucis, to detect what are the consequences of the voluntary system, and what of a lax church government; if any evils are found in the English dissenting churches which are wanting in the Irish Catholic Church, it is clear that they either arise from the defective church government of the former, or that they are counteracted by the good church government of the latter.

On the other hand, some advantages have been stated to belong exclusively to the voluntary system, which do not seem necessarily limited to it. Thus it has been said that this system has a great superiority to the opposite system, in its power of adapting itself to the wants of the people. "The principle of adaptation, (says Mr. Reed,) the want of which a high authority has lately admitted to be the great defect of an establishment, is certainly the life and virtue of the voluntary system. Whatever may otherwise be its character, its adversaries cannot disallow its inherent power of adaptation; and if they did, America would confound them. The school-house and the church are seen to accommodate themselves precisely to the state of the people, never behind them, never too much in advance. Their very form and structure pass through the gradations of wood, brick, and stone, as do the residences of the people." It is true that, as established churches have been governed, their institutions have for the most part been ill adapted to the wants of the people, inasmuch as the protecting state has consulted its own good rather than that of the church, and has sacrificed ecclesiastical to political interests. The Irish Established Church is a striking instance of this want of

*Vol. ii. p. 280.