been required to give up the national language) for those of the foreigner. It was only because Rome was mistress of Greece that she could afford to admit the higher excellence of Grecian art, literature, and science:

"Excudent alii spirantia, mollius æra

Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento
Hæ tibi erunt artes."

In the case of the Irish people there was no reflection by which the national pride could console itself. There was no endowment, natural or acquired, physical or mental, in which the less civilized could claim an unquestionable superiority over the more civilized. nation. There was no interchange of advantages as in the case of Rome and Greece, where protection was given on one side, instruction on the other. Here the instructors were also the conquerors.

The political exigencies of the time delayed the completion of the conquest till the time of the Reformation. The worst evils of English rule in Ireland, both before and after the Reformation, have arisen from the weakness, not from the power of England. England was not able to control or to punish the arrogant nobles who under the plea of her authority committed the grossest outrages against the native population.

7. A speedy retribution overtook the oppressors. Being few in number, widely separated from one another, and far removed from their own country, their interests were henceforth identical with the interests of the people in the midst of whom they dwelt. Since they refused to extend to the native Irish the benefits of the higher civilization which they had enjoyed

at home, they were doomed to sink to the level of their neighbours by a process of gradual degradation. Having none of the advantages of education, having no facilities for obtaining articles of luxury, comfort, or even of decency, in a country destitute of manufactures and commerce, they soon lost all traces of higher civilization, and became undistinguishable from the surrounding population. To prevent this progress of disintegration which was going on continually,— reducing the numbers of the friends of England, and swelling the numbers of her enemies,-several statutes were passed against Irish customs, Irish laws, and even the Irish language. Thus, not only were the Irish people the conquered vassals of a more civilized race, to which they were inferior in the arts of war, in religion, and in social life, and by whom they were treated with contempt; but they found their own customs, dress, manner of living, and usages of social and domestic life forbidden under the harshest penalties, not only in their own case, but in the case of any of the conquering race who might think fit to adopt them. Contempt on one side engendered vindictiveness on the other. The Irish people clung with the more desperate tenacity to those venerable usages which they saw so scornfully and so bitterly proscribed. It became henceforth a point of honour to retain them.

8. The chief agents of this anti-Irish policy were the bishops. The bishops were the most powerful members of the Government. They often wielded the whole power of the Government. In the absence of the lay-peers, they were frequently the majority of the Upper House. The instruments of this coercive and barbarous policy could not but become objects

of special detestation. This sentiment might perhaps be concealed, so long as all parties were united on the subject of religion, while there was nothing to try the influence of the superior over the inferior clergy, or over their respective flocks. But so soon as any occasion would arise to try this influence,—the moment they put themselves at the head of any movement which it was desirable to render popular,-then the remembrance of the accumulated wrongs which they had lent themselves to inflict would burst forth, and it would be seen how little real authority they possessed with the mass of the population.

In this way the original defect of the Irish episcopate never has been remedied. The limits of dioceses had not been firmly settled, nor had diocesan episcopacy become a national institution till the century of the English invasion. After this invasion the bishops became identified with the English interest in Ireland. They lent their spiritual authority to the coercive measures which were most unpopular in Ireland, and they were regarded as the instigators and accomplices of the laws which were passed against the language and the customs of the Irish race. Thus

Brennan, a Franciscan, who has written an ecclesiastical history of Ireland, gives abundant evidence of the anti-Irish policy of the pre-Reformation bishops, and their scandalous neglect of their spiritual duties. "One truth is certain, that while these men (the prelates) with power and influence at their command, were thus busily employed in the political management of foreign interests; the general state, the peace and prosperity of Ireland, were subjects scarcely ever contemplated, they were wantonly and shamefully disregarded."-(vol. ii. p. 23.)

He admits (vol. ii. p. 84) that by a statute passed in the reign of Edward 1V., the prelates of Ireland were obliged under the penalty of one hundred pounds to pronounce sentence of excom

a position originally weak, was submitted to a strain which the very strongest position could not bear. It was the fate of the Irish Church at the time of the Reformation, that the long pent-up vengeance which the selfish policy of the pre-Reformation Church had been exciting, burst at this crisis with overwhelming force. As the bishops had been the foremost ministers of the Church as well as of the Crown, they had been regarded with suspicion and distrust, and had never gained the hearty allegiance of the national party either among the clergy or the people.

munication on such of the king's subjects as the authorities should think proper to pronounce disaffected.

He gives a translation of the words of the oath drawn up by Henry VII. to be taken by all prelates of the Irish Church, as follows: "I, A. B., shall from this day forward, as often as I shall on the behalf of our Sovereign Lord the King be lawfully required, execute the censures of the Church, by the authority of our holy Father Pope Innocent VIII., and by his bull given under lead, against all those of his subjects, of what dignity, degree, state, or condition they may be, that disturbeth or troubleth our said Sovereign Lord or his title to the Crown of England and Lordship of Ireland; or causeth commotion or rebellion against the same; or aideth, supporteth, or comforteth any of those traitors or rebels that intendeth the destruction of his said Realm of England and Lordship of Ireland, &c."—(vol. ii. p. 59.)

To the native Irish it made little difference whether the pre-Reformation bishops preferred the interests of England or of Rome.

The Abbé Mac Geoghegan records the fate of an attempt which was made to found a University in Ireland for the instruction of the natives. The proposal was defeated through the opposition of one of the principal members of the council, who was also a bishop. To one of his friends who expressed his surprise that a Catholic bishop should frustrate so holy and salutary a measure, the prelate answered, "that he had not decided as a bishop of the Catholic Church, but as a senator of England."Mac Geoghegan's History, vol. i. p. 197.

We cannot understand the present position of the Irish Church, nor estimate the force of the opposition against which it has had to contend since the Reformation, without bearing in mind this accumulation of hoarded discontent created against it by the antiIrish policy with which it had been identified before the Reformation.

9. Let us contrast with the foregoing the state of the Church of England during the same period. Centuries before the invasion of Ireland, the boundaries of English dioceses and parishes had been settled. In the time of Edward the Confessor, we find all the machinery of episcopal supervision, with the several grades of subordinate officers discharging their respective duties as the recognised agents of a national Church.

In England, the parish is the most characteristic of all the national institutions. From the earliest to the latest times the parish has been the trainingschool of Englishmen in habits of self-govern ment and independence. In the parish-meetings they have learned to transact their own affairs, and thus to counteract the tendency to centralize all matters of internal administration in the executive government. At the subordinate meetings of the clergy every parochial incumbent was bound to attend or to send his curate as proxy, and the rural deans presided, making known among other matters the decisions of the superior diocesan and provincial synods of which they were members. As the great councils of the Church in the earlier centuries gave the first practical illustration of the value of representative institutions, so the parish-meetings brought before the poorest parishioner the most important questions of the day,