IRELAND. We have long been convinced that our sympathies are not sufficiently drawn out to the present sufferings of the Irish clergy. Never, perhaps, at any former period have their privations and difficulties been greater than at the present moment; and never, perhaps, has there been in vigorous exercise a more abundant degree of believing confidence and patient resigned submission. But it is not for us in our more privileged position to forbear our sympathy because of their submissive silence-it is rather the more incumbent upon us to seek out their distresses, and to familiarize ourselves with their sorrows, in order that we may apply our services where most needed and deserved, and where they will most extensively benefit; and, indeed, in proportion as we wish to befriend the suffering mass of the Irish laity, we may well uphold the standard-bearers of the cross. The name of any faithful parochial clergyman may well be designated

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Legion;" no one can calculate the extent of his beneficial influence, and who can estimate the disastrous consequences of the standard-bearer fainting? It is perfectly manifest that in upholding the laborious and devoted clergy of Ireland, we render the surest and most unmingled service to that unhappy country.

In order that our readers may not be ignorant of their present position, we are induced to give them the following letter, which lately appeared in the Morning Herald—

blighted this year-also, while poorrate taxation is our only present means of repairing the loss and keeping alive millions, you will easily understand how high that taxation must be in miserable localities, and how heavily it must press upon the rate-payers, so as, in fact, to reduce multitudes of "strong" solvent farmers at each collection to the common level of pauperism. Now, our poor clergy, beneficed, suffer this pressure with four-fold severity.

"First. The valuation of lay property is generally under the mark, or the increased value of farm produce may help the owner to lighten the burden. Not so with the clergy; their rate is equivalent to the full value of their tithe-rent charge; no allowance for loss or cost except upon the tax levied by the ecclesiastical commissioners upon benefices over £300 per annnum, which are but few comparatively to this, after the confiscation of a quarter of church income left us all reduced indeed.

Secondly. The moment a poor rate is struck, it can be levied off the clergy, for it is deducted by the landlord from the tithe-rent charge which he pays, and this long before he has himself paid the rate, as, previous to the 1st of May, or the 1st of November, the rates are genarally struck and deducted instantly from the titherent charge due upon those days. No hesitation, no appeal, is allowed here.

"Thirdly. The landlord and tenant divide the poor rates equally between them: far different measures does the law assign to the clergy; the full rate is deducted from them. For example, if the rate be 7s. 6d., the landlord and tenant generally pay 3s. 9d. each; the minister the full 7s. 6d.

"Fourthly. It has been given as the opinion of some eminent counsel, that we are only to pay rate on each pound of our actual receipt of tithe ; but other lawyers have declared that we should allow the landlord to deduct the rate on the whole year's tithe income out of the half year,

payable at the time the rate is struck, and this latter construction of this harsh law the landlords almost invariably take, so that the 7s. 6d. rate, which falls upon the tenant and landlord jointly, becomes 15s. deducted out of the half-year's income of the poor clergy. Still more you are aware that there is no church cess in Ireland, and that in lieu of it, our churches, &c., are supported by taxation upon the benefices of the clergy, in addition to the revenues of the ten suppressed bishopricks.

"Now at this awful crisis the ecclesiastical commissioners, who have the management of this fund, are more rigidly than ever enforcing their taxation; and where the impoverished incumbent cannot pay, they are issuing sequestrations, a system which enhances the debt, I believe, by 5s. in each pound. Now, what are our resources? If the landlords were disposed to act humanely, they seldom have the power, so many of the Roman Catholic tenants have emigrated, carrying off the value of their crops, either by intimidation or by stealth. This day I heard of a southern landlord, who this year received only £60 out of a rental of £1600. We seldom have private means, for we are generally younger sons, who have expended our capital upon our expensive university course. Even in such rare cases as we have property independent of our benefices, it suffers equally with other property, and our tender Christian feelings will not allow us to enforce our rights rigidly by law, as laymen enforce them, if at all. Tuition is the most usual resource of the English clergy. It does not exist to any perceptible degree in this country, where parents cannot afford the extra expense. For the benefit of my afflicted brethren in the ministry, I will give you the details of my own case, for it casts a mournful light upon what I have stated. The income of my benefice is nominally above £300 per annum, it extends over many square miles. The ecclesiastical commissioners have laid claim to £200 per year of the amount, and that wealthy corporation can easily crush an individual, so that my clear undisputed income is

£100. Last November, £50 were payable to me, but then 5s. 4d. poor rate was to be deducted (from the whole year's income) out of the November gale, and accordingly it was 10s. 8d. in the pound to me, which taken from £50, left me £23 6s. 8d. as my clerical income for the half year! In no single instance has any landlord abated his claim; but, on the contrary, I have lying before me a letter from a nobleman's agent, requesting time for the payment of my pittance demanded from his lordship. Having obtained high honours at my university, I have repeatedly tried to obtain pupils, and succeeded but once. It was in the case of an English officer, who left the army for the church. He studied for some time with me, and passed a very creditable ordination examination; but finding that his means were as small as my own, I declined accepting any payment for my labour.

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"I do say, in all sincerity, that but for my trust in the tender mercy of my Heavenly Father, the distress in which I myself have been long placed, and the calamities which I witness around me, would have long since broken my heart. I have seen the health of my wife and children visibly impaired by all the privations which they have endured since the famine commenced. During the last five months two of my family have fallen under maladies, aggravated if not caused, by insufficient and unwholesome food.

"When I go abroad into my parish, I am absolutely stunned by the clamorous applications of poor Roman Catholic wretches, whose dire wretchedness is shocking. When I enter my school, it is full of children, chiefly Roman Catholic, eagerly committing to memory the Word of God; but, alas! the pallid faces and sad smiles of most of these little ones, so different from their former merry laugh and cheerful countenances, tell me enough of their misery at home, without noticing the tattered clothes which hang loosely round them. If I enter a parishioner's house, I either meet the supplicating look of some decayed Protestant, who hangs upon any little help I can give to keep

himself out of the confinement and contamination of the workhouse, which, glutted as it is by the vilest Roman Catholic reprobates in the country, threaten him with death, spiritual and temporal-or I am urgently asked for help. How can I refuse to draw out my soul to these

miserable suppliants? The agony of refusing any such appeal is intense. The applications made to me by our numerous local charities and our religious societies are still more urgent, and more difficult to be resisted. I am told, that if I withdraw my name from the list, the injury will be excessive, from the bad example shown to others, who naturally expect a minister of Christ to be foremost in charity.

"Grievous as my sufferings are, and difficult to be borne by a minister who has borne the burden and heat of seventeen years' toil in some of the most arduous parishes in Ireland, they are light compared with those endured by other clergymen of my acquaintance.

"I know a very highly-gifted man, of exalted piety and eminent success in his ministry, whose praise is in all the churches: he can seldom place butcher's meat on his table. He cannot afford a cup of coffee; tea is out of the question. He has been twenty-four years ordained, and has a delicate wife and five children.

"I lately met a devoted clergyman. He told me that his poor rate was 15s. in the pound. He was suffering from dropsy. He spoke of knowing many clergymen worse off than himself. He, shortly after my interview, expired. Time would fail me if I undertook to detail even worse cases than these, where the furniture and even bed of clergymen have been seized for debt, and redeemed by friends, for such small sums as £14.

"These cases are not made known because there is no relief in Ireland; and there is a general impression abroad, that the English people have confounded the innocent with the guilty in Ireland, and that no relief can be expected from persons who fancy that it would be expended on the ungrateful.

"The Irish clergy tarry the Lord's leisure. He has given them that good part which they know shall not be taken from them. They sit at Jesus' feet, and hear his word; they are faithful to that good word; they esteem it more than their necessary food-1600 out of 2000 clergy still resist the Roman Catholic National Board. The Irish Society prospers nobly. Our flocks are fed in Gospel pastures. We know that our covenant God hath provided, and will provide. His will be done.-Very faithfully, in Christ Jesus,

66 AN IRISH VICAR."

It is gratifying to see such sentiments expressed in the Irish newspapers as appear in the following leading article in a Belfast Journal

"What is the greatest grievance of which Ireland complains? and what is the greatest grievance of which Ireland has cause to complain? Let the patriots answer the first question, and we will reserve to ourselves the right to answer the second. They say, it is British rule and connexion-the dominion of foreigners as they term it-the want of a home legislature, viz., the fine rule and influence, which their noble selves would give to the country. And by this they mean the downfall of the Protestant Church, the reestablishment of Popery, and the power to vex first, and then drive every Protestant out of the country. "Ireland for the Irish" is their maxim, whereby, they mean, Ireland for the priests and agitators, Peter-pence for the Pope, and the whole income of the country for the support of demagogues, hypocritical bishops, and the tame underlings and agents of the Man of Sin. Such are the leading grievances of which the Repealers complain; so that their grief has become vocal, their imaginary oppressions real, and their contingent wants necessary! Mitchel, the opium eater, has wrought himself up into a phrenzy; devised miseries for himself and the whole country; and while the queen sits on the throne, he is resolved to be as wretched Haman, who exclaimed, "all these

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things avail me nothing so long as I see Mordecai, the Jew, sitting at the king's gate." If he is not a manufacturer of shoes, silks, or briefs for his excellency, he has the chief honour of being the prime artificer in inventing grievances for the ignorant and illiterate, and of making imagination run away with sound sense, and sober reason. In this, he has borne away the palm from the whole O'Connell family, which must be felt as a great grievance, especially by John, who is successor to his father in the art of colouring, and misrepresentation. At all events, between young and old Ireland, the country is burdened with grievances, which no man can imagine, much less enumerate.

"But what is the great grievance of which Ireland has just cause to complain? If she had a voice which could issue from her fertile plains, diversified mountains, gentle hills, and flowing rivers, what would be the great complaint she would utter? Foreign rule and bondage would be the burden of her bitter cry. She would bewail the tyranny of Satan, and the Man of Sin, the abstraction of her revenues to pay for masses, and the liberation of souls from an imaginary purgatory, to send them into a fool's paradise. Her voice should be heard reverberating throughout the universe of God, while she would complain of false dogmas, vain traditions, unmeaning mummeries, priestly assumptions, altar denunciations, Bible burnings, and the vast mass of iniquity, turbulence, agitation, dissatisfaction, depredations, and savage murders, by which the blood of the innocent has watered her fertile soil. In a word, Popery is her greatest grievance: and England, Scotland, and the Province of Ulster, could bear testimony to the truth of her complaint. Who can account for the poverty, misery, and degradation of the South and West, on any other principle? This false and cruel system has deprived the peasantry of the country of manly, independent principle; reduced them into beggary by habit, made them the dupes of priests and demagogues,

shut them up in ignorance, made them in love with Celtic barbarism, taught them to shut their eyes to the future, and thereby fold their arms in indolence, when they ought to be improving the present moment in manly energy. It is this infernal system which has destroyed confidence, prevented the employment of capital, and doomed the inhabitants of Ireland to sit in idleness, with the potato in one hand and a string of unmeaning beads attached to a crucifix in the other. It is this abomination which maketh desolate,' that has shut the eyes of all to the late judgment of God; attributed the punishment to wrong causes; raised the cry against the Government, as if they produced the potato blight; agitated the country; called for the manufacture of pikes, and moved the people against all rule and authority. It is this, and this alone, which forms a blot upon our juries; glories in perjury as a virtue, and provides for the iniquity by priestly absolution.

"Such is the foul system of Popery, of which Ireland has just cause of complaint. At this moment it grasps the hand of infidelity in the persons of Mitchel, Duffy, Reilly, Meagher, and O'Brien, the descendant, forsooth, of a royal savage, whose only saddle was a suggaun. Look at the junction now formed, and see its workings in one striking fact, which indicates the wickedness of the movement party, and tells the world that the judgment of heaven must fall in retribution on their heads. We allude to the desecration of the Sabbath. This is the special day chosen for rifle exercise, spouting clubs, and treasonable associations. On this sacred day, the priest and the infidel meet on the platform, exhibit the Sabbath-breakers and infidels of '98, as a proper pattern for the people to follow after; encourage bloodshed; speak evil of dignities,' and trample on the institution of God. They have thus set themselves in array, not only against the sovereign of this empire, but against Him who is the great ruler of the universe."

His removal from his earthly labours to the joy of his Lord just before the Jubilee commemoration week, a period to which he had looked forward with earnest expectation, served to deepen the solemnity, and to increase the spirituality, of the occasion, in the minds of a large circle who had known and valued him as a coadjutor or Christian friend. Many allusions were made, in the course of the proceedings of that week, to his memory. The Archbishop of Canterbury, in his sermon, touchingly alluded to him as "the faithful servant of God and of this Society, who had been recently taken from the Society, but can never be taken from the God whom he served. Would he exchange the blessed Jubilee which he has entered on for that which he once looked forward to with joy?"

A sermon was also preached, on the jubilee day, in the chapel of Rugby School, by the Rev. Dr. Tait, head master, in which the character and example of Mr. Fox, who had formerly been a pupil at the school, MARCH-1849.

were forcibly presented to the boys; and the reasons for uniting in the Jubilee celebration were thus stated:

"On this day we should have been wantonly separating ourselves from those of the faithful throughout Christendom, who are most nearly connected with us, and wantonly forgetful also of the prayers of a dead friend who loved well our school, and was one of its truest ornaments, if we had not met to stir up our minds to take an interest in this great work."

On Sunday the 22d of October, which preceded the jubilee week, a sermon had been preached at Hampstead Chapel, by the Rev. J. Tucker, on the occasion of Mr. Fox's death; for in that chapel, after his late return from India, he had first returned public thanks to Almighty God for his safe voyage. He had also assisted, for a few weeks, in the ministry of the chapel; and while he was lying upon his bed of sickness, the prayers of that congregation had been specially offered on his behalf. Some particulars of the last days of Mr. Fox are given in Mr. Tucker's ser

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