o the Established Church;
the other half were Dissenters. But in Ireland Scot and Southron were
strongly bound together by their common Saxon origin. Churchman and
Presbyterian were strongly bound together by their common Protestantism.
All the colonists had a common language and a common pecuniary interest.
They were surrounded by common enemies, and could be safe only by means
of common precautions and exertions. The few penal laws, therefore,
which had been made in Ireland against Protestant Nonconformists, were
a dead letter. [158] The bigotry of the most sturdy churchman would not
bear exportation across St. George's Channel. As soon as the Cavalier
arrived in Ireland, and found that, without the hearty and courageous
assistance of his Puritan neighbours, he and all his family would run
imminent risk of being murdered by Popish marauders, his hatred of
Puritanism, in spite of himself, began to languish and die away. It
was remarked by eminent men of both parties that a Protestant who, in
Ireland, was called a high Tory would in England have been considered as
a moderate Whig. [159]

The Protestant Nonconformists, on their side, endured, with more
patience than could have been expected, the sight of 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 a year,
without ever performing any spiritual function. Yet this monstrous
institution was much less disliked by the Puritans settled in Ireland
than the Church of England by the English sectaries. For in Ireland
religious divisions were subordinate to national divisions; and the
Presbyterian, while, as a theologian, he could not but condemn the
established hierarchy, yet looked on that hierarchy with a sort of
complacency when he considered it as a sumptuous and ostentatious trophy
of the victory achieved by the great race from which he sprang. [160]

Thus the grievances of the Irish Roman Catholic had hardly anything
in common with the grievances of the English Roman Catholic. The Roman
Catholic of Lancashire or Staffordshire had only to turn Protestant; and
he was at once, in all respects, on a level wi