felt very comfortable if he had happened to
come near the hurling field that day, and to hear the loudly expressed
comments of his neighbors on his line of conduct. To make the troubles
still deeper, it often happened that the claimant of the tithes was an
absentee--the incumbent of many a parish in Ireland left his curate to
look after his flock and his tithes alike--and the absentee was almost
as much hated in Ireland as the tithe-collector.

[Sidenote: 1832--The tithe question in Parliament]

Now it must not be supposed that there were not many of the Protestant
clergy in Ireland who utterly disapproved of the tithe system. One
Protestant clergyman in England, from whom we have just quoted, the
Rev. Sydney Smith, had denounced the system over and over again in
language the most indignant and the most scornful that even his
scathing humor could command. But there were numbers of Protestant
clergymen in Ireland who saw and proclaimed its injustice and its
futility. The Archbishop of Dublin declared that no Government could
ever accomplish the collection of tithes in Ireland otherwise than at
the point of the bayonet. Protestant country clergy often found that
the very attempts to collect the tithes only brought increased distress
and hardship upon themselves.

Many a poor Protestant clergyman saw the utter injustice of the system,
and disliked and detested it almost as much as the Roman Catholics
themselves could have done. There were many such men, too, who put up
with miserable poverty rather than make any attempt to recover such an
income by force. Great English speakers and writers were beginning to
denounce the whole system. Macaulay stigmatized it as severely as
Sydney Smith had done. George {211} Grote, the historian of Greece,
who had then a seat in the House of Commons, had not only condemned it,
but had condemned the whole State Church system of which it was only a
part. In our own days the ordinary English reader finds it hard to
understand how any such system could have been carried on under a
civilized European Government. Such a reader will readily admit that
Sydney Smith had not gone beyond the limits of sober assertion when he
declared that "there is no abuse like it in all Europe, in all Asia, in
all the discovered parts of Africa, and in all we have ever heard of
Timbuctoo." The subject had been brought up in Parliament by some of
the advanced reformers of the day, and, indeed, it was br