n, but is also less able to procure it.
If there were no Established Church, people in our rank of life would
always be provided with preachers to their mind at an expense which
they would scarcely feel. But when a poor man, who can hardly give his
children their fill of potatoes, has to sell his pig in order to pay
something to his priest, the burden is a heavy one. This is, in fact,
the strongest reason for having an established church in any country. It
is the one reason which prevents me from joining with the partisans of
the voluntary system. I should think their arguments unanswerable if the
question regarded the upper and middle classes only. If I would keep up
the Established Church of England, it is not for the sake of lords, and
baronets, and country gentlemen of five thousand pounds a-year, and rich
bankers in the city. I know that such people will always have churches,
aye, and cathedrals, and organs, and rich communion plate. The person
about whom I am uneasy is the working man; the man who would find it
difficult to pay even five shillings or ten shillings a-year out of his
small earnings for the ministrations of religion. What is to become
of him under the voluntary system? Is he to go without religious
instruction altogether? That we should all think a great evil to
himself, and a great evil to society. Is he to pay for it out of his
slender means? That would be a heavy tax. Is he to be dependent on
the liberality of others? That is a somewhat precarious and a somewhat
humiliating dependence. I prefer, I own, that system under which there
is, in the rudest and most secluded district, a house of God, where
public worship is performed after a fashion acceptable to the great
majority of the community, and where the poorest may partake of the
ordinances of religion, not as an alms, but as a right. But does
this argument apply to a Church like the Church of Ireland? It is not
necessary on this occasion to decide whether the arguments in favour
of the ecclesiastical establishments, or the arguments in favour of the
voluntary system, be the stronger. There are weighty considerations on
both sides. Balancing them as well as I can, I think that, as respects
England, the preponderance is on the side of the Establishment. But,
as respects Ireland, there is no balancing. All the weights are in one
scale. All the arguments which incline us against the Church of England,
and all the arguments which incline us in favour