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allowed in the spirit of those laws. They held up the clergy of the people to unmitigated odium, and exhausted on them the whole vocabulary of denunciation and contempt. They rudely scorned all the beliefs and feelings which the people held as the most consecrated in the inmost sanctuaries of their religious affections. Beyond this, these missionaries were the most virulent opponents against the struggles of the people for the enjoyment of national and civic rights. They were zealous for the emancipation of the West Indian negro, and equally zealous against the emancipation of the Irish Catholic; yet these were the men who thought that they had divinely assigned to them the duty, and the gifts, and the fitness to turn a rusty Irish Catholic into a brightly-plated Brummagem Protestant.

The part which Dr. Doyle took in these controversies was seldom purely theological. His polemics were usually incidental to his patriotism, and the defence of his Church was generally connected with that of the civil claims of its members. We shall select but one opponent with whom he powerfully grappled, we mean Archbishop Magee, author of a celebrated work on the Atonement. A few remarks on the Archbishop and his work may interest our readers. He was a native of Enniskillen, the son of a respectable but reduced merchant, and was born about 1764. He was educated at the expense of a wealthy relative. He entered Trinity College, Dublin, when he was only fifteen, and had for fellow-students Plunket and Thomas Addis Emmet. He was diligent in study and cheerful in temper; he loved the society of maidens, and the pursuit of mathematics; he had extraordinary skill in //dancing and diaphantines. He obtained a fellowship, and, See p.30. considering the enormous amount of learning and science demanded in the Dublin University in the candidate for such an office, the success of a young man in gaining it gave him deservedly very high distinction. He entered into orders, and, in spite of the law which enjoined celibacy on the fellows, and which he was sworn to observe, he married. In early life, he was a radical, a hater of England and an opponent of the union. He was Irish of the Irish. Change of conviction, and with it change of colors, came in time. Poor and outcast

liberalism gave place to prosperous and exultant toryism, and rebellious green bloomed into loyal orange. Magee became Dean of Cork, and, in due season, Archbishop of Dublin. Theological conversion, even with the greatest abilities, is seldom so favorable to ambition as political conversion. Kirwin, the most eloquent of preachers, of whom Grattan said, that "he awoke the slumbers of the Irish pulpit, and exhausted the oil of life in feeding the lamp of charity," changed his religion, and died in a wretched deanery; Magee changed his politics, and died in a wealthy archbishopric.

We allude to the Archbishop's book, not to review or criticise it, but on account of some circumstances connected with it. Learned men have impeached the originality of this book, both as to its learning and its argument; but all candid readers will confess that there is a polemical bitterness in it which is all the author's own. His work, on a certain occasion, became of value to a class of theologians who desire to appear learned in theology-made-easy, and whose bigotry is commonly as deep as their scholarship is shallow. About the year 1839, thirteen Evangelical clergymen of the Established Church undertook to preach weekly a series of thirteen lectures, in Liverpool, against Socinianism. Accordingly, one morning all the Liverpool Socinians saw placards staring them in the face, exhorting them to attend thirteen lectures by learned and godly men, which were to convert them from the iniquity of their heresy, and save them from the error of their ways. Three unaided Unitarian ministers of the place-though scornfully left out of notice by these learned and godly men felt it their duty to interfere, and announced a counter series of thirteen lectures. Thus arose what was called "The Liverpool Controversy." After the thirteen reverend gentlemen had been compelled to recognize the three reverend heretics, and to agree to certain conditions of argument, it was arranged on both sides that the Scriptures in their original languages should be the only ultimate authority. Notwithstanding this, from the beginning to the end of the discussion, the thirteen disputants never ceased to urge against their opponents the assumed perversions of a work which was called "An Improved Version of the New Testament." This weapon, and most of

the other weapons which the thirteen used, came from the armory of Dr. Magee's work. The fact was, that the Unitarian disputants had no concern with "The Improved Version." But what was this version? The substance of it was by Archbishop Newcome: this was retouched by Mr. Belsham, who added some marginal notes. In less than a year after its publication, "The Improved Version" was subjected to a searching and condemnatory criticism by the Rev. Dr. Lant Carpenter, Unitarian minister in Bristol. The essentials of this criticism were adopted, almost without acknowledgment, by an Oxford divine; Dr. Magee borrowed them from him; and the Liverpool champions of Orthodoxy adopted them from Magee. Magee withheld "all notice of his obligations to the Unitarian reviewer." So the very book which a Unitarian scholar was the first to decry, was made the heaviest count in the theological indictment which the Archbishop and his followers brought against the Unitarians. "If Dr. Carpenter," asks the Rev. James Martineau, "had been minister in Liverpool, instead of Bristol, would he have been bound to come forward and answer himself?" In a long note to his lecture against "Vicarious Sacrifice," Mr. Martineau presents a scorching and most demolishing analysis of Dr. Magee's controversial character. Of Dr. Magee he says, in his preface to the same lecture: "A careful study of his treatise on the Atonement, with the habit of testing his citations, has revealed to me a system of controversy which, before, I should have esteemed incredible, and which no terms of censure can too severely describe."

Such was the disputant with whom Dr. Doyle dared to enter the lists; and here was the occasion. In a charge to his clergy, the Archbishop said: "My reverend brethren, we are hemmed in by two opposite descriptions of professing Christians, the one possessing a church without what we call a religion, and the other possessing a religion without what we can call a church." "And we, my reverend brethren," he might have added, "have a church in Ireland without having what we can call a people; but in compensation, my reverend brethren, though others feed the sheep, we shear them." The church without a religion was intended for the Roman Catho

lics; the religion without a church, for the Dissenters: between these two the venerable Establishment, that was both a church and a religion suffered grievous persecution, and had to bear 66 heavy blows and great discouragements." The phrase here quoted from the Archbishop's charge, and the habit of using such phrases, caused him to be styled "the antithetical Magee." Dr. Doyle took up his own side of the antithesis, and with such effect as must have taught the Archbishop the extreme danger of pointed sentences, which may be made to wound the author more deeply than those at whom they are aimed. A very favorite mode in those days, among Roman Catholic polemics, in dealing with their opponents of orthodox Protestant churches, was to vindicate, on the grounds of individual conscience and of private interpretation, the religious claims of Unitarians. This mode of argument was often very annoying and perplexing to those against whom it was used. Dr. Doyle used it with stunning energy against Dr. Magee. "Are not Socinians," he wrote, "men of sound judgment? Have they not, according to your rule, a right—nay, are they not obliged to follow the dictate of that judgment in preference to all authority on earth? And yet you exclude them from the kingdom of God because, in the exercise of their judgment, or in what you consider the discharge of their duty, they differ in opinion from yourself. Your opinion of them, if judged by your own principles, is unjust, uncharitable, and unreasonable."

Dr. Doyle went hand in hand with O'Connell during the last great struggle for Catholic emancipation. His influence was very efficient in promoting O'Connell's election for Clare, which was the decisive blow that brought the Tory statesmen to their senses. The pen of Dr. Doyle was as powerful in its way as the tongue of O'Connell. Dr. Doyle had influence over classes which O'Connell did not reach. Dr. Doyle's writings were read by aristocratic and educated men of all parties, — men who would not listen to O'Connell, and whom, if they would, O'Connell could not convince. O'Connell had the ears and hearts of the masses; Dr. Doyle had the attention and thoughts of the select. He had many personal acquaintances among the most powerful and intellectual of

the aristocratic politicians. Dr. Doyle was himself by nature aristocratic; O'Connell was democratic in temper, in talents, and by his training and experience among the people in their assembled multitudes. Dr. Doyle's splendid evidence and eloquence before the leading men of the empire-lords, bishops, commons-gave authority to his words of counsel, of remonstrance, of history, of prophecy, which the words of an individual have rarely had in the concerns of mighty

states.

We can only glance at the agitation against tithes, and a glance is all that is needed.

Tithes, even in the Church of England, have always been the most unpopular of legal imposts. Yet a large mass of the English people belong to the Church, and among them are the wealthiest portion of the nation. What must tithes have, then, been in Ireland, where the mass of the population are not only not of the Established Church, but thoroughly and passionately opposed to it, and where, moreover, the tithes weighed most heavily on the struggling and the poor! We enter in no wise into the rationale or logic of the legal or the voluntary system of supporting religious institutions; we pass by all speculative arguments for tithes or against them. We confine ourselves to broad and palpable facts. On the face of the matter, it does seem unreasonable and unjust to force a man to pay for the administration of a religion which his conscience and conviction reject. Even among Protestant sects, it appears hardly fair to make all the sects except one support that one. But among Protestant sects there are only differences; Roman Catholics are opposed to all forms of Protestantism, but of all forms of Protestantism in Ireland, the Church form was, perhaps, the most unpopular. To it belonged the aristocracy, with which, rightly or wrongly, the Roman Catholic people associated conquest, plunder, confiscation, and oppression; to it belonged a clergy whose creed they denied, whose incomes they were forced to pay, among whom they saw some of the most active and zealous denouncers of their own faith; and, as we have said, the burden of this odious tax or tribute fell most heavily on the struggling and the poor. A collection of advertisements of tithe-auctions

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