the miseries and beauties of ireland. - Tapa blanda

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1837 Excerpt: ...in DR. Fitzgerald's OPINION OF TITHES. 227 opposition to the principle which gave rise to them, in being bestowed upon the clergy of a minority of the population. After the manner, he added emphatically, in which the clergy of the Established Church had persecuted the people with the sword, they never could be tolerated. Notwithstanding Dr. Fitzgerald's information, it is notorious that the blessings that are ever found to result from a free and unmolested perusal of the bible, are often denied to the poor and unlearned members of the Roman Catholic communion. Except in the company of their priests, or when attending divine worship in their chapels, they are forbidden to consult the written oracles of God; thus being excluded from one of the richest sources of instruction and comfort. Besides, apart from the evil of interdicting the popular use of the scriptures, in a spiritual point of view, the prohibition seems to be objectionable on another ground. It imposes upon those who submit to it, a yoke of mental slavery. As long as a people submit to a dictation of this sort, they are unfit for the successful execution of 228 INCREASED READING OF THE SCRIPTURES. great enterprises. But in spite of the interdiction of the priests, the Catholics, I believe, will not be prevented from reading the scriptures. In one place which I visited, I was told by a most respectable gentleman, that such had been the anxiety of several poor Catholic families, in his neighbourhood, to " search the scriptures," in consequence of relations from their children of passages which they had read at the schools of the Board, that, in defiance of the risk they ran, they had actually obtained bibles; and Mr. Blacker, at the conclusion of his "Claims of the Landed Interests,&...