For all this there are good and legitimate reasons to be found, not only in what is adduced in this work on the church establishment, but also in the current experience of every man of common observation throughout the Principality. The wonder is, not that dissent should have attained its present height, but that the church should have continued to exist at all, amidst so many abuses, so much ignorance, so much neglect, and such extraordinary apathy--until of late days--on the part of her rulers. The actual condition of the church in Wales may be summed up in a few words--it is that of the church in Ireland: only those who differ from it are Protestants instead of Roman Catholics. Let us quote Sir Thomas Phillips again:-- "We have now passed in review various influences by which the church in Wales has been weakened. We have seen the religious edifices erected by the piety of other times, and with the sustentation of which the lands of the country have been charged, greatly neglected, whilst the lay officers, on whom the duty of maintaining those buildings in decent condition was imposed, are sometimes not appointed, or, if appointed, make light or naught of their duties: we have seen ecclesiastical officers, specially charged with the oversight of the churches, not required to exercise functions which have been revived by recent legislative enactments: we have found a clergy, with scanty incomes, and a want of decent residences, ministering in a peculiar language, with which the gentry have most commonly an imperfect and often no acquaintance--even where it is the language of public worship--influences which lower the moral and intellectual standard of the clergy, by introducing into holy orders too large a proportion of men, whose early occupations, habits, and feelings, do not ordinarily conduce to maintain the highest standard of conduct, and who (instead of forming, as in England, a minority of the whole body, and being elevated in tone, morally and mentally, by association with minds of higher culture) compose the large majority of the clergy of the Principality. It cannot, then, be matter of surprise, if amongst those men some should be found who (not being received on a footing of equality into the houses of the gentry, over whom they exercise but little influence) again resume the habits from which they were temporarily rescued by an education itself imperfect, and, selecting for daily companionship uneducated men, are either driven for social converse to the village alehouse, or become familiarised with ideas and practices unsuited to the character, injurious to the position, and destructive to the influence of the Christian pastor. Nor could we wonder, if even the religious opinions and well-meant activity of the more zealous among persons thus circumstanced, were to borrow