To us, now, his statements appear exaggerated and too sweeping, but it must be remembered that he spoke of the Irish clergy in the closing decades of the last century. He expressed himself fiercely regarding the parsons, and in return they dubbed him "atheist." His second negative assertion was: II. "The world is not God's." He knew from the Bible that God had made all things very good, and that he loved the world, but he held that a number of people had got in between God and his world, and made it very bad and hateful. They were known as kings and emperors, and they had seized on the world by fraud and force. They lived on the best of everything that the land produced, and when they disagreed among themselves they sent their people to kill each other on their account, while they sat at home in peace and luxury. These usurpers not only held sway over the possessions and lives of men, but they decreed the exact thoughts men were to entertain concerning God, and the exact words they were to speak concerning God; and when men presumed to obey God rather than men they were tied to stakes and burned to death as blasphemers. For such sentiments as these Hugh Bronte was denounced as a socialist--a very bad and dangerous name at the beginning of the present century. His third negative proposition was: III. "Ireland is not the king's." He understood that King George III. was not a wise man, but that he was a humane man. Ireland was not governed by King George III., but by a gang of rapacious brigands. They constantly invoked the king's name, but only to serve more fully their own selfish ends. By the king's authority they carried out their policy of systematic outrage, until he hated the very name of the king whom he always wished to love. The chief business of the king's representatives was to plunder his majesty's poorer subjects. For this purpose the country was parcelled out and divided among a number of base and greedy adventurers, in return for odious services. Each of these adventurers became king, or landlord, in his own district, and lived on the wretched natives. Every meskin of butter made on the farm, every pig reared in the cabin, every egg laid by the hens that roosted in the kitchen, went to support the land-king. The cottages were mud hovels. The land was bog and barren waste. The men and women were in rags. The children were hungry, pinched, and bare-footed. But the landlord carried off everything, except the potato crop, which was barely sufficient to sustain life.