This famous brief, by which Henry II. of England held himself divinely authorized to conquer Ireland, is strongly disapproved of by many writers, especially by Irish ones; who will not alloy it the least excuse, but overwhelm it with abusive censure. And yet the plain truth is, Adrian meant it, as he worded it, for Ireland's good. However false the grant of Constantine the Great,--on which the claim set up for St, Peter's dominion over the islands is founded,--may have been proved in later times to be; yet it is certain that both the grant and claim in question were in the 11th, and 12th centuries firmly believed in by all orthodox christians, just as much so as that the Pope was literally our Saviour's vicar on earth, before whose powers every other had to bow. That the king of England was secretly guided by worldly motives, while ostensibly professing religious ones, was his concern and not the pope's: whose business was to weigh the merits of the case, not by reasons imputed, but by those propounded; which, if he found them, from the religious point of view of his times, sound, he was justified in accepting. Now, there is the best evidence in cotemporary writings, especially in those of Giraldus and St. Bernard, that Ireland was, as above said, given up in the 12th century, to the worst demoralization in Church and State, that a country, not wholly pagan or savage, could be. Giraldus, who travelled in Ireland in the suite of King John, and attentively observed its condition, expresses in his work [3] written on the subject, his surprise that a nation, in which the Christian faith had been planted so far back as the days of St. Patrick, and had gone on increasing more or less ever since, should yet in his age be so ignorant in the very rudiments of religion. "A nation" as he proceeds to describe it, "filthy in the extreme, buried in vice, and of all nations the most ignorant of the rudiments of the faith." In support of this severe censure, he accuses the Irish of "despising matrimony, of being addicted to incest, of refusing to pay tithes, and of totally neglecting attendance at Church." In another place he writes, that the people in many districts continued still to be pagans, through the indifference of the clergy. St. Bernard draws a picture not less darkly shaded. In his life of St. Malachy, [4] adverting to the state of the Irish church on the promotion of that saint to the episcopacy, he describes how the new bishop soon found out that he had to do with "brutes and not with men; how that nowhere he had met with such barbarism of every sort; nowhere found a race so perverse in their morals, so savagely opposed to religious rites, so impious towards the faith, so headstrong against discipline, so barbarous towards the laws, so filthy in their habits of life; a people, Christians in name, but heathens in practice, who paid no tithes, who contracted no lawful marriages, who never confessed their