there had been none: and the advantages of a pastor on the spot, frugal, indeed, of necessity, but carrying with him the respect which superior intelligence commands, and the sympathies of those amongst whom he walks not unseen; whose adviser he is in difficulties, and peace-maker in disputes; whose houses he visits in sickness and sorrow, and whose children he teaches the way in which they should go;--these charities, the attendants upon a resident ministry, are diffusing themselves over districts where they were once unfelt, and attaching the inhabitants to our church by the strongest of all ties, “the cords of a man.” But, alas! the residence must depend upon the house, and the house upon the income of the benefice: to the improvement of the latter, therefore, should our efforts be first directed, as the moving-spring of all; and if, by any equitable means, the fund at the disposal of the commissioners of Queen Anne’s bounty could be enriched, great would be the gain. But if lay patrons of small livings, where they happen to be also impropriators, could be induced to co-operate with the clergy for this same great object, which is national; if the generous spirit which animated their fathers, during half a century, after the Restoration,[489] when they had learned in the day of suffering the value of their church, and in the moment of joy at its re-establishment welcomed it with gifts,--if that spirit would stir in them also; if they would re-annex, as was then done so commonly, to these their own livings (we ask no more), some portion, however small, of the tithes which they enjoy, and which were all wrung from the church; a sacrifice which, from its amount, would scarcely be felt by many patrons, and which would not, in fact, be an alienation of so much property, but rather a regulation of the course in which it should run; a reduction, perhaps, of fifty or a hundred pounds a year from an elder brother’s rent-roll, to the augmentation to the like amount of a younger brother’s benefice;--if the patron and impropriator could be persuaded thus to act, the necessity for non-residence and pluralities would be still more rapidly diminished, and the national church would soon be placed in a more impregnable position than she has ever assumed in this particular, either since the Reformation or before it. And without urging higher motives, without urging even the feudal nature of all property in one sense, held, under God, the Lord of all, on condition of suit and service to be done, and not as an absolute possession to be dealt with altogether according to the pleasure of the occupant--without pressing this consideration (which is nevertheless a sound one), we shall be borne out in saying, that the possessor of property best secures the permanent enjoyment of it by securing a righteous population to his country; that the respect or contempt of the laws of the land in our parishes, and particularly in our rural