The history of the Irish member of this curious ecclesiastical firm may best be traced through the statutes at large. As its parentage was parliamentary, so its life has been legislative. There is one advantage in having this description of authority to refer to, that it cannot be disputed. The "Journals of Parliament" in England and Ireland, from the reformation to the civil emancipation of the Catholics in 1829, are good Protestant authority. The peers and commoners of the old religion were excluded from the English houses, from the 10th of Elizabeth (1567) to the 9th of George IV., (1829,) a period of 262 years; and in Ireland, the last parliament in which Catholics sat was that of 4th James II., (1689,) followed by a period of exclusion, before the union, of 111 years. {202} It was not found possible, so early as the time of the two first Stuarts and Elizabeth, to wholly exclude Catholics, or, as they were then called, "recusants," from membership in either house in Ireland; and accordingly we find them a formidable minority in those rarely occurring assemblies, such as the Irish parliaments held in the 11th and 25th of Elizabeth, the 11th James I., the 14th Charles I., and the 12th of Charles II, In the second James's short-lived parliament of one session, hastily adjourned to allow his lords and gentlemen to follow their master to the banks of the "ill-fated river," they were a majority; but with that evanescent exception, the statutes of Ireland are quite as exclusively Protestant authority on all church matters as those of England previous to the union of the legislatures and the churches, and subsequently down to 1829.