The Established Church in Ireland, then, in its unpurged and unreformed state, was very little else than a mere political engine for supporting and fostering British interests and English principles in this country; and no one, here had any great chance of preferment in it who did not signalize himself some way in favor of British policy. The Establishment was indeed the only bond that bound the political interests of the two nations together. But if any person will now venture to form an opinion of the Irish Church from her gorgeousness and immense wealth at that period, he will unquestionably find that what ought to have been a spiritual, pure, holy, self-denying, and zealous Church, was neither more nor less than an overgrown, proud, idle, and indolent Establishment, bloated by ease and indulgence, and corrupted almost to the very core by secular and political prostitution. The state of the Establishment was indeed equally anomalous and disgraceful. So jealous was England, and at the same time so rapacious of its wealth, that it was parcelled out to Englishmen without either shame or scruple, whilst Irish piety and learning, when they did happen to be found, were uniformly overlooked and disregarded. All the ecclesiastical offices of dignity and emolument were bestowed upon Englishmen; upon men who lived here with reluctance, and but seldom--who had no sympathy with the country or its inhabitants--nay, who looked upon us, in general, with feeling of hostility and contempt; and who, by example or precept, rendered no earthly equivalent for the enormous sums that were drawn from a poor and struggling people. It is idle to say that these prodigious ecclesiastical revenues were not paid by the people, but by the landlord, who, if the people had not paid them, would have added them to the rent. But even so--the straggling peasant reasoned naturally, for he felt it to be one thing to pay even a high rent to the landlord, whose rights, as such, he acknowledged, but a very different thing to pay forth out of his own pocket a tenth of his produce to the pastor of a hostile creed, which had little sympathy with him, for which he received no spiritual equivalent, and on which, besides, he was taught to look as a gross and ungodly heresy.