An impartial reader, if he pleases to examine what I have already said, will easily answer the bold “Queries” in the pamphlet I mentioned:  He will be convinced, that “the reason still strongly exists, for which” that limiting law was enacted.  A reasonable man will wonder, where can be the insufferable grievance, that an ecclesiastical landlord should expect a moderate, or third part value in rent for his lands, when his title is, at least, as ancient and as legal as that of a layman; who is yet but seldom guilty of giving such beneficial bargains.  Has “the nation been thrown into confusion”?  And have “many poor families been ruined” by rack-rents paid for the lands of the church?  Does “the nation cry out” to have a law that must, in time, send their bishops a-begging?  But, God be thanked, the clamour of enemies to the Church is not yet the cry, and, I hope, will never prove the voice of the nation.  The clergy, I conceive, will hardly allow that “the people maintain them,” any more than in the sense, that all landlords whatsoever are maintained by the people.  Such assertions as these, and the insinuations they carry along with them, proceed from principles which cannot be avowed by those who are for preserving the happy constitution in Church and State.  Whoever were the proposers of such “queries,” it might have provoked a bold writer to retaliate, perhaps with more justice than prudence, by shewing at whose door the grievance lies, and that the bishops, at least, are not to answer for the poverty of tenants.

To gratify this great reformer, who enlarges the episcopal rent-roll almost one half; let me suppose that all the Church lands in the kingdom were thrown up to the laity; would the tenants, in such a case, sit easier in their rents than they do now?  Or, would the money be equally spent in the kingdom?  No:  The farmer would be screwed up to the utmost penny, by the agents and stewards of absentees, and the revenues employed in making a figure at London; to which city a full third part of the whole income of Ireland is annually returned, to answer that single article of maintenance for Irish landlords.

Another of his quarrels is against pluralities and non-residence:  As to the former, it is a word of ill name, but not well understood.  The clergy having been stripped of the greatest part of their revenues, the glebes being generally lost, the tithes in the hands of laymen, the churches demolished, and the country depopulated; in order to preserve a face of Christianity, it was necessary to unite small vicarages, sufficient to make a tolerable maintenance for a minister.  The profit of ten or a dozen of these unions, do seldom amount to above eighty or an hundred pounds a year:  If there be a very few dignitaries, whose preferments are, perhaps, more liable to this accusation, it is to be supposed, they may be favourites of the time, or persons of superior merit, for whom there hath ever been some indulgence in all governments.