The ostensible object of the Bill of Residence was to compel the clergy to reside on their livings.  By this bill, any person taking a benefice, with cure of souls, of the annual value of L100, was forced, if the land attached to that benefice had no house fit for residence, to build one thereon, in any situation the bishop might think suitable, this house to cost one year and a half’s income, and to be completed within a time fixed by the bishop.  It will at once be seen that the power over the inferior clergy which this bill placed in the bishops’ hands was by no means insignificant; and Swift felt that to make such a bill law would not only tend to impoverish, the inferior clergy, but would place them in a position of subjection at once degrading and dispiriting.  He opposed the bill, with the consequence that the House of Commons rejected it.

By the Bill of Division “it was intended to be enacted that whenever a church should become vacant, although the incumbent should refuse his consent, it might be lawful for the chief governor, with the assent of the major part of the Privy Council, six at least consenting, by and with the consent of the ordinary and the patron, to subdivide any parish into as many portions as they might think fit, provided that, after such division, the church of the old parish should continue worth, at the least, L300 per annum.”  This bill, which passed the House of Lords two days after the Bill of Residence, Swift opposed in a spirited and somewhat bitter manner.  His opposition largely influenced the Lower House in rejecting it.  The two tracts which state the grounds of his opposition to both bills are the present one, and the following tract, “Considerations upon two Bills, sent down from the House of Lords to the House of Commons in Ireland, relating to the Clergy.”

Scott notes that the “tone of aigreur,” which is more distinctly felt in the second of these tracts, intimates a “deep dissatisfaction with late ecclesiastical preferments, which may perhaps be traced as much to personal disappointment as to any better cause;” a statement which it was hardly worth making; since, however deep may have been Swift’s personal feelings, he never allowed them to be the impelling motive to his work.  It should suffice us to know that the cause which Swift espoused was a disinterested one.  As Vicar of Laracor he knew what it was to make a shift of living on an insufficient income; and it may have been, this experience as much as “personal disappointment” which gave pungency to his criticism.  It is easy enough to find questionable motives for a satirist, especially when that satirist is Swift; let us not, however, forget that in his case the personal element was never permitted to overweight the impersonal purpose.  Other men when they reach prosperity often forget or ignore the hard conditions of their previous state; to Swift these conditions were always existing factors in his considerations for the amelioration of his fellow-men.  This it is which gives to his writings so much of the “tone of aigreur.”