forbidden to make appropriations to religious houses without the consent of the bishop, in whose diocese they lived.  But even this prohibition did not succeed.  The people still favoured the lay abbies, paying their tithes there, till Pope Innocent the third, in the year 1200, ordained, and he enforced it by ecclesiastical censures, that every one should pay his tithes to those who administered to him spiritual things in his own parish.  In a general council also held at Lyons, in the year 1274, it was decreed, that it was no longer lawful for men to pay their tithes where they pleased, as before, but that they should pay them to mother church.  And the principle, on which they had now been long demanded, was confirmed by the council of Trent under Pope Pius the fourth, in the year 1560, which was, that they were due by divine right.  In the course of forty years after the payment of tithes had been forced by ecclesiastical censures and excommunications, prescription was set up.  Thus the very principle, in which tithes had originated, was changed.  Thus free will-offerings became dues, to be exacted by compulsion.  And thus the fund of the poor was converted almost wholly into a fund for the maintenance of the church.

Having now traced the origin of tithes, as far as a part of the continent of Europe is concerned, I shall trace it as far as they have reference to our own country.  And here I may instantly observe, and in a few words, that the same system and the same changes are conspicuous.  Free will-offerings and donations of land constituted a fund for the poor, out of which the clergy were maintained.  In process of time, tenths or tithes followed.  Of these, certain proportions were allotted to the clergy, the repairs of the churches, and the poor.  This was the state of things in the time of Offa, king of Mercia, towards the close of the eighth century, when that prince, having caused Ethelbert, king of the East Angles, to be treacherously murdered, fled to the Pope for pardon, to please whom, and to expiate his own sin, he caused those tithes to become dues in his own dominions, which were only at the will of the donors before.

About sixty years afterwards, Ethelwolf, a weak and superstitious prince, was worked upon by the clergy to extend tithes as dues to the whole kingdom; and he consented to it under the notion, that he was thus to avert the judgments of God, which they represented as visible in the frequent ravages of the Danes.  Poor laymen, however, were still to be supported out of these tithes, and the people were still at liberty to pay them to whichever religious persons they pleased.