This learning, which I believe to be pretty general, together with an higher situation, and more chastened by the opinion of mankind, forms a sufficient security for the morals of the established clergy, and for their sustaining their clerical character with dignity.  It is not necessary to observe, that all these things are, however, collateral to their function, and that, except in preaching, which may be and is supplied, and often best supplied, out of printed books, little else is necessary for a Protestant minister than to be able to read the English language,—­I mean for the exercise of his function, not to the qualification of his admission to it.  But a Popish parson in Ireland may do very well without any considerable classical erudition, or any proficiency in pure or mixed mathematics, or any knowledge of civil history.  Even if the Catholic clergy should possess those acquisitions, as at first many of them do, they soon lose them in the painful course of professional and parochial duties:  but they must have all the knowledge, and, what is to them more important than the knowledge, the discipline, necessary to those duties.  All modes of education conducted by those whose minds are cast in another mould, as I may say, and whose original ways of thinking are formed upon the reverse pattern, must be to them not only useless, but mischievous.  Just as I should suppose the education in a Popish ecclesiastical seminary would be ill fitted for a Protestant clergyman.  To educate a Catholic priest in a Protestant seminary would be much worse.  The Protestant educated amongst Catholics has only something to reject:  what he keeps may be useful.  But a Catholic parish priest learns little for his peculiar purpose and duty in a Protestant college.

All this, my Lord, I know very well, will pass for nothing with those who wish that the Popish clergy should be illiterate, and in a situation to produce contempt and detestation.  Their minds are wholly taken up with party squabbles, and I have neither leisure nor inclination to apply any part of what I have to say to those who never think of religion or of the commonwealth in any other light than as they tend to the prevalence of some faction in either.  I speak on a supposition that there is a disposition to take the state in the condition in which it is found, and to improve it in that state to the best advantage.  Hitherto the plan for the government of Ireland has been to sacrifice the civil prosperity of the nation to its religious improvement.  But if people in power there are at length come to entertain other ideas, they will consider the good order, decorum, virtue, and morality of every description of men among them as of infinitely greater importance than the struggle (for it is nothing better) to change those descriptions by means which put to hazard objects which, in my poor opinion, are of more importance to religion and to the state than all the polemical matter which has been agitated among men from the beginning of the world to this hour.