“You don’t know Hourigan, then?”

“How could I, sir, and me a sthranger?”

“Faith, and whether you do or not, it seems to me there’s a strong family likeness between you and him.”

“Maybe so,” the fellow replied, with a grin.  “I hear my father say that he sartinly was down in this counthry when he was sowin’ his wild oats:”  and with this observation he passed on with the horse he was leading.

CHAPTER VIII.—­An Unreformed Church

—­The Value of Public Opinion—­Be not Familiar with the Great

Recent circumstances have, unfortunately, shown us the danger of tampering with, and stimulating, the blind impulses of ignorant prejudice and popular passion beyond that limit where the powers of restraint cease to operate with effect.  At the period which our narrative has now reached, and for a considerable time before it, those low rumblings which stunned and frightened the ear of civilized society, like the ominous sounds that precede an earthquake, were now followed by those tremblings and undulations which accompany the shock itself.  But before we describe that social condition to which we refer, it is necessary that we should previously raise the vail a little, which time has drawn between us and the condition of the Established Church, not merely at that crisis, but for a long period before it.  This we shall do as briefly as possible, because we feel that it is an exceedingly unpleasant task to contemplate a picture which presents to us points of observation that are, from their very nature, painful to look upon—­and features so secular and carnal, that scarcely any language could exaggerate, much less distort them.

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