before me. It is not true that I received any contribution towards building a Chapel from Donovan. It is not true, of course, that he, as that letter states, paid certain sums, and that more exorbitant demands were then made. In all this malignant fabrication there is not a word of truth. I shall now state the case which gave rise to this mischievous letter.

In the year 1800, I opened a subscription for the purpose of building a Chapel in Clonakilty. Rules, for carrying the subscription into effect, were drawn up, and approved of by all the subscribers. The parishioners from whom subscriptions were looked for (from the poor nothing was expected) were classed into three descriptions. From the first, or most opulent class, a guinea was ex pected; from the second, three crowns; and from the third class, a half-guinea. The persons placed in the higher classes were at liberty to descend to a lower scale, and those in a more humble line were free, of course, to assume a higher situation; and should any man, or number of men, having means to contribute, refuse their co-operation, it was expected that such would not obtrude on the subscribers, by taking their place in a house, to the construction and other expences of which they were not willing

to contribute.

In two or three years after the building was erected, considerable debts remained to be liquidated. Some of the original subscribers did not yet pay their subscriptions. These defaulters were earnestly and repeatedly called upon during three years. The creditors were daily becoming more importunate in their demands; and I was applied to by the subscribers, and urged to carry the regulations adopted by them into effect, by excluding from the Chapel all those who shamefully withheld the contributions which they had voluntarily agreed to pay. I therefore ordered a list of these defaulters to be drawn up, and placed in a conspicuous part of the Chapel, that no man should plead ignorance. I advised them to resort to another Chapel, not far from the town, until they should be pleased to pay their quota of the contribution; and threatened any of those persons who should, after a de fined period, enter the new Chapel, with an ecclesiastical censure. Donovan was the only one of them who contumaciously resisted the regulations of the subscribers, and the authority of his pastor. The congregation witnessed his audacity, and resented it, by withdrawing themselves, in some measure, from his communion. He brought his action against

me at the Summer Assizes of 1805, and having no grounds on which he could, honestly, sustain it, a wretch of infamous character was suborned to swear, that L excommunicated him, and every one that should deal with him. When this wretch unexpectedly gave her evidence, I informed the Counsel who had the chief management of my defence, that there were twenty respectable witnesses in Court, who were ready to rebut every thing which she deposed. I begged of him not to allow her perjury to go to a Jury unrefuted. He was of opinion, that as some of the Jurors were not unacquainted with her character, and with the circumstances of the case, her evidence could have no weight. I reluctantly acquiesced. No witness was examined on the part of my defence; and the consequence was, that the Judge, in his charge, informed the Jury that they should find a verdict for the plaintiff, they found one of fifty pounds. The deluded woman, on whose testimony, this decision was founded, died soon after, a deplorable victim of remorse and despair.

In justification of the part I have taken in this transaction, I shall only say, that I acted with a conviction that I was warranted in conscience, and by law. I was not aware of any reason why a number of Roman Catholic subscribers may not purchase a plot of ground, and build a house thereon, for any uses that were not illegal, with an exclusive right of making regulations, by which that house should be governed. I saw good and loyal subjects, in every part of the United Kingdom, forming themselves into associations, clubs, subscribers to commercial buildings, &c. &c. I saw the founders and supporters of these various associations making rules for the government of their societiesadmitting and excluding such descriptions of persons as they deemed meet. I conceived that the subscribers to the Clonakilty Chapel were warranted to act in a similar manner; and had I ima gined that their conduct could, by any construction of law, be considered incorrect, I should be as far from sanctioning it as any man living. This, Sir, is my defence of a transaction which bas slept for so many years, and is now revived from motives which, I apprehend, 1 are not the most untainted. Yours, &c.

WILLIAM O'BRIEN,

TH

Mr. URBAN, Essex-house, April 6. HOUGH Bp. Burgess gives me no credit for sincerity, I cannot refuse that credit to his Lordship: on the contrary, if he were not the most sincere and artless of human beings, he would never commit himself in the way in which he has done in his two" Addresses to persons calling themselves Unitarians." But I am truly surprized that he has not some discreet friend to warn him of the evil consequences of writing in a manner so easy of refutation, and so injurious to his character and to his cause. The whole of the Bishop's second Address lies before me. It is printed in the form of a sixpenny pamphlet; and had it been published only in this form, to be circulated among the mountaineers of his Lordship's Dio cese, with many of whom it is, no doubt, a first principle, that a learned and Right Reverend Bishop cannot err, I should have had some suspicion that "though his Lordship said it, he did not believe it;" but now that he offers it to the inspection of the enlightened and liberal Readers of the Gentleman's Magazine, it is a clear proof that he really is, what I should hardly have thought possible, in good earnest; that he really be lewes his own assertions, and confides in his own arguments. And I feel obliged to his Lordship, for affording me an opportunity of meeting him again upon this public arena, and of referring the decision of the contest to an intelligent and impartial tribunal.

In that portion of the Address which you have already communicated to the publick, Bp. Burgess has attacked me personally, as a reviler of the Clergy of the Established Church. In the second part, which is yet to come*, he attacks my Review of the Controversy between Bp. Horsley and Dr. Priestley. As my character is implicated in the first charge, I beg leave to avail myself of the earliest opportunity of replying to it and I have no doubt of obtaining a favour able verdict, Mr. Urban, from all your respectable and candid Readers.

The first of the Bishop's allegations is the old story (for when the learned Prelate has once got hold of a good thing, he never knows when to let it drop, but treats his Readers with it

See it in p. 313.

over and over, till their stomachs nauseate the dose), that in his vindication of the Claims of Dr. Priestley, Mr. B. has stated that "Truth must necessarily be the object of the aversion and abhorrence of those, whose hopes are built upon the profession and defence of a system of theology which is the relick of a dark and barbarous age." The learned Prelate does not appear to recollect that Truth is opposed to error as well as to falsehood. And as Mr. B. conceives that many of the doctrines professed by the Established Church, and subscribed and taught by the Clergy, are in the highest degree unscriptural and erroneous, he must regard the advocates for those errors as enemies to Truth; in the foremost rank of whom, is the learned Prelate himself. And this may happen without the slightest impeachment of their moral character: it may even be the result of a conscientious sense of duty. Nevertheless, as the expression was liable to misapprehension, and bad, in fact, given umbrage, an explanation of it was offered in a late Number of the Gentleman's Magazine. With this explanation, however, the learned Prelate is dissatisfied. He may, perhaps, be dissatisfied still: but, as I have no further explanation to give, it must be left to the judgment of the candid and impartial.

The Bishop, however, will not let me off so easily. "The words," he says, were not the hasty effusion of an angry moment, but his old and accustomed language." To establish this charge, the Bishop cites two or three sentences which are said to be taken from my Review of Mr. Wil berforce's celebrated Treatise on Prac tical Christianity, which Review was published in the year 1797.

It is some satisfaction that the learned Prelate is obliged to travel almost twenty years back, before he can fasten upon another passage in the works which I have published, which can be so represented as to be apparently disrespectful to the Established Clergy, for that it is really so I deny, and shall immediately dis prove. Bp, Burgess appears to know nothing of the work which he har quoted, but what he borrows from that eminently liberal and candid critick the Dean of Cork; from whose noted Treatise on the Atonement, the

Bishop cites the following words': "In his (Mr. B.'s) Review of Mr. Wilberforce's excellent work, he says, an Established Priesthood is, in its very nature, a persecuting Order. All breathe the same fiery and intemperate spirit."

It is very true, Mr. Urban, that Mr. B. in his Review of Mr. Wilberforce, bas used language similar to this of Ecclesiastical Orders in general, when supported by the State; not, however, without some honourable individual exceptions, among which it would have given him pleasure to have been able to include the Right Reverend Bishop of St. David's, and the Very Reverend Dean of Cork. But that no particular reflection was intended upon the Clergy of the Established Church, is abundantly evident from the context, which it did not comport with the design of the Dean of Cork to introduce. It stands in P.

199 of the first edition of the Review: “An Established Priesthood is in its very nature a persecuting Order. There has been no exception to this Rule. Heathen and Christian, Jew and Maho metan, Papist and Protestant, Episcopalian and Presbyterian, when in power, have all breathed the same fiery and in temperate spirit, a few enlightened individuals only excepted. Men who are engaged to defend an established system are, from that very circumstance, engaged to discourage inquiry, and to oppose truth, unless, which is not often the case, truth should happen to be the established doctrine."

Mr. Urban, whether your intelligent Readers agree or disagree with Mr. B. upon the question concerning the general tendency of Religious Establishments, it would be an affront to their understandings to suppose, for a moment, that they could regard the passage which I have just cited as an intentional reflection upon the Established Clergy. But we see how much may be made of a few short sentences, artfully garbled, and altered to suit a particular purpose.

But this alone, Mr. Urban, does not satisfy my accusers. They must in terpolate as well as garble. To the words cited by his Lordship, the Very Rey, Dean adds, in commas, as if they contained an extract from Mr. B.'s work, these remarkable words:

tered

Hold, my Lord;-not quite so fast. Your Lordship is apt to be a little too precipitate. Mr. Belsham never utputed to him: nor any thing like it. nor wrote what you have im. Your Lordship and the Dean of Cork have been so kind as to say it for him: and then to reproach him most unmercifully, and to hold him up to he never did say, and for publishing a public indignation, for saying what Libel upon the Established Clergy, which you, my Lord, the Right Reverend Bishop of St. David's, and your high authority the Very Reverend Dean of Cork, have yourselves invented and published for him.

What say you, my Lord? is this fair play?-But I forbear to comment: or to apply appropriate epithets. I cast myself upon the judgment of the publick; and I leave your Lordship, and the Dean of Cork, to whom in deed the merit of invention principally belongs, to the luxury of your own reflections. I have only to request, that the next time your Lordship condescends to indulge in your favourite amusement of accumulating opprobrious language upon so obscure an individual as myself, you will have the goodness not to make me responsible for what I have not written. If from the works which I have published, which are now tolerably voluminous, your Lordship will take the trouble to extract a sentence here, and half a sentence there, aud so on, in the way that Lord Peter found out" Shoulder-knot" in his. Father's Will, it will be hard indeed if your Lordship cannot make me say any thing you please, without racking

either

either your own invention, or that of the Very Reverend the Dean of Cork.

After all, Mr. Urban, I verily believe that the head and front of my offending is, an unfortunate observation which occurs in my Vindication of Dr. Priestley's Claims; viz. "that the learned Prelate would himself be the first to laugh to scorn the solemn ignoramus who should seriously main tain that he had obtained the victory in his controversy with Dr. Priestley." This observation seems to lie with uncommon weight upon his learned Suc'cessor's mind. I fear it disturbs his rest, and haunts him in his dreams. He has cited it no less than three times at the beginning of this second unsolicited Address, with marks of strong displeasure: and he will have it, that though I say it, I cannot be lieve it. I verily think, Mr. Urban, that if it had not been for, this goading remark, which clings to his Lordship's soul, I might have said what I pleased about the Clergy, without any animadversion from the Right Reve rend Prelate. But this business of the "solemn ignoramus" twines about his heart-strings: he cannot get over it: he cannot digest it.

But, Mr. Urban, though I am a great lover of peace, and would sacrifice any thing to preserve it but truth, I cannot give up my proposition. And I can assure his Lordship, that all bis arguments are not of sufficient weight to induce me to move a single step from the ground which I have hitherto occupied. How far I am justified in this determination I shall be happy, upon some future occasion, to submit to the decision of your intelligent Readers. T. BELSHAM.

lowing passages in the New Testament: John xvii. 8; viii. 40; 1 Cor. viii. 6; 1 Tim. ii. 5; Acts ii. 22; Luke ii. 48; Matth. xiii. 55.] 1 presume no objection can be made to these testimonies: the evidence is indeed indisputable; no Christian can doubt it.

If Ignatius, who lived so early as the first century, and was well acquainted with these plain and authentic passages, has been made by copyists and polemicks of later ages to say any thing contradictory to them, the blame is theirs. A great part of the Epistles under his name are accounted by learned men to be wholly spurious; and even in those that are styled genuine, there are many evident interpolations relating to opinions which had no existence in the time of Ignatius.

Being an humble member of that most respectable body of men, on whom the welfare, and even the existence of our Country depends, I mean the Farmers of this Kingdom, I am too much engaged with the labours of the field to give any farther attention to the present subject at this time: indeed, it does not seem to be necessary. In taking my leave of your Correspondent, who is perhaps of the Clerical order, I make him my parting obeisance with perfect goodwill, adopting, in a Christian sense, the words of a Heathen Poet,

Ουτοι συνέχθειν, αλλά συμφιλείν, έφυν.

the plough, I shall not remove so far But though I retire to look after as to be out of sight of what passes once a month in your Magazine (whose excellence consists in its variety), especially when curiosity is excited by the contending opinions of two such able and learned criticks and divines as Bp.Burgess and Mr.Belsham. Only, let us be permitted to hope, that

Epistles of Ignatius, permit me to place in the opposite scale a few passages taken from writers of undoubt ed authority. The originals are written in the learned languages; but for the benefit of the English Reader, I will give the translation, and to each extract I will subjoin the name of the Author:-In the beginning God created the heaven and the carth: and, Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord. MOSES. [Our Correspondeat in like manner refers to the fol

on both sides in such a manner as bethat those who cannot pretend to comes the Christian and the Scholar, to improve themselves by attention to their accomplishments, may be taught their example. Και των λεγοντων ευ, xaλor To μardαVELY. Sophocl. Antigonė. A SUSSEX FREEHOLDER.

καλον το

From this circumstance it was deemed the best place in which they could be disposed of. But how they were to be transported thither (as one of your Correspondents asks, p.431, Nov. 1818,) is a mystery.

In my last, p. 32 a. 1.16, put out the comma after the word instruction.

The lines in Hudibras are,

"For those that fly may fight again, Which he can never do that's slain."

Canto III. Part iii. line 243. The other four are only an amplification of these two, by a later hand.

ALLOW me to observe, that your Correspondent E. p. 118, in his attempt to illustrate certain classical sayings, proved himself erroneous in two out of four of his illustrations. The much-hackneyed lines of He that fights and runs away, &c. he tells you are to be found in an exceedingly rare little book of poems by Sir John Mennes, which, small and insignificant as it is, sometimes fetches the enor mous price of five guineas. That book I possess, (it is intitled Musarum Delicia, or The Muses' Recreation, printed 1656,) and roundly assert that no such lines occur therein. That they have a reference to the Greek line cited in Aulus Gellius, lib. xvii. cap. 21, is indisputable; and Mr. Beloe, in his version of that author, adopts the Hudibrastic lines in question as a translation of the Greek.

Again The well-known saw of Quos Deus vult perdere, &c. your Correspondent calls a translation of a Greek Fragment, Iambick, found in Euripides; but knows not in what edition. Were it in any, it would to a certainty occur in that of Musgrave, which is the most copious of any extant: I have looked over the Fragments there contained, which are very numerous; and I have examined several other editions, but no such line is to be found. I have likewise gone over all the lambicks in the body of Euripides, but yet met not with it: indeed the Greek line given bears the evident stamp of a fabrication, meant as a close translation of the Latin.

From these premises 1 should much doubt the validity of the two other illustrations adduced by your Correspondent E. J. N***.

to answer this question, we must consider what is the object of Taxation. Is it not to secure to us the enjoyment of our property in peace and quiet? If it be, then that mode of Taxation must necessarily be the most equitable, which diminishes the enjoyments of all in a proportionate degree. But how are a person's enjoyments to be ascertained? By the amount of his property? Certainly not; because, if it were possible (which it is not) to ascertain the value of all the different kinds of property; the same kind of property in one person's hands will yield twice as much income, or means of enjoyment, as it will in the hands of another. By each person's income then? No; because, independently of the difficulty and vexation of ascertaining the amount of every individual's income (not to mention the temptation to false swearing which such an attempt must give rise to), it is not every one that can enjoy the whole of his income. By what criterion then shail a person's enjoyments be ascertained? I auswer, By his Expenditure.

What a person

spends, he enjoys. Whenever property is in the course of enjoyment, then it should be taxed; till then it is to the possessor as a non-entity. But bow is this principle of taxing expenditure to be applied? I answer, thus-Suppose a given sum to be wanted, and suppose this sum to be about a tenth, or any other proportion, of the estimated expenditure of all those classes of society from which it should be thought most equitable to raise the supply. The first step to be taken would be to consider what would be a suitable establishment of servants, horses, &c. and what the probable consumption of other arti cles upon which it should be judged expedient to lay the Tax for a person of the largest scale of expenditure, and what for the smallest ; and then to fix such Duties upon these several

rticles, as should render the amount contributable by each class proportionate to the extent of their several expenditures; regard being had to this consideration, that the larger the expenditure, the greater should be the proportion of the Tax; it being a principle universally admitted, that