The difference between an Irish and an English parson is greater, perhaps, than that which exists between Irishmen and Englishmen of any other special denomination, and is of a nature exactly contrary to that which generally marks the distinctive character of the Milesian and the John Bull. The normal Irishman is a jolly fellow; but the normal Irish Protestant clergyman is a severe, sombre man, one who speaks of life in sad, subdued tones,—unless when he is minatory in the pulpit,—one who looks at things around him with a continual remembrance that life is but a span long, that men are but grass of the field, that the sickle is ready and the oven heated, and that it is worth no man’s while to be comfortable{106} here on earth. He is preaching every moment of his life, preaching in his gait, preaching in every tone of his voice, preaching in every act that he does, preaching in every turn of his eyes. Find him asleep, and you will find him preaching with a long-protracted, indignant, low-church, Protestant snore, very eloquent as to the scarlet woman. But an English parson, let him be ever so much given to preaching, preaches only from his pulpit. He may scold, advise, or cajole in the school, the cottage, or the drawing-room; but he keeps his sermons for his Sunday work. An Irish clergyman does not shake hands with you without leaving a text or two in your palm,—with his own special comments on their tenour as regards the Pope.

The reason of this is not far to seek. The Irish clergyman does not live in the midst of Protestants with whom he sympathizes, but is surrounded by Roman Catholics with whom he cannot sympathize, and against whom he is driven to feel almost a personal enmity, not only by reason of their creed which he sorely hates, but by reason also of the anomalies of his own position which are so hateful to them. He is always in a state of feud,—in a state{107} of feud, not only against the devil, as should be the case with all of us whether clergymen or laymen, but against Antichrist on the Seven Hills, against the scarlet woman who goes about devouring, against the Pope who is to him a ravenous old woman as to whom he cannot say whether he is most ravenous or most old-womanish, against a creed which has for him none of the attractions of Christianity,—in which he sees only the small points of divergence from his own, and which is, therefore, worse to him than the creed of Mussulman or of Jew. He is therefore always serious, as is a soldier who is ever buckling on his armour, and somewhat sad, as is a soldier who cannot get his enemy down so that he may take away his standard and trample on him. The Irish Protestant clergyman is ever longing to lead troops of the Roman Catholics of Ireland in triumph to the top of the Tarpeian rock of conversion; but they succeed in bringing thither but one and another, and these one and another are such that they hardly grace the chariot wheels of their victors.

The popular idea of an Irish clergyman in England is, we think, somewhat incorrect. He is{108} often supposed to be an idle man, listless for want of occupation, given to self-indulgence, ill-educated, eager only in defence of his temporalities, and warmly attached to the party politics of Protestants, rather than to their religion. Such men may doubtless be found among the holders of livings in Ireland, as they may also in England; but such is not the general character of the Irish clergyman. He is a man always active, though unfortunately his activity has but small field of usefulness. His air is not the air of a listless man, but of a man disappointed,—as it may well be. As he goes on in life he may come to love too dearly his slippers and his armchair, and perhaps to feel, as disappointed men will feel,—will feel but not acknowledge,—that the consolations of the dinner-table are, and that none others are, reliable; but such is not his normal condition of body or mind. I will not say that he is generally well-educated,—because the word means so much. But the Irish clergyman has generally read as much as his brother in England, though his reading has been of a different nature. Of reading applicable specially to his own profession he has{109} probably endured more than his brother in England. In short he is more of a clergyman and less of a man of the world than the English parson,—with this misfortune, that his clerical activities are always at work against enemies and not on behalf of friends.

There would not be space for me to say much, in this short sketch, of the now acknowledged anomalies of the position of the Church of England as established in Ireland; but I will endeavour to describe the outward form and bearing of the clergyman whom these anomalies have produced, begging my readers to believe at the outset that the Irish clergyman may be regarded, nine times out of ten,—ninety-nine out of a hundred I think we might say,—as a sincere man, as a man with strong convictions, who has no shadow of doubt in his own mind that the surest road to heaven, if not the only one, is by that special pathway of which he professes to have the clue. There is no reservation within his mind, as to his religion with its intricacies being good for the ignorant, for instance, though perhaps not altogether needed for the educated. He has no doubts. The Eureka with him is a certainty. That{110} men will be saved and will be damned as they live remote from or attached to papistical teachings is to him a reality. Now it is something that a man should be capable of a sincere belief, and that he should succeed in attaining to it.

The Irish beneficed clergyman has almost always been educated at Trinity, Dublin, and has there been indoctrinated with those high Protestant principles with which he has before been inoculated. He is, of course, the son of an Irish Protestant gentleman, and has therefore sucked them in with his mother’s milk. He goes before his Protestant bishop and takes his orders with a corps of other young men exactly similarly circumstanced. And thus he has never had given to him an opportunity of rubbing his own ideas against those of men who have been educated with different proclivities. He has never lived at college either with Roman Catholics, or with Presbyterians, or with Protestants of a sort different from his sort. In his cradle, at his father’s table, at school, at the university, in all the lessons that he has learned, in all the games that he has played, in his converse with his sisters, in his first soft, faint, whisperings{111} with his sisters’ friends, in his loud unreserved talkings with his closest companions, the same two ideas, cheek by jowl, have ever been present to him,—the State ascendancy of his own Church, and the numerical superiority of another Church antagonistic to his own. When we consider all this, and look at the training which the Irish clergyman has undergone, how can we wonder at his idiosyncrasies?

Irish clergymen are thus bound together more closely than clergymen in England, chiefly from the want of opportunity for divergence. Not only education goes always in the same course, but the circumstances of professional career attach themselves very closely to one form. The livings are more generally in the gift of the bishops than with us, and the Irish bishops, perhaps, are more inclined to give promotion solely on the score of merit than are the English bishops. There is, we believe, less of Church patronage,—or rather of the exercise of Church patronage for the furthering of private ends; and if this be so, the Irish Church in that respect is superior to our own. But as the Irish curate is to get his living from the Irish bishop, and is to receive{112} it ............