Although this "much-abused prelate," as Lecky calls him, was a firm supporter of the English government in Ireland, he was far from being a man of tyrannical or intolerant disposition.
His contributions to the press, and his Addresses to the Lord Mayor and other political pamphlets made him one of the most popular writers in Ireland of his time, although he was anticatholic in his prejudices, and although, as Lecky observes,.
Burke and Grattan were anxious that provision should be made for the education of Irish Roman Catholic priests at home, to preserve them from the contagion of Jacobinism in France; Wolfe Tone, "with an incomparably juster forecast," as Lecky observes, "advocated the same measure for exactly opposite reasons."
Lecky, 4 whether such a philosophy affords a basis for natural theology at all; but the attempt is made.
This third possibility in philosophy does not enter at all into Lecky's grouping referred to above; in fact, it is very generally strange to older British thinking,3 t;csm.