Book review: Early Modern Ireland: New Sources, Methods, and Perspectives

forensic examination of the subject. Oddly, Murray’s presence on Whately’s commission goes unmentioned by Morrissey, and more could have been made of the Catholic archbishop’s views on poverty and welfare through the sources that the author does engage with – Murray’s personal papers, his published sermons and newspaper articles of his public utterances, typically delivered at annual meetings of charitable societies. Perhaps the chronological structure to Morrissey’s book does not lend itself to an exploration of certain themes, whereas, for instance, Boylan’s thematic structure allows her to devote two of her fourteen chapters to her subject’s chairmanship of the Poor Inquiry and his wider views on poverty. Boylan makes good use of Whately’s 1835 sermon Christ’s Example, delivered in aid of Dr Steevens’s Hospital in Dublin, which captures his application of principles of political economy to matters of social concern. Whately loathed – as did his intellectual guide, Thomas Malthus – indiscriminate almsgiving and found legitimation for his opposition to the relief of the able-bodied poor in scripture: Christ relieved the hungry multitudes only twice and refused a third time because, in Whately’s words, indiscriminately and continually relieving the poor would ‘have been the means of drawing off the greater part of the population in those countries from their ordinary employments by which they gained their bread, when they found bread provided for them, by miracle, without any labour on their part’ (Boylan, p. 161). The Church of Scotland minister and social commentator Thomas Chalmers also drew on the parable of the Loaves and Fishes to suggest that two millennia before the writings of Thomas Malthus, Christ imposed principles of political economy in the Galilea! A joint reading of these two excellent biographies reveals moderation and steadfastness – both in their personal relationships and in their wider public roles – as being key themes in the lives of Daniel Murray and Richard Whately. The approach taken by these two important nineteenth-century prelates in their dealings with more zealous and radical internal opponents was aptly captured by Whately: ‘to me it appears that true Christianity is a very quiet and deliberate religion. It keeps the steam acting on the wheels, instead of noisily whizzing out at the safety valve’ (Boylan, p. 83).