CHAPTER XIX. Ireland: Its Half-Century's Drilling in IRELAND has been variously spoken of as the "Isle of Saints' and the "Poland of the West." These are modes of speech which attribute moral qualities and political conditions so widely different as to make it hardly possible for us to accept them as a truthful description of the same country, at least at the same era. There is an odour of sanctity about the first which it is difficult to reconcile with the flavour of revolution which invests the second. And yet if some considerable latitude in point of time be allowed us, it will be easy to show that both designations are perfectly applicable to the sister island. In the early ages, that is, in the fifth, the sixth, and the seventh centuries, Ireland was the seat of a pure Scriptural Christianity, and the home of a people renowned for their civilisation and their many virtues. The fame of their schools, of their learned men, and their humble and holy pastors, was spread throughout Christendom. Ireland in that age was the "Isle of Saints," saints not by the oil of Rome, but by the anointing of the Holy Spirit. But the blissful youth of the sister country has receded far into the past. The golden age has been followed, alas! by the iron one, and the "Isle of Saints" of the seventh century is the "Poland of the West" of the nineteenth. Do not start, kind reader, as if we were about, after the fashion of the hour, to exhaust the whole vocabulary of declamatory vituperation in denouncing Saxon injustice and Saxon oppression. We shall have to speak of tyrants, it is true, tyrants who have gone forth in the garb of the patriot and the mantle of religion, greedily to make a spoil, and cruelly to tear in pieces, weeping crocodile tears the while over their victims—tyrants who have laboured to rear their own vile ascendency upon the ignorance, the enslavement, and the woes of a once-enlightened and noble people; but that tyrant is other than the Saxon. Ireland is the "Poland of the West" because, like the Poland of the East, it has to lay its ruin mainly at the door of the Jesuit. As in the case of an individual patient, so in that of a nation, when stricken down, the first step towards a cure is to ascertain what really is the malady. Ireland is the prey of some secret and virulent distemper. What is it? Our statesmen and politicians have been keeping their wits on work for more than half-a-century, to find out Ireland's malady. It has baffled them all. The riddle remains unread. How many volumes have been written, how many speeches have been delivered, how many committees of investigation have sat, how much philosophy and philanthropy have been expended in the task of searching out the hidden cause of her mischief. It is a mystery to this hour. When statesmen speak of the little island in the Atlantic, parted from us by a "silvery streak" of sea—“ alas ! so narrow! would it were a thousand times broader!"—it is with awe, seeing in Ireland a Sphinx an hundred times more terrible than the Sphinx of classic story, and who, like her prototype propounds her riddle to each successive British Cabinet, and on their failing to solve it, tears them in pieces. What is the reason of this ? One may miss the solution by too much as well as by too little ingenuity. Our statesmen have been digging fifty fathoms down in search of what is on the surface. They have been looking to the ends of the earth for what lies at their feet, and which they might have for the picking up, would they but condescend to stoop. They have been exhausting the mysteries of state-craft, and the powers of philosophy in discovering what any man who has sense enough to count his ten fingers could tell them. Why is this? The truth is, our statesmen do not wish to find out this secret. They know very well where and in what it lies, but they sedulously avoid turning their eyes in that direction lest they should see it, and be compelled to confess it, and forced to grapple with it. That is the reason why the case of Ireland is still a mystery. True, at first sight, Ireland's case is a frightfully complicated one. It would seem as if all the furies which delight to vex and torment nations had come trooping to that shore, and taken up their abode on this unhappy island. Only let us think what an assemblage of diverse and hideous ills we find here. Here, keeping out of view the northern quarter of the island, is the ignorance of the Zulu, the filth of the Hottentot, the slavery of the Turk, and the lawlessness of the Kurd. Here are undrained bogs, unploughed lands, hovels of mud, as if tools were yet to be invented; here are agues, fevers, famines, and men steeped to the lips in poverty, clothing themselves with rags, and subsisting on the coarsest food. Here are secret societies, unlawful oaths, prowling assassins, rapines, seditions, treasons, conspiracies, and murders. Here the cry of suffering goes up night and day; and here a spirit of vengeance, like a great furnace, burns continually. This is the Ireland of the present hour. The evils that make up this deplorable picture are so numerous and so diverse, that one despairs of being able to trace them all to one root. And yet, to one root may they all be traced. Let us take an individual patient. From head to heel he is one hideous blotch of running sores. You cannot touch him with the tip of your finger without giving him exquisite pain, so covered is he with disease. But the skilful physician will tell us that these open wounds, loathsome and painful though they be, are only symptoms, that the disease of which they are the outcome is one, and that its seat is within. Ireland, blotched all over with manifoid mischiefs has one great malady, and that malady is the cause of all the "wounds, bruises, and putrifying sores,” with which from "the crown of the head to the sole of the foot,” like another sunken land in olden time, it is covered. The whole case of Ireland may be stated in a few words. A system dominant over conscience and reason, a system at war with industry, order, and liberty, binds down the people in serfdom and misery. The priests of that system are discontented because they are not dominant, and the peasantry are insurrectionary because misled by priestly declamation, they mistake their oppressor, and cry out against England. The evils of Ireland are multiform and manifold, but their root is one, and that root is Popery. If the reader should doubt it, we crave his attention to the following brief statement of historical facts. In 1796 an order arrived from the Cardinal Prefect of the Propaganda at Rome, to the effect that a thorough training in Ultramontanism should be provided for the people of Ireland. Rome was then planning those efforts which she has ever since been steadily prosecuting for restoring her dominion in Christendom, so deeply shaken, first by the Revolution in England in 1688, and next by the Revolution in France in 1789. She thought best to make a beginning with her project in Ireland. That country was an advantageous point from which to attack the heresy of the sister isle, and restore the authority of the Papal chair in England, and so restore it in the centre of the world. But first Ireland's own Popery must be consolidated. It must be recast in the sterner mould of Ultramontanism. In order to this two measures were adopted. First, Maynooth was established as an Ultramontane School; and second, Dens' Theology, a system of thorough Ultramontanism, was adopted as the training-book in Maynooth. Cardinal Cullen used Scavini and Gurry as text-books. These were a compend of the theology of Liguori, as Dens' was of Thomas Aquinas. Passing over political steps taken outside of Ireland, we come to the year 1831. By this time most of the Irish priests were Maynooth-bred men. In that year two injunctions were issued to the priests, as appears from the Dublin Diocesan Statutes. The first was to the effect that every priest should have in his possession a work on Moral Theology, and that every day he should read and study a chapter of it, in order that being himself well instructed in the laws of the Church, he might be able to direct the consciences of his flock by these laws. The second injunction was that all the priests of Ireland should assemble in conference, each body in their own diocese, four times every year, and undergo examination by the bishop on the portion of Dens, or of the canon law previously prescribed for their study. Here we behold a mechanism, than which nothing more complete and thorough can be imagined for writing the canons and dogmas of Rome on the mind of the whole priesthood of Ireland. To the daily study of these canons in private are added four public drillings in the year. Under such a training what could the Irish priests become but a phalanx of thorough Ultramontanes? But the operation did not end here. The priest, having made proof of his own thorough proficiency in canon law by standing an examination upon it before his bishop, and by maintaining it in debate with his fellow-priests, was sent down to his parish, charged with the task of summoning his flock into the confessional, and indoctrinating every man of them in the same anti-social and anti-national dogmas. These were delivered to them as the truth of God, on what they most surely believed to be a Divine and infallible authority. We behold here the canon law of Rome in the process of being engraven on the mind and conscience-wrought into the life of the whole Popish popu |