IRELAND'S MISSION.
BY W. MAZIERE BRADY, D.D., AN IRISH PROTESTANT CLERGYMAN.
Few persons expected that the passing of Mr. Gladstone's disestablishment bill would have immediately introduced a golden age into Ireland. The leading promoters of that measure never regarded it as one which was final and complete; but rather as a necessary prelude to certain reconstructive measures more powerful and important than itself. The abolition of the ascendency of an alien church did not restore—and did not affect to restore—to the Catholic Church its ancient status and endowments. The attempt would be entirely vain to regather the disjecta membra of the great body of Irish church temporalities long since dispersed and broken up by successive spoliations and alienations. The property dealt with by the recent legislation is but a small fraction of what once belonged to the Irish Church. Restitution, unhappily, is often impossible to the statesman. He may build up an edifice upon ruins, and create new empires out of revolutions. But he can no more give back to outraged nationalities their unsullied honor, or to plundered kingdoms their squandered treasures, than he can restore to those fallen from purity their virgin crown or reëndow criminals with a conscience void of offence and free from sear of guilt. And therefore the removal of the alien church led to no replacement of the old Catholic Church in the position vacated by its Protestant rival; but merely paved the way for the introduction of constructive measures upon the nature of which will depend the future, not of Ireland merely, but of the British empire. Amidst these constructive measures the statesman will not reckon any provisions for the maintenance or aggrandisement of the Catholic Church in Ireland. A church which withstood calamity and survived the loss of its possessions, and flourished under three hundred years of bitter persecution, may safely be left to itself. State patronage, in any extended form, might corrupt, but could not strengthen, Irish Catholicism. Catholics in many countries are beginning to feel that freedom of action and development is of far greater value than endowments to the church. In Ireland, Catholics have long since perceived and acknowledged that liberty—not the enervating influence of court favor—is the true bulwark of Catholic worship.
Legislators have, in fact, no occasion to take into their consideration the Irish Catholic Church, except in so far as its power and interests intermingle with the educational and other social and political problems which demand deep and impartial inquiry. Whoever examines, without prejudice or passion, the actual position of Ireland as an integral part of the British empire must confess that Ireland forms at this time, more than at any other, the cardinal point of English policy. Gibraltar was once the key to the Mediterranean and to political supremacy in Europe. Ireland is to England another Gibraltar, on whose rock British power must be either consolidated or riven. The Ireland of 1870 is rapidly entering on a new phase of existence, which is none the less worthy of the statesman's study because it is the result of causes altogether beyond his control. Ireland is no longer an island lying within a few hours' sail of the English navy, inhabited by men whose interests may be disposed of without reference to the wishes of any save the inhabitants of Great Britain. The people of Ireland are by no means confined within the territorial limits of that country. The Irish nation has two homes. The one is in Ireland, the other is in America. Misgovernment sent half Ireland into exile, and those exiles have prospered and multiplied to an extent far exceeding any known examples of similar transmigrations. But although there are two homes, there is but one nation of Irishmen. Five millions of men occupy Irish soil, but far more than twice five millions of Irishmen dwelling in foreign lands not only claim but exercise an ever-increasing influence on Irish politics. Some few among the ultra-conservative statesmen of England—and among them one no less distinguished than the great chief of the late Tory administration—looked with eyes of cruel satisfaction on the exodus which wiser men regarded with awe as a hemorrhage draining away the life-blood of their kingdom. The famine was to these bigoted men a God-gift, which swept off what they flippantly termed a superabundant population. Emigration was, in their eyes, a more tedious and costly process for the decimation of Irish Catholics. Protestants, belonging chiefly to the dominant and richer class, were in proportion to their numbers less exposed than Catholics to the severity of the famine and the necessity of expatriation. Famine and emigration, if only Providence would prolong and intensify their action, would alter—so they thought—the numerical proportions between Catholics and Protestants make Ireland a Protestant country and render the church establishment less anomalous. Let a few more years pass—so argued these reasoners—and instead of having to legislate for a Catholic, discontented, Ireland, over-populated and half-pauperized, we shall have to deal with one comparatively Protestant, which will be prosperous, happy, and loyal to the British crown. It is recorded of an English statesman that he once expressed a wish—in jest, no doubt—that Ireland were for an hour submerged in the Atlantic, that it might rise again stripped of its inhabitants, a fresh field for the importation of English Protestant colonists. The folly of wishing for either a flood or a famine to repair the defects of English legislation for Ireland, is now as apparent as the cruelty. Even though the island of Ireland were reduced to such a tabula rasa as some bigots would desire, England must take into account the thousands and millions of Irishmen in various lands who constitute part of the Irish nation, and who think, plan, and pray for the happiness of their traditional fatherland. And fortunately for the interests of England, no less than of Ireland, a policy has of late been adopted by the leaders of the great liberal party which professes to deal with Catholic Ireland, not as with a venomous thing to be guarded against, kept down, and, if possible, crushed, but as a country to be tenderly regarded, carefully cherished, and legislated for with a view to the contentment and preservation of its Catholic people. The policy of Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Bright, and the party of which they are now the recognized chiefs, is at present but partially developed, yet has already produced good fruits. Righteousness exalteth a nation, and England has risen immensely in the opinion of wise and good men in Europe and America by that great though tardy—the greater, perhaps, because so tardy—act of righteousness, namely, the abolition of an English Protestant church establishment for Irish Catholics. The sympathies of all honest men in every quarter of the globe are with the English government in its endeavor to stay the tide of Irish emigration, and retain Irishmen upon their native soil as contented occupiers and owners of farms. But admiration and sympathy are not the only rewards which England may reap by steadily following out the policy begun by Mr. Gladstone. The integrity of the British empire may be shown to depend upon the continued development of the principles which carried the Irish church bill of 1869 and introduced an Irish land bill in 1870. If it be too presumptuous to attempt to forecast a triumphant progress for those principles, it will yet be not wholly profitless to denote the perils and obstructions which beset the way.
The disturbances and outrages which in Ireland preceded and followed the passing of the disestablishment bill, were the natural result of the violent harangues uttered by the fanatic debaters of the Church Defence Association, many of whom announced to their excited auditors that the land bill of Mr. Gladstone would confiscate the property of Protestant land-owners in Ireland. The evil passions of men thus deceived into a belief that a wrong was intended not only to their church but to their lands, found vent not merely in hard words and cruel threats, but in merciless deeds. Some Protestant landlords withheld the accustomed local charitable contributions which, as owners of property, they had hitherto given to various institutions. Others issued notices of ejection against their tenants, and these attempted ejections produced—as capricious injustice is certain to do—ill-will and resistance. Outrages, even assassinations, occurred. But such offences against public order may be expected to cease when the causes of them are removed. Time will allay the heat of bygone party conflicts. Agrarian outrages will, if the land bill be good for any thing, occur as rarely in Ireland as in America. Industrious laborers will, it is to be hoped, find it easy to rent or purchase small holdings on which they may expend their toil, and in which they may invest their savings without fear of their being appropriated to the use of felonious landlords by means of notices to quit. It is when the excitement of the land and church questions shall have yielded to the pressure of other momentous questions, that the real danger will threaten the onward march of those principles which, in the opinion of many, can alone safely guide the mutual relations between England and Ireland. The education question will be a highly perilous one. If the liberal party put forward a scheme for compulsory, or secular, or sectarian education, which shall, on whatever pretext, either nominally or practically, tend to withdraw the education of Catholic children from the immediate control of the priests, the result will be disappointment and disaster. Free education, in the sense of an education independent of religion, has great charms in the eyes of English and Irish liberals. Some Catholics are inclined to favor any scheme which would place a superior system of secular instruction within the reach of the great bulk of the poorer and middle class, even though it should not provide for that religious training which is a characteristic of a strictly Catholic education. But the Catholic clergy of Ireland, to a man, and those members of Parliament who represent Irish Catholic constituencies, will give strenuous and effectual opposition to undenominational or secular education under its open guise, although they may prove unable to resist the employment, in a modified shape, of the principle which they regard as pernicious. It will be much to the advantage of Great Britain if the education of Catholics in England, as well as in Ireland, be made thoroughly Catholic. The vast, and in many respects admirable system of national education in Ireland, which, twenty or thirty years ago, was favorably regarded by very many of the Irish Catholic bishops and clergy, has long since been declared unsatisfactory by the Catholic hierarchy. The elementary national schools are now merely tolerated. The national model schools are loudly denounced. The national system aimed at giving to all children a combined secular instruction and at affording opportunities for separate religious instruction. The priest and the parson were invited to become joint patrons of schools. The board of education were to supply school-rooms, teachers, books, and requisites for a secular instruction in which all the pupils were to share. The ministers of various denominations were to supply, either personally or by deputy, a religious teaching to their respective pupils. Thus an hour or more was to be set apart for religious teaching. During that hour the Catholic children were to be taught the Catholic religion by the priest, or by one of the masters under the priest's direction, and the Protestant children were similarly to be taught the principles of Protestantism in another room by the parson, or by one of the teachers under his control. It was supposed that all ministers of religion would join in carrying out a system which thus provided for the general education of the poor, without interfering with the conscientious discharge of that part of the ministerial duty of clergymen which relates to the religious teaching of the young. The idea of instructing Catholic and Protestant children together and bringing them up in habits of mutual affection and esteem, was specious and captivating. Who could withhold his quota of aid toward realizing the prospect thus held out of future generations of educated Irishmen of various creeds, each respecting the religious principles of the others while strong in his own, and all loyal to the impartial government of the British crown? Yet, at its very outset, the clergy and bishops of the Protestant establishment held aloof from the national board. They refused any partnership with Catholic priests in the management of schools, and declared that their consciences would not permit them to consent to support a system which set limits to the free use of the holy Scriptures during secular instruction. In vain was it shown that in Protestant universities, colleges, and higher schools, nay, that in the very order for divine service according to the ritual of the establishment, a limit was actually set to the use of the holy Scriptures by the appointment of fixed times and places for the study and reading and exposition of the sacred word. In vain was it demonstrated that neither insult nor disparagement was intended by regulations which might be looked on as scarcely different from those which prevented a lecturer in mathematics from giving his class a dissertation upon Isaiah, and denied a clergyman of the establishment the privilege of interpolating his reading of the litany with a chapter from the Apocalypse. The establishment clergy, with a few notable exceptions, asserted it as their right and duty to use the Scriptures at all times in their schools, and declared it to be a sin to consent to suspend, even during the hours of combined secular instruction, their office of teachers of divine truth. By adopting this course they lost whatever claim to public estimation they might otherwise have had as helpers of education, and hastened, undoubtedly, the fall of their establishment. It has lately, through the publication of Archbishop Whately's biography by his daughter and of the journals of Mr. Senior, been fully disclosed that a desire for proselytism, although in his lifetime he publicly professed the contrary, was at the bottom of that able prelate's energetic support of the national system. The religious and moral teaching of the books used for combined secular instruction had, so argued Whately in private, a strong tendency to implant truths which must lead to the reception of Protestantism. Give free scope, so reasoned the archbishop, to the national system, and, although the priests may not perceive their danger, Ireland must cease to be a Catholic country. When publicly advocating the national system, Whately's language was, of course, far different. Then he maintained stoutly that the books were thoroughly impartial, he repudiated with affected loathing any dishonorable desire to make converts to Protestantism, and he professed the most scrupulous respect for the consciences of those who differed from him in religion. The posthumous publication of Whately's real sentiments—destructive as that publication is of much of his reputation, and especially of his character for straightforwardness—forms a valuable vindication, not merely of the behaviour of those more honest commissioners of education whose refusal to adopt the Whately tactics led to Whately's retirement from the board, but also of the conduct of the Catholic bishops and clergy who have found it necessary emphatically to demand a radical change in the system of national instruction so far as Catholics are concerned.
It is, however, for the interests of Protestantism and of Great Britain, as well as of Catholicism, that the education of Catholics should be carried on more perfectly in accord with the desires of the Catholic people. The principle of religious neutrality in education has been tried in Ireland, and found wanting. It has not resulted in bringing into the same school-rooms the young of various creeds, and educating them in mutual love. Three or four Protestants may be found in the same school with a hundred Catholics; or three or four Catholics may attend a school frequented by a hundred Protestants. But nowhere in Ireland is it possible to find a school where one half of the pupils are Protestants and the other half Catholics, or where the Protestant clergyman and the Catholic priest, as joint patrons, superintend their respective classes. It is true, indeed, that proselytism is discouraged by the rules of the board, and that no favor is shown to one denomination more than to another. But with all this endeavor after impartiality by its administrators, the system inflicts a serious wound upon Catholicity. The authority of the board is substituted for that of the Catholic Church. The national school teacher, when in training for his office, learns his duties from men of various religious denominations, who are not permitted, even were they desirous, to impart a devotional color to what they teach. The virtues must be commended on moral, not on religious grounds. Patriotism may take root in ignorance; for no book of Irish history is to be found in the list of Irish national school books. When the trained teacher is set over a school, he still regards himself as dependent upon the board which is his paymaster. Catholic teachers may, and sometimes do, hold opinions different from those of the priest, and even upon occasions refuse to carry out the priest's directions in the matter of religious teaching. The influence of the priest upon his flock is weakened by that very separation between secular and religious instruction which is the basis of the system of national education. Protestantism may flourish under the impartiality, neutrality, and secularization of education at which the originators of that system aimed; but Catholicism must inevitably become deteriorated.
It was in past years the almost universal belief of Protestant governments, that an Irish Catholic, in proportion as he ceased to be loyal to his spiritual, would advance in loyalty toward his temporal sovereign. Toleration was offered, even under Elizabeth and James, to Catholics who would abjure the spiritual supremacy of the pope. In modern times the same spirit of distrust shows itself in the endeavor, on the part of some Protestant statesmen, to offer to Catholics educational and other advantages upon conditions inconsistent with Catholic practices. Those greatly err who thus fancy that Great Britain will gain—either politically or religiously—by the undermining of the influence of the Catholic priesthood, or by leavening the education of Catholics with the spirit of secularization. The Irish Catholic may be taught to unlearn his faith, to neglect confession, and disobey the injunctions of his priest; but no one will say that thereby he becomes, necessarily, either a better Christian or a better subject to his sovereign. Such a one may, or may not, become a Protestant or an infidel. When the influence of the priest is weakened or destroyed, the Irish Catholic becomes an easy victim to those who teach disloyalty and rebellion. But his lapse into treason should be ascribed to the fact not of his being a Catholic, but of his being a bad one. No good Catholic who values the sacraments, and respects the precepts of his church, could possibly join the treasonable brotherhoods denounced by the Catholic priest from the altar, by the bishops in pastorals, and by the pope himself. There are, however, too many Irish Catholics whose obedience to their church is partial, or but nominal. Perhaps these men first learnt in Irish national schools the lesson that religion, like every thing else, has its appointed time and place; that Catholic devotion forms no indispensable portion of secular studies, and that priestly intervention in affairs not strictly religious is intrusive and impertinent. The want of a truly Catholic training in early life doubtless has led many an adult Catholic to hold that a priest out-steps the proper sphere of his office, when he cautions his flock against revolutionary excesses.
If misdirected and uncatholic teaching occasions many Irish Catholics to become rebels in thought if not in deed, their education has advanced and is advancing in another point, so as to render their treason more dangerous. Irishmen in former years were prompt to seize occasions for the overthrow of British rule, but lacked certain qualities requisite for permanent success. They seemed incapable, for any length of time, of combined action and resolution in the field or the cabinet. They carried into battle the dissensions and jealousies of their divided council-chambers. Brilliant displays of military valor served only to mark more distinctly the fatal effects of indecision and insubordination. Victory itself was often the prelude to that demoralization of forces which is the worst consequence of defeat. But now the Irish are swiftly learning to acquire those qualities of organization and self-government which will render their revolts more formidable and disastrous to England than hitherto they have proved. Irishmen have shown themselves in American campaigns not soldiers merely, but generals, and not merely skilful tacticians in handling masses of troops before the enemy, but also able organizers, clever in moulding and disciplining untrained materials into effective battalions. Habits of promptitude, self-control, and self-reliance belong to the Irish-American in perhaps even a higher degree than to the Anglo-Saxon. The number is rapidly increasing of Irishmen who, having acquired those habits in America, repair to Ireland and communicate them in some degree to their brethren at home. The peasantry of Ireland—already familiarized with trans-Atlantic ideas of independence and republicanism—are apt to become Americanized. Their sympathies are with the United States rather than with England. If war broke out between Great Britain and the States, no one doubts but that the first American army flung upon Irish shores would find Ireland one vast recruiting field, and that swarms of soldiers of Irish descent would fly from distant lands to Ireland to lend their aid in rendering it, throughout its length and breadth, a garrison impregnable to British attacks. And no one doubts but that England—even though eventually victorious by land and sea—would depart from such a conflict crippled in half her strength. Ireland, alienated irrevocably, would be to England like a paralyzed limb to the combatant, both a sign and a source of weakness. At no very distant period from the termination of such a war, Ireland would virtually become an American outpost, and would cease to be an integral part of Great Britain. Without Ireland to rely upon, England could scarcely be expected to maintain a position as a first-class power in the event of war among European nations. Mercenary troops might, indeed, for a time supply the want of Irish soldiers and sailors. But the nation which has to hire foreign troops to fight its battles is already in decay.
It is possible, however, that Ireland, instead of becoming the occasion of ruin and dismemberment to the British empire, may prove its mainstay and the bond of its integrity. If Ireland shall become prosperous and contented under the changed policy of England, if its population shall increase under prosperity, and if its nationality shall be recognized and fostered—then no combination of European foes, unaided by America, can hope to prevail against the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. But why should America withhold her hand, when opportunity shall have presented itself for dealing a blow in repayment of old wrongs aggravated by recent disputes? France may demand the armed assistance of the States, whose existence as an independent government she so powerfully helped to create. He reads ill the face of nations who fails to perceive that the great body of Americans desire to see the pride of England humbled, and that they are treasuring up their wrath against the day of wrath. The native-born Americans are moved by the transmitted rancor of past injustice. Those of Irish and Catholic descent have the wrongs of Ireland and of the Catholic Church to avenge. All the traditions of faith and patriotism are now arrayed against England, and the influence of the Irish and Catholic population of the States is sufficient to decide the political action of Congress in the eventuality of the reasonableness of war with Great Britain becoming a subject for discussion. Yet the Irish and Catholic element in the American population might, under circumstances to be created by English policy, prove the means of restraining from an almost fratricidal contest the two great empires. Ireland may become so linked to England that any blow struck against England would equally harm Ireland. An enlightened legislation concerning the soil of Ireland may lead to the break-up of absentee landlordism, and substitute tens of thousands of owners and occupiers in place of the few hundred feudal proprietors who now exact rack-rents from an impoverished tenantry. The multiplication of resident working farm-owners may afford remunerative and permanent occupation to numerous agricultural laborers for whom there now offers only an intermittent and precarious employment. The agricultural prosperity of Ireland is a powerful bond of union with England, the nearest and best market for Irish produce. Another bond of union may be found in the grant of legislative independence, or such a modification of the present parliamentary system as may place the disposal of purely Irish interests in the hands of Irish representatives, satisfy the just desires of the patriotic, and leave no room for sentimental grievances to fester into international feuds. The Catholic religion, subjected to no disabilities in either kingdom, and overshadowed by no hostile establishment—for Englishmen themselves in a few years will remove their present church establishment in the interests of their church and of Protestantism—will form another tie between the countries. English Catholics have always been loyal to the British government. Irish Catholics may become just as loyal. Education may render the rough Irish laborers, who frequent the centres of English commerce and manufacture, as loyal as the most loyal in England, and a valuable counterpoise to the ultra-democratic semi-infidels who form the dangerous mobs of London, Liverpool, and other vast trading and industrial cities. And if the social and political interests of Catholic Irishmen and of Catholics in England become recognized as identical with those of English Protestants, then the union between Great Britain and Ireland will be completely consolidated, and the Irish party in America will have neither excuse nor opportunity for joining any other party which may desire, disregarding the welfare of Ireland, to inflict a wound upon Great Britain. On the contrary, the Irish and Catholic element in the States will be both able and willing to throw its effective influence into the scale upon the side of peace and good-will, whenever the differences between the cabinets of London and Washington demand settlement. Ireland will thus indirectly become the mediator between the contending empires—the arbiter to reconcile the angry parent and the aggrieved son. But Ireland, to be enabled to act this part, must be cherished as Irish and Catholic, with its nationality unimpaired and its faith untrammelled. And if the political interests of Great Britain shall be served by the flourishing condition of Irish Catholicism, the religious interests of Protestant England will not necessarily be damaged. Nay, it may prove an advantage to Protestantism to be brought upon equal terms into close and harmonious relations with the fervent faith of the Catholic Church, which nowhere appears to greater advantage than in Ireland. Rationalism and scepticism are on the increase in Great Britain and elsewhere, and will prove far more dangerous neighbors than the Church of Rome to the Church of England. Infidelity is an enemy against whom both would do well, if not to unite their strength, at least to direct their separate attacks. As rivals in opposing vice and unbelief, they may learn to respect each other, and, alas! have before them a field only too ample for their most vigorous exertions.