The Irish Race in the Past and the Present

by Augustus J. Thébaud

Thus, when the conduct of their chieftain was not in accordance with what the clansmen considered the right, they were ready to express their disapproval of his actions by deposing him, and placing their allegiance at the service of the man of their choice.

But though this course of action is true of the whole period of their history, more especially from the date of their becoming Christian up to the time when the blows of religious persecution welded them into one people, yet they were divided and often at war among themselves. But no sooner did the work of perversion make itself felt among them, than we behold the clansmen exhibiting a unity of feeling on many points which never marked them before. So that thenceforth the separated clans gradually began to merge into Irishmen.

This unity of feeling showed itself, above all, in the deep love for their religion, which at once became universal and all- pervading. This love had undoubtedly existed before, as it could scarcely have originated and swollen to such proportions all at once; but as the stroke of the hammer reveals the spark, so the force of opposition enkindled the flame and caused it to burst forth into view. At the first blow it showed itself throughout the island, and thus the people became once and forever united.

This unity of feeling was displayed likewise in an ardent love for their country in contradistinction to the special locality of the tribe. Thus arose a true fraternal union with all their countrymen of whatever county or city. The old antagonism between family and family only appeared at fitful and unguarded intervals; but in general each one grasped the hand of another only as a Catholic and an Irishman.

This is clearly attributable to their religion. Catholicity knows no place; its very name is opposed to restrictions of this character. Could it carry out its purpose, which is that of its Divine founder, it would make one of all nations; and, to a certain extent, it has achieved this task. Differences of character, which are deeply impressed in the nature of various branches of the human family, are indeed never totally obliterated by it; but such differences disappear when kneeling at the same altar and receiving the same sacraments. The Catholic religion is the only one which is, has ever been, and must ever claim to be, universal; the religions of antiquity were purely local.

Since the coming of our Lord, no heresy, no schism has ever pretended to the reality of a catholic existence, and, if the word is self-applied by certain sects, the world laughs at it as a meaningless thing. The Catholic Church alone has truly claimed and possessed such a character.

But if of all men it makes one family with respect to spiritual matters, what unanimity of feeling must it not create in a single nation truly imbued with its spirit, which is attacked for its sake? Until the reign of Henry VIII., the Irish, in their struggle with England, could summon no religious thought to their aid, since England was Catholic also, and the Norman nobles established among them followed the same calendar, possessed the same churches, the same creed, the same sacraments. But as soon as the English power was stamped with heresy, the opposition to that power assumed a religious aspect, and no longer restricted itself to the clans immediately attacked, but spread throughout the whole nation.

To bring the case down to some particular point, in order to render our meaning more clear, a priest or monk, who was hunted down, was no longer sure of refuge in his own district, and among men of his own sept merely, but he was equally welcomed in the castle of the chieftain or the hut of the peasant through the length and breadth of the land. Any Irishman, subject to fine, imprisonment, or torture, for the sake of his religion, did not find sympathy restricted to his own circle of friends or acquaintances, but, even if tried and prosecuted in a corner of the island, far away from his own home, he could count upon the sympathy of as many friends as there were Irish Catholics to witness his sufferings. This state of things was certainly unknown before.

Religion, when deep, is the strongest feeling of the human heart, and endows the nation steeped in it with an unconquerable strength. To judge of the intensity of religious feeling in the Irish, it should be remembered that it was the only legacy left them after every thing else had been taken away, and, though it was the special object of attack, they were to be stripped one by one of their old customs, their own chieftains, their houses of study and of prayer, their religious and secular teachers, nay, of the chance even of educating their children, of the right to possess not merely their own soil, but even to cultivate a few acres of it, nay, of their very language itself, in a word, of all that makes a country dear to man. For ages were they destined to remain outcasts and strangers on the soil which was their own; abject and ignorant paupers, without the faintest possibility of rising in the social scale.

One thing only did they keep in their hearts, their faith, though stripped of all the exterior circumstances which adorn it, and reduced to its simplest elements. But at least it was their religion, to deprive them of which, all the wealth, resources, armies, laws of a powerful nation, were to be strained to the utmost during long ages. How, then, could they fail to love and cherish it, to cling fast to it, as to an inestimable treasure, the only real one indeed they could possess on earth, where all else passes away?