How could it be expected that all would be gain without loss, when the harvest-time had not yet arrived, and the "enemy" was busy sowing "tares" in all directions? Was not the work human as well as divine? and, as human, did not the work partake of the imperfection of human things?
The continent had evidently been predestined to form one of the strongest branches of the great Catholic tree. Discovered before the modern heresies of Protestantism had shown themselves, it was to bring into the fold of Christ new nations, when some old ones were to be cut off and wither away. This has long ago been pointed out; but another mighty design of Providence there was which only now begins to show itself.
Columbus was in search of Asia and the holy sepulchre when he stumbled on the New World. Nor was the idea of his great mind altogether a delusion. The new continent was in future ages to be used as the highway from Europe to the Orient; China, Japan, India, vast regions filled with innumerable multitudes of human beings, had, so far, scarcely been touched, could scarcely be touched, by Catholicism coming from Europe. In fact it was too far away, and the means of intercommunication were too inadequate. The holy Catholic Church increases as "things which grow;" a few husbandmen—missionaries—are required to set the first seedlings and plants in the soil, to water them, watch over them, and see that they thrive and flourish; the rest of the process is a matter of seeds wafted by the wind, falling and taking root in a fertile soil, which has been already prepared for their reception. If there were no other means of propagation than the toil and sweat of the husbandman, how long would it take to cover the whole earth with vegetation? The first propagation of Christianity was done in this way; hence it took more than ten centuries to Christianize Europe. In the fifth century, Rome was still thoroughly pagan. Were the vast regions of that dim, far-away East to undergo a similar slow and painful process, necessitating an immense amount of labor, centuries and centuries in duration? God hastened the process by adding to it the wafting of seeds, and America was to be the vast nursery from which those seeds were to come. It was from that long and alternately widening and narrowing belt of land, running down the sea from north to south, that the Japhetic race was to invade the "tents of Sem."
Thus was the dream of Columbus to be realized. Asia would be reached by Europe, of which America would form a part. The east of Asia would become contiguous to a real European population, large masses of which would easily come in contact with the Mongolian and Malay races of their immediate neighborhood, steam and modern improvements in travel reducing the intervening distance to a matter of a few days. Thus the Japhetic movement could be carried out on a large scale, and European civilization come to supersede the obsolete manners of those old and effete races of Eastern Asia. The unity of mankind would be vindicated against its blasphemers; and, to crown the whole, Christianity would find its way back to the cradle of man, then, to its own birthplace, Calvary and the sepulchre of Christ. Thus would the conjectural vision of the great Genoese become only an explanation of the old prophecy of the second father of mankind.1 (1 The reader will understand that all this is merely "a view, " and not given as a pure interpretation of Scripture or past history.)
Thus would the Church at last become rigorously Catholic, and not as some theologians imagined, in their desire to make actual, incomplete facts coincide with a far wider theory, only Catholic by approximation.
If it were allowed us to read the designs of Providence reverently, we might say, without presumption, that it seems such is to be future history, although simple conjecture may produce too strong an impression on our minds. But, at the period of which we speak, shortly after the middle of the last century, any one who would have spoken thus would have been justly deemed a visionary. The south of America, though possessed of the true religion, seemed inert; the North was already showing signs of an intense future activity, but all opposed to the truth. God was about to change those appearances, and, by infusing the Irish element into the North, produce, in a comparatively short space of time, the wonderful phenomenon which we witness.
Yet, so short-sighted are we, that some are almost staggered in their faith, because the children of the earliest Irish emigrants to this country, were apparently lost to the Church.
Nevertheless, several circumstances might be brought forward to show that a real gain accrued to the Church from these lost children of the first Irish settlers. How many prejudices, so deeply rooted in the country as to seem ineradicable, owe their destruction to them! How many harsh and uncharitable feelings against Catholics were smoothed away or softened down by their instrumentality!
Those men who, in after-life, remembered that they "ought to be Catholics," were not ready to accept, on the word of a "minister," all the absurd calumnies spread against the Church throughout those vast regions. They had heard, by a kind of tradition, kept alive in their families, of what their ancestors had formerly suffered, and they at least were not inclined to join in the universal denunciation of a creed which they were conscious "ought to be" their own.
Who shall say whether it is not the old Catholic blood, running in the veins of these children of Irish Catholic parents, which has been mainly instrumental in creating that spirit of true liberality which inspires the honorable conduct of the majority of the American people, and in which the Church has at all times found her safety?