The Irish Race in the Past and the Present

by Augustus J. Thébaud

(1 Many quotations in this chapter are from the "Legend. Hist." by J. G. Shea.)

In the annals of no other Christian nation do we see so many examples of the power of the ministers of God to punish the wicked and help and succor the good, as we do in the hagiography of Ireland. Bad kings and chieftains reproved, cursed, punished; the poor assisted, the oppressed delivered from their enemies, the sick restored to health, the dead even raised to life, are occurrences which the reader meets in almost every page of the lives of Irish saints. The Bollandists, accustomed as they were to meet with miracles of that kind, in the lives they published, found in Irish hagiography such a superabundance of them, that they refused to admit into their admirable compilation a great number already published or in manuscript. Nevertheless, the critics of our days, finding nothing impossible to or unworthy of God in the large collection of Colgan and other Irish antiquarians, express their surprise at their exclusion from that of Bollandus.

No one at least will refuse to concede that, true or not, the facts related in those lives are always provocative of piety and redolent of faith. They certainly prove that at all periods of their existence the Irish have manifested a holy avidity for every thing supernatural and miraculous. Do they not know that our Lord has promised gifts of this description to his apostles and their successors? And what the acts of the Apostles and many acts of martyrs positively state as having happened at the very beginning of the Church, is not a whit less extraordinary or physically impossible than any thing related in the Irish legends.

Every Christian soul naturally abhors the unbelief of a Strauss or of a Renan as to the former; is it not unnatural, then, for the same Christian soul to reject the latter because they fall under the easy sneer of "an Irish legend," and are not contained in Holy Writ?

At all events, the faith of the Irish has never wavered in such matters, and to-day they hold the same confidence in the priests' power that meets us everywhere in the pages of Colgan and Ward. The reason is, that they admit Christianity without reserve; and in its entirety it is supernatural. The criticisms of human reason on holy things hold in their eyes something of the sacrilegious and blasphemous; such criticisms are for them open disrespect for divine things; and, inasmuch as divine things are, in fact, more real than any phenomena under natural laws can be, skepticism in the former case is always more unreasonable than in the latter, supposing always that the narrative of the Divine favors reposes on sufficient authority.

It is clear, therefore, that since the preaching of Christianity in Ireland, the world showed itself to the inhabitants of that country in a different light to that in which other men beheld it. For them, Nature is never separated from its Maker; the hand of God is ever visible in all mundane affairs, and the frightful parting between the spiritual and material worlds, first originated by the Baconian philosophy, which culminates in our days in the almost open negation of the spiritual, and thus materializes all things, is with justice viewed by the children of St. Patrick with a holy horror as leading to atheism, if it be not atheism itself.

Without going to such extremes as the avowed infidels of modern times, all other Christian nations have seemed afraid to draw the logical conclusions whose premises were laid down by revelation. They have tried to follow a via media between truth and error; they have admitted to a certain extent the separation of God and Nature, supposing the act of creation to have passed long ages ago, and not continuing through all time; and thus they are bound by their system to hold that miracles are very extraordinary things, not to be believed prima facie, requiring infinite precautions before admitting the supposition of their having taken place; all which indicates a real repugnance to their admission, and an innate fear of supposing God all-powerful, just, and good. It is the first step to Manicheism and the kindred errors; and most Christian nations having, unfortunately, imbibed the principles of those errors in the philosophy of modern times, have almost lost all faith in the supernatural, and reduced revelation to a meagre and cold system, unrealized and not to be realized in human life.

Not so the Irish Religion has entered deep into their life. It is a thing of every moment and of every place. Nature, God's handiwork, instead of repelling them from God himself, draws them gently but forcibly toward Him, so that they feel themselves to be truly recipients of the blessings of God by being sharers in the blessings of Nature.

And must God's ministers, who have received such extraordinary powers over the supernatural world, be entirely deprived of power over the inferior part of creation? Who can say so, and have true faith in the words of our Lord? Who can say so, and truly call himself the follower and companion of the saints who have all believed so firmly in the constant action of God in this, the lesser part of his creation?

And this faith of the Irish in the power of the priesthood is not a thing of yesterday. It dates from their adoption of Christianity, to continue, we hope, forever. It ought, therefore, to be carefully distinguished from that love for every priest of God which beats so ardently in the hearts of them all, and which was so strengthened by a long community of persecution and suffering.