"Aren't the priests fine-looking men?" says he.
"Yes," breaks in another Irishman, "and they ought to be the fathers of families. All that good blood going to waste and their lines ending with them instead of enriching the blood of Ireland in future generations. That's what celibacy does."
Another Irishman chimes in, "Oh, the priests are not such a fine lot. The constabulary are, I'll admit, but the most of them are as useless as the priests. Most of their time is spent training canaries, for there's little else for them to do in the country districts. But the priests; sure a man says, 'Oh, Jimmy's no good at all at all. Let's make a priest of him.'"
"It's folly you're talking," says the one who spoke for the priests. "There's not a finer body of men in Ireland than the priests."
"Oh," says the other, with Irish wit, "there's white sheep in every fold, I'll admit, but if Ireland was free from political and religious domination, she'd be able to stand upright and she wouldn't need home rule."
All of which is very perplexing to the man who came to Ireland thinking that with the exception of a few Orangemen all Ireland was working morning, noon, and night for home rule.
Next day I meet a man I know to be a Protestant and I say to him in my easy-going way (being all things to all men when I am traveling, in order to save wear and tear), "The Catholic religion is keeping Ireland back, is it not?"
He looks at me for a moment and then a spiritual light illumines his eyes and he says: "Protestantism is always death to arts. Look at Shakespeare, the last Catholic that England had, as you might say, and look at his work with its artistry, its absence of dogmatism, and then look at Protestant and tiresome Wordsworth and Protestant and didactic Tennyson. Spenser was a great artist. Spenser was a Catholic. Catholicism emancipates the artistic side of a man's nature, puritanism seals it up, dams it, condemns him to preach sermons.
"The Irish are the most artistic people on the face of the earth when Protestantism has not been allowed to stamp their idealism out of them."
"But I thought you were a Protestant. Then I suppose that you think that the priests——"