Ireland, Historic and Picturesque

by Charles Johnston

Yet after all is said, we can hardly fail to see that out of the spoliation and scattering of the religious orders much good came. There was a danger that, like the older indigenous schools which they supplanted, these later foundations might divide the nation in two, all things within their consecrated walls being deemed holy, while all without was unregenerate, given up to wrath. A barrier of feelings and hopes thus springing up, tends to harden from year to year, till at last we have a religious caste grown proud and arrogant, and losing all trace of the spiritual fervor which is its sole reason for being.

The evils which surround a wealthy church are great and easily to be understood, nor need we lay stress on them. There is, indeed, cause for wonder in the spectacle of the followers of him "who had not where to lay his head" become, in the Middle Ages, the greatest owners of land in Europe; and we can see how temptations and abuses without number might and did often arise from this very fact. Ambition, the desire of wealth, the mere love of ease, led many to profess a religious life who had never passed through that transformation of will and understanding which is the essence of religion. The very purpose of religion was forgotten, or allowed to be hidden away under things excellent in themselves, yet not essential; and difference of view about these unessential things led to fierce and bitter controversy, and later to open strife and war.

We take religion, in its human aspect, to mean the growth of a new and wider consciousness above the keen, self-assertive consciousness of the individual; a superseding of the personal by the humane; a change from egotism to a more universal understanding; so that each shall act, not in order to gain an advantage over others, but rather to attain the greatest good for himself and others equally; that one shall not dominate another for his own profit, but shall rather seek to draw forth in that other whatever is best and truest, so that both may find their finest growth. Carried far enough, this principle, which makes one's neighbor a second self, will bring to light in us the common soul, the common life that has tacitly worked in all human intercourse from the beginning. Individual consciousness is in no way effaced; something new, wider and more humane, something universal, is added to it from above; something consciously common to all souls. And through the inspiration of that larger soul, the individual life for the first time comes to its true power--a power which is held by all pure souls in common.

We can see that something like this was the original inspiration of the religious orders. Their very name of Friars or Brothers speaks of the ideal of a common life above egotism. They sought a new birth through the death of selfishness, through self-sacrifice and renunciation. All their life in common was a symbol of the single soul inspiring them, the very form of their churches bearing testimony to their devotion. More than that, the beauty and inspiration which still radiate from the old abbey buildings show how often and in how large a degree that ideal was actually attained.

Nevertheless we can very well see how the possession of large wealth and costly offerings might be a hindrance to that spirit, fanning back to life the smouldering fires of desire. We can see even more clearly that the division between the secular and the religious life would tend to raise a moral barrier, hardening that very sense of separation which the humane and universal consciousness seeks to kill. Finally, we should see what the world has often seen: the disciples of the Nazarene dwelling in palaces, and vying with princes in the splendor of their retinues. This is hardly the way to make real the teaching of "the kingdom not of this world." This world, in the meaning of that saying, is the old world of egotism, of self-assertion, of selfish rivalry, of the sense of separation. The kingdom is that very realm of humane and universal consciousness added from above, the sense of the one soul common to all men and working through all men, whether they know it or not.

We can, therefore, see that the confiscation of the monasteries, and even the persecution of the religious orders, might be the cause of lasting spiritual good; it was like the opening of granaries and the scattering of grain abroad over the fields. The religious force, instead of drawing men out of the world, thenceforth was compelled to work among all men, not creating beautiful abbeys but transforming common lives. Persecution was the safeguard of sincerity, the fire of purification, from which men's spirits came forth pure gold. Among all nations of the world, Ireland has long held the first place for pure morals, especially in the relations of sex; and this is increasingly true of those provinces where the old indigenous element is most firmly established. We may affirm that the spiritualizing of religious feeling through persecution has had its share in bringing this admirable result, working, as it did, on a race which has ever held a high ideal of purity.

Thus out of evil comes good; out of oppression, rapacity and confiscation grow pure unselfishness, an unworldly ideal, a sense of the invisible realm. We shall presently see the same forces of rapacity and avarice sowing the seeds for a not less excellent harvest in the world of civil life.

The principle of feudalism, though introduced by the first Norman adventurers in the twelfth century, did not gain legal recognition over the whole country until the seventeenth. The old communal tenure of the Brehon law was gradually superseded, so that, instead of innumerable tribal territories with elected chiefs, there grew up a system of estates, where the land was owned by one man and tilled by others. The germ of this tenure was the right of private taxation over certain districts, granted by the Norman duke to his barons and warriors as the reward for their help in battle. Feudal land tenure never was, and never pretended to be, a contract between cultivator and landowner for their mutual benefit. It was rather the right to prey on the farmer, assigned to the landowner by the king, and paid for in past or present services to the king. In other words, the head of the Norman army invited his officers to help themselves to a share of the cattle and crops over certain districts of England, and promised to aid them in securing their plunder, in case the Saxon cultivator was rash enough to resist. The baronial order presently ceased to render any real service to their duke, beyond upholding him that he might uphold them. But there was no such surcease for the Saxon cultivator. The share of his cattle and crops which he was compelled to give up to the Norman baron became more rigidly defined, more strictly exacted, with every succeeding century, and the whole civil state of England was built up on this principle.

The baronial order assembled at Runnymead to force the hand of the king. From that time forward their power increased, while the king's power waned. But there was no Runnymead for the Saxon cultivator. He continued, as to this day he continues, to pay the share of his cattle and crops to the Norman baron or his successor, in return for services--no longer rendered--to the king. The whole civil state of England, therefore, depends on the principle of private taxation; the Norman barons and their successors receiving a share of the cattle and crops of the whole country, year after year, generation after generation, century after century, as payment for services long become purely imaginary, and even in the beginning rendered not to the cultivator who was taxed, but to the head of the armed invaders, who stood ready to enforce the payment. The Constitution of England embodies this very principle even now, in the twentieth century. Two of the three Estates,--King, Lords and Commons,--in whom the law-making power is vested, represent the Norman conquest, while even the third, still called the Lower House, boasts of being "an assembly of gentlemen," that is, of those who possess the right of private taxation of land, the right to claim a share of the cattle and crops of the whole country without giving anything at all in return.

This is the system which English influence slowly introduced into Ireland, and with the reign of the first Stuarts the change was practically complete, guaranteed by law, and enforced by armed power. The tribesmen were now tenants of their former elected chief, in whom the ownership of the tribal land was invested; the right of privately taxing the tribesmen was guaranteed to the chief by law, and a share of all cattle and crops was his by legal right, not as head of the tribe, but as owner of the land, with power to dispossess the tribesmen if they failed to pay his tax.