The appeal was not lost on O'Connell. In his heart he loved Father Cahill for the Christ-like life of self-denial he had passed in this little place. But in his brain O'Connell pitied the old man for his wasted years in the darkness of ignorance in which so many of the villages of Ireland seemed to be buried.
O'Connell belonged to the "Young Ireland" movement. They wanted to bring the searchlight of knowledge into the abodes of darkness in which the poor of Ireland were submerged. To the younger men it seemed the priests were keeping the people from enlightenment. And until the fierce blaze of criticism could be turned on to the government of cruelty and oppression there was small hope of freeing the people who had suffered so long in silence. O'Connell was in the front band of men striving to arouse the sleeping nation to a sense of its own power. And nothing was going to stop the onward movement. It pained him to differ from Father Cahill—the one friend of his youth. If only he could alter the good priest's outlook—win him over to the great procession that was marching surely and firmly to self-government, freedom of speech and of action, and to the ultimate making of men of force out of the crushed and the hopeless. He would try.
"Father Cahill," he began softly, as though the good priest might be wooed by sweet reason when the declamatory force of the orator failed, "don't ye think it would be wiser to attend a little more to the people's BODIES than to their SOULS? to their BRAINS rather than to their HEARTS? Don't ye?"
"No, I do NOT," hotly answered the priest.
"Well, if ye DID," said the agitator, "if more priests did, it's a different Ireland we'd be livin' in to-day—that we would. The Christian's heaven seems so far away when he's livin' in hell. Try to make EARTH more like a heaven and he'll be more apt to listen to stories of the other one. Tache them to kape their hovels clean and their hearts and lives will have a betther chance of health. Above all broaden their minds. Give them education and the Divine tachin' will find a surer restin' place. Ignorance and dirt fill the hospitals and the asylums, and it is THAT so many of the priests are fosterin'."
"I'll not listen to another wurrd," cried Father Cahill, turning away.
O'Connell strode in front of him.
"Wait. There's another thing. I've heard more than one priest boast that there was less sin in the villages of Ireland than in any other country. And why? What is yer great cure for vice? MARRIAGE—isn't it?"
"What are ye sayin'?"
"I'm sayin' this, Father Cahill. If a boy looks at a girl twice, what do ye do? Engage them to be married. To you marriage is the safeguard against sin. And what ARE such marriages? Hunger marryin' thirst! Poverty united to misery! Men and women ignorant and stunted in mind and body, bound together by a sacrament, givin' them the right to bring others, equally distorted, into the wurrld. And when they're born you baptise them, and you have more souls entered on the great register for the Holy Church. Bodies livin' in perpetual torment, with a heaven wavin' at them all through their lives as a reward for their suffering here. I tell ye ye're wrong! Ye're wrong! Ye're wrong! The misery of such marriages will reach through all the generations to come. I'd rather see vice—vice that burns out and leaves scar-white the lives it scorches. There is more sin in the HEARTS and MINDS of these poor, wretched, ill-mated people than in the sinks of Europe. There is some hope for the vicious. Intelligence and common-sense will wean them from it. But there is no hope for the people whose lives from the cradle to the grave are drab and empty and sordid and wretched."