Take figures.
In Scotland, the proportion of illegitimate children is 16 per cent. In Protestant Ireland (County of Antrim, etc.) it is 7 per cent. In the poorest parts of Roman Catholic Ireland, the proportion is only ½ per cent.
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A religion is materialized that is practiced in temples adorned with statues and pictures, images of the dwellers in the realms of the blest. The uncultured mortal does not know what abstraction is. He believes in what he sees. When our peasant folk think of God, they picture Him to themselves as an august personage in a blue robe with flowing sleeves, who keeps the accounts of our good and bad actions and receives in private audience every morning certain saints, dressed in various colors (St. Peter invariably in bottle-green), who come to talk of their protégés, and recommend them to His mercy.
This materialism of the other world helps the ignorant to understand, and explains why the poor crowd our churches, in the provinces at all events. I say in the provinces especially, for it would be as wrong to judge France by Paris, as it would be to judge England by Regent Street and the Haymarket. This is a remark that I should like to repeat at every page.
"What is it that these English people worship?" is the question invariably asked by the French who visit English churches and chapels. The fact is, there is nothing to be seen there but whitewashed walls, benches, an organ, and an enormous Bible. Tell them that, in the eyes of the English, a crucifix is a profane object, that would be looked upon with as much horror as a statue of Vishnu, and they will have their doubts whether the name of Christian really ought to be applied to an English person.
In religion, everything is spiritualized in England and America. A crucifix recalls the fact that Christ became man.
The English will have neither crucifix, statue, nor picture in their churches, because they adhere to the Bible, and there they find, among the commandments of God, given on Mount Sinai:
"Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in the heaven. Thou shalt not bow down to them, nor worship them."
The Roman Catholic Church has suppressed this commandment. It is not for me to criticise her; but as she has adopted a certain number of commandments, which she has even translated into verse in order to fix them more easily in the minds of the faithful, she would have perhaps done better to adopt them all. At any rate she has done wisely in interdicting discussion among her followers, and in telling them: