"'Those opposed eyes,
Which like the meteors of a troubled heaven,
All of one nature, of one substance bred,
Did lately meet in th' intestine shock,
Shall now, in mutual well-beseeming ranks,
March all one way.'"
THE DUTY AND VALUE OF PATRIOTISM
John Ireland, Archbishop of Saint Paul, was born at Burnchurch, County Kilkenny, Ireland, September 11, 1838. As a boy he came to Saint Paul, Minnesota, in 1849, and there obtained his secular education at the Cathedral School. He studied theology in France, in the seminaries of Meximieux and Hyeres. During the Civil War he was chaplain of the Fifth Minnesota Regiment. In 1875 he was consecrated bishop of Saint Paul. In 1869 he founded the first total-abstinence society in Minnesota and has lectured much on temperance in the United States and Great Britain. The following extracts, used by special permission, are from his lecture delivered before the New York Commandery of the Loyal Legion, New York, April 4, 1894.
Patriotism is love of country, and loyalty to its life and weal—love tender and strong, tender as the love of son for mother, strong as the pillars of death; loyalty generous and disinterested, shrinking from no sacrifice, seeking no reward save country's honor and country's triumph.
Patriotism! There is magic in the word. It is bliss to repeat it. Through ages the human race burnt the incense of admiration and reverence at the shrines of patriotism. The most beautiful pages of history are those which recount its deeds. Fireside tales, the outpourings of the memories of peoples, borrow from it their warmest glow. Poets are sweetest when they reecho its whisperings; orators are most potent when they thrill its chords to music.
Pagan nations were wrong when they made gods of their noblest patriots. But the error was the excess of a great truth, that heaven unites with earth in approving and blessing patriotism; that patriotism is one of earth's highest virtues, worthy to have come down from the atmosphere of the skies.
The exalted patriotism of the exiled Hebrew exhaled itself in a canticle of religion which Jehovah inspired, and which has been transmitted, as the inheritance of God's people to the Christian Church:
"Upon the rivers of Babylon there we sat and wept, when we remembered Sion.—If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand be forgotten. Let my tongue cleave to my jaws, if I do not remember thee, if I do not make Jerusalem the beginning of my joy."