It is thus that the tempest, which seems but to destroy the flower, catches up its seeds and scatters them far and near, and these seeds produce other flowers as beautiful as that from which they were torn, so that some fair spot of the prairie, when despoiled of its loveliness, but affords the means of covering the vast expanse with new and variegated beauties.
It is thus that the famine, and the pestilence, and the inhuman evictions of Irish landlords, have spread the faith of Christ far and near, and planted it in new colonies, which, when they shall have grown out of their tutelage, will look back to the departed power of England and the undying faith of Ireland as, in the hands of Providence, the combined causes of their greatness and their orthodoxy. Macaulay's traveller from New Zealand, who will, on some future day, “from a broken arch of London Bridge, take a sketch of the ruins of St. Paul's”, may be some Irish “O'” or “Mac” on a pilgrimage to the Eternal City, who passes that way—having first landed on the shores from which his ancestors were driven by the “crowbar brigade”, and visited with reverence the hallowed graves under whose humble sod lie the bones of his martyred forefathers.
It is thus that the Catholic faith is being planted in the British colonies of North America; it is thus it is carried to India, and to Australia, and to the islands of the South Sea. Thus are laid the foundations of flourishing churches, which promise, at no distant day, to renew, and even to surpass, the work done by Ireland in the palmiest days of faith, when her sons planted the Cross, and caused Christ to be adored, as he wished to be adored, in the most distant regions of the earth.
The magnitude of this work is not to be measured even by the importance of these transplanted churches at the present moment. The countries to which I have alluded are but in their infancy. We can see on this continent the rapid strides of such infant colonies. Within three quarters of a century this country has advanced in population from three to over thirty millions, and in most other elements of greatness in still grander proportions. If it continue to increase, as it has done regularly from [pg 074] the beginning, at the end of this century, or soon after, it will have a population of over one hundred millions—that is, as great as is now the population of France, and Spain, and Italy, and Great Britain combined. If this be expected in this country in forty years, what will the case be in one or two hundred, in this and so many others similarly situated?
Australia starts with all the advantages of this country, and some peculiar to itself, and is following it with giant strides. It may overtake it before long, if not outstrip it. But the position of Catholicity there is very different from what it was at the commencement, or even at an advanced period, in the United States. The Catholics in Australia occupy a position of practical social equality with others. They will grow with the growth and strengthen with the strength of their adopted country, and have their fair share in its importance.
England herself, from which the Catholic name was thought to have been almost blotted out, has been deeply affected by this exodus of Irish Catholics. In her cities, and towns, and hamlets, the Cross has been raised from the dust. At the side of the ancient monuments which remind England of her apostacy, humble spires rise in every part of the land, and tell that nation that the faith which they thought destroyed still lives, and is ready to admit them again to its wonted blessings. They stand there, and betoken the unity and stability of that faith of which they are the symbols—of that faith which reclaimed the fathers of that people from barbarism, and continued to be the faith of the land for a thousand years, and is yet a faith, and the only faith, in which men of every tongue and every clime are united. The English people see its unity and stability, while they are forced to witness the ever shifting and clashing forms of the religion that was substituted for it. For, in the name of the one Christ and the one Bible, altar is everywhere erected against altar, pulpit thunders against pulpit, the teaching of to-day is contradicted in the same pulpit on the morrow; yet each one proclaims his own device as the plain teaching of Scripture.
This confronting of unity with confusion, of steady adherence to truth with the ever varying shifts of error, of the mild but bright glory of an everlasting Church with the frivolities of the proudest inventions of men, is a grace, and a great grace, which God grants. It is a grace for the use of which that people will give strict account. And oh! may that use be, that they will make it fructify to their salvation. For while we appreciate the blessings granted to ourselves, we have no other feeling in their regard than a wish that they, too, may share in these blessings, and be like unto us in everything “except these chains”.
But whether well used or abused, whether unto “the ruin” or [pg 075] “salvation” of many in that country, this grace is given chiefly through the Irish emigration.
I am not unaware of, nor do I undervalue, the importance of the faithful remnant that has in England steadfastly continued in the faith once delivered to the saints, nor of the accession made to their numbers by the conversion of so many noble souls, to whom God gave light and strength to overcome the many difficulties that would have fain prevented their following that light. But of both we might not inaptly ask, “What are these amongst so many?” They are like those few tints that gild the skies here and there, when the sun's light has all but departed; or like those stars that pierce at night the cumbered heavens—bright, indeed, and beautiful—but only showing forth more clearly the dark outlines of the heavy and murky clouds that shroud the horizon. They make us feel only more sensibly, and keep fresh in our memory, the loss of the sun that has set.
It is the Irish emigration that has chiefly supplied the multitudes who flock around English altars, that has made churches and schools spring up, that has finally called for the restoration of a numerous hierarchy; and, as if to mark this fact, and point out the great part that Ireland had in restoring Catholic life to England, God has so arranged it that the first head and brightest ornament of that new hierarchy should be the son of Irish emigrants; for such is the great and illustrious Cardinal Wiseman.