Such results would be no anomaly in the experience of the Church. Several nations first learned Christianity under a heterodox form, and some of the most Catholic to-day are their descendants. Their errors were not their own faults, as nations, and God had pity upon them.
We may say the same thing of this, and of several other countries, where great and independent peoples will be found one day as they now are here. This nation has never apostatised from Catholic truth, simply because it never possessed it as a nation. At its birth it was already entangled in the meshes of heterodoxy, and it found the Catholic Church in its midst, with few adherents. Yet, at its very birth, it struck off the shackles by which she was bound. Several circumstances, it is true, aided this course of justice. But, who will say that these existed otherwise than by God's Providence, and for the nation's benefit, as well as for ours? This course of justice, moreover, was adopted cordially and fully by the founders of the country's independence, and that at a time when the Church was so treated by few even of those nations on whom she had the best claims. Bigots, it is true, were not wanting, then, or since. But it is a great fact, that this nation, as a nation and as a Government, has always, since its birth, treated God's Church with justice.
A cup of cold water, given in the name of Christ, shall not be without its reward. Do we exaggerate in hoping that this mode of proceeding towards his Church shall have its reward from her [pg 083] Heavenly Spouse—that it will plead for this nation with the Divine Mercy, as the alms of Cornelius obtained for him the knowledge of Gospel truth and a share in its blessings? The grace of faith, with these blessings, is the greatest which God gives to man, nor is it the less valuable because it is not now appreciated or is even spurned. It is God's grace that gives a hunger for divine things, as it is by Him that the hungry are filled.
Yes, I do not only desire, and send up the prayer, but I candidly avow the hope, that the light of faith is yet destined to shine brightly here, even amongst those who now look on it with contempt or hostility. In this I am strengthened by the desire for a knowledge of truth, which, notwithstanding the bigotry of many, is so widely spread. I am strengthened by the growth of the Church itself, which bears the marks of a higher purpose on the part of God than the mere preservation of those who came Catholics to our shores. I am strengthened by the very losses which the Church sustains in the falling away of many of her children. For surely God did not permit them to be driven hither by persecution that they might perish. He sent them forth to battle, in doing which, though many may be lost, he will grant victory to his own cause. I am strengthened by the very dangers by which we are surrounded; nor would my hope be shaken even if storms should impend. For it is according to the ways of God to reach his ends amidst contradictions.
Let it not be said that the humble condition or the faults of many of the children of the Church, forbid such a hope as this. God's ways are not as our ways. It is not by the great or by the mighty that his truth is propagated. Flesh might otherwise glory in His sight, and men might say that, by their wisdom and their efforts was His kingdom established. So far from this being an objection, when other things inspire hope, the hope is strengthened by the humble form in which the Church presents itself. Our hope of its diffusion is better founded when we see it borne to our shores by humble labourers, than if it had come recommended exclusively by proud philosophers, cunning statesmen, or by men loaded with wealth.
What we hope for this nation, we may hope with greater reason for the other nations yet reposing in their infancy, or growing in giant proportions under British rule. I say, with greater reason, because in most of these the foundations of Catholicity are laid even more deeply than they are here. While it would be a great thing for God's honour and glory, there is nothing to forbid the hope that these may one day be united in the true fold of the everlasting Church. The blood of Ireland and of England will mingle in their veins; and, while they will look back with shame on the apostacy of the sixteenth century, as a disgraceful chapter [pg 084] in the history of their forefathers, they will glory in the recollections of the saints and the heroes of religion who, for a thousand years, adorned both their mother countries. With feelings analogous to those with which we look back to the tyrants of the first centuries and their victims, they will set off the martyr heroes of one portion of their ancestors to the apostacy of the other, and the apostasy itself will be, in their history, but an episode proving how far human nature may stray, while their own conversion will be a standing monument of the power of the cross.
If these hopes be realized, the Irish race and its sufferings will have been the instruments in the hands of God by which the grand result will be accomplished; but whether they be realized or not, the main point which I have endeavoured to dwell upon seems to me to be established beyond doubt—that is, that this race has been preserved by God in the true faith in an extraordinary manner, for the purpose of spreading that faith throughout the English-speaking nations which now exist, or which are coming into being.
As Ireland owes the preservation of her faith to her being destined as the leaven of that mass, it is but assigning to God a purpose worthy of His goodness to say, that England owes her power to her mission to spread that leaven throughout so many vast regions. It will not, I presume, be considered rash to say that God, permitting her to acquire power, proposed to himself some higher object than that other nations should have cheap cotton or woollen fabrics, or that they should learn how to travel forty instead of four or ten miles an hour. In his goodness he designed that power for some purpose worthy of Heaven; and this purpose may be accomplished whether England herself will it or not, or even though she desire the very contrary. I have said before, that most learned and grave writers consider the Roman power to have been intended, in the counsels of God, to prepare a way for the diffusion of the Gospel. The rulers of Rome despised the Gospel and its heralds. Still Rome most probably owed to them her greatness, and but for this mission, she might have remained what she was in the beginning—an obscure village, a place of refuge for the thieves of the surrounding country. England may despise the Irish Catholic. Like Rome, she may look upon the professors of Catholicity as the great plague-spot of her system. Yet, in the designs of God, she most probably is indebted for her power to the part she is made to act in the diffusion of their faith. It is certain, at least, that the highest use of that power she has yet been allowed to make, is the carrying of frieze-coated Papists to distant shores, and the clearing of the forests where they are propagating, and are yet to propagate more extensively, [pg 085] the true faith. If a higher design in her behalf exist in the arrangements of Providence, it is yet to be made known. But for this she might have remained, as the poet described her, “a naked fisher” on her rock, and when she shall have ended her usefulness as an instrument for accomplishing this object, she may return “to her hook”, still musing, perhaps, her senseless “No Popery”, while the churches which she has unwillingly assisted to plant, will be growing up in beauty and praising God in one harmonious voice with the other children of his family throughout the world.
The value and importance of this great mission cannot be overrated. It is awful to think what would have been the condition of the English-speaking races, in a religious point of view, if Ireland had shared in the English apostacy. Scarcely a Catholic voice would be heard amongst those seventy or eighty millions now using that language, who occupy so large a portion of the Earth, and in another century, according to the ratio of their growth, may become two or four hundred millions, or even more. The very remnant that has continued faithful in England might have followed in the wake of their predecessors, had not the influence of Ireland caused the sword of persecution to be sheathed, and civil intolerance to cease at last, and thus the temptation to be removed which had proved fatal to so many. In that vast empire, or the empires that may rise out of its fragments—for, in more than one place are foundations of empires laid which would grow with giant growth, even though the power of the mother country were paralysed to-morrow—the holy sacrifice would not be offered up, and thus the prophecy not fulfilled, which foretold that a clean oblation would be offered from the rising of the sun to the going down thereof. That union of the Christian family for which the Saviour prayed before he suffered, and which he left as a mark by which men would know his followers, would not be exhibited to the world. Christianity would be confounded with the products of these latter ages of so-called “light”, and be thought, like the appliances of steam and the contrivances of machinery, to owe its power to the genius of the Anglo-Saxon race, instead of deriving it from Him who died on Calvary. For their Christianity, by its very name, would proclaim that the work of Christ had failed, until the press and the “march of light” had come to its aid. Religion, in a word, instead of being a divine institution, would appear and be amongst them but a brilliant work or invention of man, and, therefore, in the supernatural order, but a brilliant delusion, not an institution which the mercy of God transplanted from Heaven, and made to stand, and to grow, and to bless, and produce fruit, in every age and in every form of society.
But, in preserving the faith of the Irish race, God has provided a leaven of truth for these masses. By the side of systems of religion which men have devised, stands the everlasting Church—that Church which, as Macaulay remarked, is the only connecting link between the civilization of the ancient and modern worlds—the Church which taught the name of Christ to every nation that knows him, even to those who afterwards fell from the fullness of truth—the Church which Augustine brought to England, and Patrick to Ireland—the Church that raised the dignity of the poor, and humbled the pride of the high, placing all on the level of the Gospel—the Church that claims no new inventions, but is itself an invention of God, infinitely surpassing all inventions of man, holding out nothing to the nineteenth, which it did not present to the first, to the tenth, and to every other century, but presenting to all the faith and institutions of God, able to save all, to elevate all, to bring all into one fold, that all may be united in one happiness in Heaven.