“Had the Irish peasants been less chaste,” he says, “they would have been more prosperous. Had that fearful famine which in the present century desolated the land fallen upon a people who thought more of accumulating subsistence than of avoiding sin, multitudes might now be living who perished by literal starvation on the dreary hills of Limerick or Skibbereen.”[11]
There is not in all Europe a more
thoroughly Protestant country than Sweden. For three hundred years its people have been wholly withdrawn from Catholic influences. During all this time Protestantism, upheld by the state, undisturbed by dissent, with the education of the people in the hands of the clergy, and a population almost entirely rural, has had the fairest possible opportunity to show what it is capable of doing to elevate the moral character of a nation. What is the result? In 1838 Laing visited Sweden and made a careful study of the moral and social condition of the people; and he declares that they are at the very bottom of the scale of European morality. In 1836 one person out of every 112—women, infants, sick, all included—had been accused of crime, and one out of every 134 convicted and punished. In 1838 there were born in Stockholm 2,714 children, of whom 1,577 were legitimate and 1,137 illegitimate, leaving a balance of only 440 chaste mothers out of 2,714.
Drunkenness, too, was more common there than in any other country of Europe or of the world. Nearly 40,000,000 gallons of liquor were consumed in 1850 by a population of only 3,000,000, which gives thirteen gallons of intoxicating drink to every man, woman, and child in the kingdom.
If these things could be said of any Catholic nation, the whole Protestant world would stand aghast, nor need other proof of the absolutely diabolical nature of popery. Compare this agricultural and pastoral population with the Catholic Swiss mountaineers—who to this day claim to have descended from a Swedish stock, and whose climate is not greatly different from that of Sweden—and we find that the Catholic Swiss are as moral and sober
as the Protestant Swedes are corrupt and besotted. Or compare them with the Tyrolese, than whom there is no more Catholic and liberty-loving people on earth.
“Honesty may be regarded as a leading feature in the character of the Tyrolese,” says Alison.… “In no part of the world are the domestic or conjugal duties more strictly or faithfully observed, and in none do the parish priests exercise a stricter or more conscientious control over their flocks.… Perhaps the most remarkable feature in the character of the Tyrolese is their uniform piety—a feeling which is nowhere so universally diffused as among their sequestered valleys.… On Sunday the whole people flock to church in their neatest and gayest attire; and so great is the number who thus frequent these places of worship that it is not unfrequent to see the peasants kneeling on the turf in the church-yard where Mass is performed, from being unable to find a place within its walls. Regularly in the evening prayers are read in every family; and the traveller who passes through the villages at the hour of twilight often sees through their latticed windows the young and the old kneeling together round their humble fire, or is warned of his approach to human habitation by hearing their evening hymns stealing through the silence and solitude of the forest.… In one great virtue the peasants in this country (in common, it must be owned, with most Catholic states) are particularly worthy of imitation. The virtue of charity, which is too much overlooked in many Protestant kingdoms, is there practised to the greatest degree and by all classes of people.”[12]
With true Protestant condescension Alison adds: “Debased as their religion is by the absurdities and errors of the Catholic form of worship, and mixed up as it is with innumerable legends and visionary tales, it yet preserves enough of the pure spirit of its divine origin to influence in a great measure the conduct of their private lives.”
Among rural populations more than elsewhere the divine power of the Christian religion is made manifest. To the poor, the frugal, and the single-hearted those heavenly truths which have changed the world, but which were first listened to and received by fishermen and shepherds, appeal with a force and directness which the mere worldling and comfort-lover cannot even realize. In the presence of nature so silent and awful, yet so vocal, everything inclines the heart of man to hearken to the voice of God. Mountains and rivers; the long, withdrawing vales and deep-sounding cataracts; winter’s snows, and spring, over whose heaving bosom the unseen hand weaves the tapestry that mortal fingers never made; summer’s warm breath, and autumn, when the strong year first feels the chill of death, and “tears from the depth of some divine despair rise in the heart and gather to the eyes”—all speak of the higher world which they foreshadow and symbolize. But in the hurry and noise of the city, with its extremes of wealth and poverty, of indulgence and want, of pride and degradation, the pleading voice of religion is not heard at all, or is heard only as a call from the shore is heard by men who are madly hurrying down some rapid stream. It is evident, therefore, that the easiest and surest way of getting at the relative moral influence of the Catholic and Protestant religions is to study their action upon rural populations. We have already established on the best authority the incalculable moral elevation of the Catholic rural populations of Switzerland and the Tyrol over the Protestants of the same class in Sweden. Let us now turn to Great Britain.
Kay, after having given a table