Ignorance is esteemed to be the prolific mother of vice. The social condition of the Irish people was made as bad as legislation could make it. Where was the room for morality in such a case? In vainly trying to explain away that most brutal project of law for the mutilation of the Irish priests, Mr. Froude says (vol. i. p. 557): “They (the Lord Lieutenant and Privy Council) did propose, not that all the Catholic clergy in Ireland, as Plowden says, but that unregistered priests and friars coming in from abroad, should be liable to castration”; and he adds in a note:
“Not, certainly, as implying a charge of immorality. Amidst the multitude of accusations which I have seen brought against the Irish priests of the last century, I have never, save in a single instance, encountered a charge of unchastity. Rather the exceptional and signal purity of Irish Catholic women of the lower class, unparalleled probably in the civilized world, and not characteristic of the race, which in the sixteenth century was no less distinguished for licentiousness, must be attributed wholly and entirely to the influence of the Catholic clergy.”
Mr. Froude cannot be wholly generous and honest in a matter of this kind, but what is true in this is sufficient for our purpose without inquiring into what is false. It is plain from his own words that the one thing that saved the Irish people from perdition, body and soul, was their Catholic faith. Yet this is the man who, having thus testified to the rival effects of Catholicity and Protestantism on a people, has the effrontery to tell us in the “Revival of Romanism” that
“If by this [conversions] or any other cause the Catholic Church anywhere recovers her ascendency, she will again exhibit the detestable features which have invariably attended her supremacy. Her rule will once more be found incompatible either with justice or intellectual growth, and our children will be forced to recover by some fresh struggle the ground which our forefathers conquered for us, and which we by our pusillanimity surrendered” (p. 103).
With his own testimony before us we may well ask in amazement, Of which church is he writing? It would seem as though Heaven, which through all ages has looked down upon and permitted martyrdom for the faith, had in this instance called upon, not a tender virgin or a strong youth, not an old man tottering into the grave or an innocent child, to step into the arena and offer up their life and blood for the cause of Christ, but a whole people. And the martyrdom of this people was not for a day or an hour; it was the slow torture of centuries. A legacy of martyrdom was “bequeathed from bleeding sire to son.” Life was hopeless to the Irish people under the Penal Laws; the world a wide prison; the earth a grave. They could only lift their eyes and hearts to heaven and wait patiently for merciful death to come. This was the supreme test of faith to a noble and passionate race, as it was faith’s supremest testimony. No work of the saints, no writings of the fathers, no Heaven-illumined mind ever brought to the aid of faith stronger reason for conviction than this. As words pale before deeds, as the blood of a martyr speaks more loudly to men, and cries more clamorously to heaven, than all that divine philosophy can utter or inspired poet sing, so the attitude of the Irish people, so opposed to all the instincts of their quick and passionate nature, bore the very noblest testimony to the reality of the Christian religion. A world looked down into that dark arena and waited for some sign of faltering in the victim, for some sign of pity in the persecutor. Neither came. The victim refused to die or sacrifice to the gods; the persecutor to relent. The struggle ended at length through the sheer weariness of the latter, and brighter times came because darker could not be devised.
Faith conquered. The Irish people arose from its grave, and at once spread abroad over the world to preach the Gospel and to plant the church which for two centuries it had watered with its blood. The Act of Catholic Emancipation was the first real sign of resurrection, and that was only passed in 1829.
So much for Protestantism having “ceased to be aggressive after the middle of the seventeenth century.” How aggressive are certain Protestant powers to-day all men know.
Another thing happened to Protestantism after the middle of the seventeenth century:
“It no longer produced men conspicuously nobler and better than Romanism,” says Mr. Froude, “and therefore it no longer made converts. As it became established, it adapted itself to the world, laid aside its harshness, confined itself more and more to the enforcement of particular doctrines” (of no doctrines in particular, we should be inclined to say), “and abandoned, at first tacitly and afterward deliberately, the pretence to interfere with private life or practical business.”
In plainer words, Protestantism, having secured its place in this world, left the next world to take care of itself, and left men free to go to the devil or not just as they pleased. Mr. Froude faithfully pictures the result: