“Ans. I think that a great many priests teach them that the end justifies the means, and that to tell a lie for mother church is honest.
“Ques. Did you ever hear one preach that?
“Ans. Well, they were so near it—it’s all the same, probably; but they did not use those words.
“Ques. Have you heard them preach?
“Ans. No, sir; they don’t preach much. They will stand a long time, going through a performance, and ring a little bell for a man to rise and kneel down, and then they will rise up again, but they don’t preach much!”
The reader will observe the marked contempt with which those to whom we consign the work are regarded as being really inferior. Why, in the eyes of this exponent of Christian doctrine and republican practice, labor, and those who do it, are quite as disreputable as used to be, in their own region, a class known as poor white trash. Now, from the conditions of this world in which we are placed, there can never, by any possibility, come a time (as there never has hitherto been one) in which it will not be incumbent on two-thirds of earth’s inhabitants to earn their bread in the sweat of their brow. It is God’s decree, man’s destiny, and a large proportion of the one-third who in any age of the world have managed to exempt themselves from the consequence of the fiat of the Omnipotent in respect to labor, have done so by taking advantage of the honesty or simplicity of their fellow-men. They or their ancestors must have converted to their own use more than their share of the soil, the common heritage of the human race and the source of all wealth. There are not wanting at this day those who consider the laws which perpetuated the right to such original seizures unjust, and it is just such despisers of the laborer and appropriators of his work as this reverend gentleman who unwittingly give the greatest occasion for discontent to those who fancy themselves aggrieved by the existing condition of things. We are neither communists nor agrarians, but we see that, even in this happy country, it will be very possible to convert the laboring class into such by subjecting them to the scorn of such men as this witness, causing them to feel that they are regarded as really inferior, and incidentally exciting the envy which the sight of ranches of seventy-six thousand acres of land in the hands of one individual is calculated to produce. Such contempt of the laborer is un-American, to say nothing of its entire lack of Christianity, and to us it seems that no men of any nationality or religion could be so injurious to the real interests of any country as those entertaining it. We do not say that we would trade the Rev. Mr. Blakeslee for a Chinaman, but we hope and believe that there are few Americans of his way of thinking in regard to labor, and trust that soon there will be none of that stock left. The preamble to the Declaration of Independence must have long ceased to be remembered, and Christianity will be in her last throes, ere such views shall obtain; and we have confidence in the permanence of this republic, with an abiding faith that God will be with his church.
We will not bandy words with Mr. Blakeslee as to his opinion that Americans generally regard the Irish as inferior in intelligence and morality. It is one of those lump statements which impulsive or prejudiced men sometimes make about a whole nation in the heat of conversation, but which seldom find their way into sworn testimony. We are American to the manner born, and we not only do not believe the fact, but, so far as both reading and intercourse with our countrymen have enabled us to form an opinion, we should assert the direct contrary. There is, we well know, about all our large cities a class corresponding to the “hoodlums” of San Francisco (and we are sorry to add that they are nearly all Americans) who fancy that their mere accidental birth upon this soil has not only elevated them above all other nationalities, but raised them above the necessity of work. We can lay no stress on the opinions of this class. By all other Americans not influenced by hatred of the church, and, indeed, by many who do not regard her favorably, we have always heard remarked (and statistics will prove) the almost entire immunity of the Irish from the crime of fœticide; their large generosity to their friends and relatives, as proved by the proportionately larger amounts of money yearly transmitted by them to the old country; their unconquerable industry; the chastity of their women, though, by their condition in life, more exposed to temptation than perhaps any other body of females in the world. It is denied by nobody that where a soldier is wanted the Irishman is always on hand, and that he compares very favorably with the soldier of any other nation. As to intelligence, Mr. Blakeslee must surely be poking some mild fun at us under the sanctity of his oath. If he had ever tried to get the advantage of the most illiterate Irishman in conversation, if he had ever heard or read a true account of the result to any one who did so, he would not, for shame’s sake, appear making the wild assertion that the Irishman is deficient in intelligence. The common experience of any local community in the United States will at once brand the statement with its proper stamp, for which three letters are quite sufficient.
But here comes the real gist of Mr. Blakeslee’s charge of immorality and stupidity against the countrymen of Swift and Burke, of Wolfe Tone and O’Connell, of Moore and John of Tuam. “If,” says he, “it were not for Romanism, they would be in course of time a very excellent people.” In other words, if they would cease to be what they are, if they would sit under the ministrations of Rev. Blakeslee and his like, if they would now give up the religion from which centuries of persecution and penal laws have failed to dissever them, they might finally come to have as thorough-paced a contempt for labor and as strong a belief in the inferiority of the laborer as this reverend gentleman himself. “Paddy,” says Mr. Blakeslee, “you are a Papist, you are an idolater, you are very immoral, and you have very little sense. Will you be good enough now to become a Congregationalist?” The Irishman’s blood boils, fire flashes from his eye, the church militant is roused in him, and away runs Rev. Blakeslee, more than ever convinced of the inferiority of the mean Irish and their imperviousness to the charms of Protestantism!
Among the ephemeral sects of the day, depending, as they do, on the temporary whims or idiosyncrasies of the individuals who “run them,” there is apt to arise a fashion in morality, so that it is something not unlike fashion in ladies’ dress—very different this season from what it was the last. Now, these sects are loud and noisy, making up in vehemence for what they lack in numbers, logic, and authority. Just now, and for some years past, the sin which it is the fashion to decry to the neglect of all others is that of drunkenness, which the church has always held to be a great scandal amongst men and a sin against the Almighty. But, while the church has received no new light on the subject, the various sectaries have erected “drinking” into the one typical, the sole crying vice, the incorporation of all the other sins. A man is now practically “a moral man,” provided he does not use liquor; and no other crime, short of murder, is, in the eyes of the Protestant community, so damning as is addictedness to drink. There is no doubt but that, in the early part of this century, liquor was drunk by the Irish to too great an extent. There is just as little doubt that a great change for the better has come over the Irish in this regard, and that the good work is still going on. But the Irish at no time exceeded the Scotch in their consumption of liquor, nor did they ever equal either the Danes or Swedes, both thoroughly Protestant nations. But if you give a man a bad name you may as well hang him; and the same holds good of a nation. It suited the sectarian temperance orators to select the Irish as the “shocking example” among nations, and falsely to attribute the exaggerated drunkenness which they represented as then existing to the influence of the church. Such a cry, once well set going from Exeter Hall and the various Ebenezer chapels, is not easily quelled; and as it is much easier for most men to take their opinions ready made than to frame them for themselves, there does remain on the minds of a large number of people a lurking distrust of the sobriety of the individual Irishman, and a general belief that drunkenness is his peculiar and besetting national vice. The statistics of the quantity of ardent spirits consumed in Ireland since the year 1870, as compared with the quantities used in England, Scotland, or Wales, will convince any one who desires to know the truth; and we are not writing for those who are content to defame a people by the dishonest repetition of a false cry. These tables prove that, man for man, the consumption referred to is in Ireland not so much as in Scotland by over three gallons, in England by nearly two gallons, and in Wales by a little less than in England. So long, however, as Sweden overtops the consumption of the highest of them by the annual amount of two and a half gallons per man, and Catholic Ireland holds the lowest rank as a consumer of ardent spirits, we have no hope that it will “suit the books” of sectarian temperance agitators to call attention to the facts. It is much easier to defame than to do justice, and by this craft many people nowadays are making a livelihood. Yet this false charge of a vice which betrays by no means the blackheartedness involved in many others—which, bad as it is, is by no means so heinous as defrauding the laborer of his hire, swindling the poor of their savings, watering stocks, accepting bribes, etc., etc., and which is not even mentioned in the decalogue—is the only one that could at any time have been charged with a decent show of plausibility against the Irish as a nation, or against the individual Irishmen whom we have in this country. We ourselves must admit that we thought there was some truth in it, till we searched the statistical tables to find out the facts, and we here make to the Irish people the amende honorable for having misjudged them on the strength of the cry of sectarian demagogues.
Going to church can, in the mind of Mr. Blakeslee, mean only one thing—i.e., going to hear a sermon—and so he says that “Catholics can hardly be said to go to church.” Certainly the prime object of a Catholic in going to church is not to listen to a sermon, nor should it be so. It is hardly worth while to attempt to enlighten a man like Mr. Blakeslee, who himself habitually sheds light from both pulpit and press; but if we are to take the knowledge he seems to possess of the Catholic Church as a specimen of the information he diffuses on other points, what rare ideas must not his hearers and readers attain of matters and things in general! Yet he is a man who professes to have made a theological course, which should involve not only the study of the doctrines and practises of his own sect, but also, to some slight extent, of the remaining sects of Protestantism, to say nothing of the church on which two hundred million Christians rest their hopes of salvation. He knows no more of the celebration of the Blessed Eucharist in the Church of Rome than to describe it as “going through a performance and ringing a little bell for a man to rise and kneel down”; and yet the fellow does not hesitate to announce what is the doctrine and what the practice of the church—nay, to hold himself forth as a champion against her tenets, as though he were divinely commissioned to instruct thereon. To see ignorance is at all times unpleasant; blatant ignorance combined with assumption of knowledge is doubly nauseous; but the supereminent degree of loathing is only excited when ignorance or conceit of knowledge elevates itself into the chair of the spiritual guide and denounces what it in no whit understands. Be these thy gods, O Israel? Surely it is not to hear the lucubrations of men of this stamp that any sane people would go to church. We can only wish to the sheep of such a pastor increase of knowledge, decrease of prejudice, and an enlarged ability to tell truth on the part of their shepherd! We repeat that Catholics do not go to church primarily or solely to hear a sermon. But they do go there to join in spirit at the celebration of the divine Sacrifice, to pray to God for grace to assist them through life, to make and strengthen good resolutions, and to obey the command of the church. We all believe that the devout hearing of one Mass is far more valuable than the hearing of all the sermons ever delivered or printed since the sermon on the Mountain of Beatitudes; and we lay no stress whatever on the best formulæ of words ever strung together by the ingenuity even of the most pious and learned of mere men, when compared with the expiatory sacrifice of Christ’s body and blood, instituted by him and celebrated, not merely commemorated, by the priest to whom he has given the power. Should it ever happen—and as the mercy of God is infinite, and his ways past finding out, it is not impossible—that this poor deluded man should be brought to a knowledge of the truth, with what shame and confusion of face would he not read his ignorant and impudent travesty of the worship of God in his church!