Meanwhile, the people had assembled in great numbers in the square and in the basilica, awaiting the appearance of His Holiness. It was not known whether he would give his blessing from the outer or the inner balcony of the temple. The traditional place was outside. Consequently, on the appearance of any one at the window of either balcony, there was a precipitous rush of the people in that direction. The noise in the basilica was like the roar of a storm-tossed sea. At last—it was half-past four o’clock—two prelates opened the window of the balcony which looks into the church, and hung over the railing some red bunting. Soon after the anthem Ecce sacerdos magnus was heard, and then a powerful, robust voice, Sit nomen Domini benedictum. It reminded people of another voice which erst rang out benedictions with the clearness of a trumpet from the outer balcony. But the figure which now appeared was tall, spare, yet imposing, and the features, worn and wan with rigid austerities, were lit up by large, brilliant orbs, that beamed gladly on the excited people below. When he had pronounced the trinal blessing in a firm voice, a great, deafening cheer arose, startling the dormant echoes of the vast edifice, and sending them quivering from nave to transept, and thence aloft into the gigantic dome itself. Again and again did the evvivas burst forth from every lip, and high, unmistakably pronounced above them all rang out the Saxon hurrah! Every difference, political and religious, was forgotten in that moment of joy. Jew from Ghetto, deputy from hostile Parliament, officer and private of invading army, dissenting Anglican from Albion, and downright, practical American joined in the shout of Viva il Papa! Viva Leone! His Holiness stood for a moment gazing on the enthusiastic multitude, then motioned with his hands, as if to deprecate any demonstration, and moved away. He did not appear at the outer balcony. We forbear putting any construction on this circumstance. The conclave was opened formally in the evening by the marshal, and the cardinals retired at nightfall to their homes. The new Pontiff moved to his apartments, and the attendants read in the severe lines of thought which had settled on his brow that he wished to remain alone for the night.
Glad words of congratulation are exchanged in all circles throughout the city, and a universal, spontaneous confidence has sprung into existence; for the man who has just blessed the Catholic world as its father is pious, learned, and very severity itself in firmness.
The Church is no longer a widow.
NEW PUBLICATIONS.
New Ireland. By A. M. Sullivan, Member of Parliament for Louth. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co. 1878.
Mr. Sullivan has invented for his country a new name that is pregnant with meaning and significance. At least, the name is new to us, and it represents a great fact. The old Ireland, the land of confiscation and bitter penury, of enforced ignorance and compulsory poverty, of chronic revolution and periodical famine, the exercise-ground of political proscription and religious persecution, is passing away under our eyes. A new Ireland is indeed springing up in its place—by no means a land as yet flowing with milk and honey, and stripped of all that cumbered it and darkened its life before, but a land full of hopeful possibilities for all good in itself and for good to its neighbors and the world at large.
It was less to describe this hopeful and bright land, whose day has not yet come, but whose morning we see dawning in the east, than to set forth in a clear light the stages that led up to it, that, we take it, induced Mr. Sullivan to write his brilliant, most interesting, and valuable book, which, perhaps, no pen but his could have written, or at least written so well, with its series of graphic pictures, its passionate reasoning, flecked with the gayest humor and most mournful pathos. It is in itself an epitome of the Irish character, with a notable improvement. The despairing courage of a “forlorn hope” that marked such writings in the past has yielded here to a resolute and practical purpose, which of all things is the most striking and hopeful sign of a really new Ireland.
Ireland as it stands to-day presents a problem of the deepest interest not only to a thinking Christian man, but also to the student of political history. It, of all nations and peoples, has resolutely refused to follow after the ignis fatuus of the revolutionary spirit of the age. This it has done in the face of the most pressing incentives to join hands with the agents of social and political disorder. From the first day of English rule in Ireland that country has been, perhaps, the worst-governed country in the world; and this ill-government is only beginning at last to cease. No better soil could have been offered as a battle-ground for the agents of evil. Yet, owing chiefly to the essentially conservative and Christian character of the Irish race, informed and strengthened by a true conception and grasp of the religion of Jesus Christ, the Irish people, as a people, has steadfastly refused to achieve right by doing wrong. For this the English government has to thank that religion which it was its avowed and persistent purpose to root out of the Irish heart, in which most wicked and revolting purpose it would certainly have succeeded long ago, were not God more powerful than all the force and machinations of man, inspired and guided by the spirit of evil. Ireland has at last shaken off some of the strongest chains that bound her, a bleeding nation, to her own earth; and she has succeeded in doing this by a persistent adherence to the right. She would not die, because Heaven made her immortal, and because the principle of immortality was grafted deep in her soul by an Almighty hand. She would not live at a gift; she would not accept a false life at a sacrifice of principle. She waited and suffered on. Her patience and her constancy, her virtue and her faith, have overcome all things. A new era opens before her. The question of questions is: What will she do with it?
Mr. Sullivan goes back in his narrative fifty years, and gives us the salient measures and movements that have affected the Irish people during that period. The state of education in Ireland fifty years ago, “O’Connell and Repeal,” “The Ribbon Confederacy,” Father Mathew and the temperance movement, the famine in “the black forty-seven,” the “Young Ireland” movement, agrarian crime and its causes, the land question, the “Tenant League” party, the “Phœnix” conspiracy, the Fenian movement, the Disestablishment of the Irish Church, and the “Home-Rule” movement—these form the chief headings of Mr. Sullivan’s chapters. They are all worthy of study, and must be studied in order to get a right view of the actual state of Ireland—not under the Tudors or the Stuarts or Cromwell, but here and now, within the knowledge of most of us. Much of what Mr. Sullivan has written was already sufficiently well known. It was well, however, to link all of these together, to weave them into a continuous narrative, and show how singularly one played into the other, how necessarily one was a sequel of the other, until the story is laid down at our own doors. We are thus enabled to see how this series of catastrophes, acting, apparently, independently of each other, wrought up secretly to the whole that is before us. The awful shocks that moved the nation, now this way and now that; that tossed it up as by a volcanic eruption; that shattered it and cast it to the ground as though by the convulsion of an earthquake, senseless and bleeding, and bereft of life; the storms that devastated it; the famine that decimated it—all were instruments of Heaven rudely, to all seeming, but surely working to a great end. Or, if the political philosophers prefer it, they were mighty and gigantic social and political forces working through the dark up and into freedom and light. They made Ireland a spectacle to the nations; they scattered her children over the world, bearing their crying wrongs to all lands; they welded together those who were left at home into a hard and compact mass; they shocked and shamed the power that was chiefly answerable for them into a sense of dawning justice. It was in such throes as these that the new Ireland had its birth.
It seems to us that never before was Ireland so well fitted to play a large part in history as it is to-day. It is now, to a great extent, certainly it is in the right way of being, its own master, its own law-giver, its own educator, its own priest. It has grasped the realities of political life and political power. These it has in its hands, and we do not well see how they can be taken from it. This fact ought to smother any smouldering fires of revolution that may be left, and it will smother them effectually, if the English legislature, as seems to us likely, can only rise to the fact that the best cure for discontent is to remove the discontent by removing its cause. We do not say that Ireland will leap at once into full national life, prosperity, and social happiness. That, even in a far from complete state, must be a work of time, and care, and struggle, not alone to the Irish but to all peoples. The Irish, however, have now in their own hands the adequate means of national representation; and this, it seems to us, is the great first step towards a true national life. Whether in after-years that life will have its centre in London or in Dublin seems to us a question hardly worth discussing just now. We like to take hold of actual facts and shape the future out of them. At present Ireland is represented in the English Parliament by a strong, resolute, and able body of Irishmen. These men may not be collectively or individually the ideals of political wisdom and sagacity. They may not have any great leader among them. They may be a little new in their harness yet. But their power, as a united body, is very great and undeniable, and it can be constantly exercised and increased. To expect that in a session or two they are going to wring from the English government repeal of the Union, or total separation, or even one-tenth part of the measures that Ireland needs in order to secure such prosperity as she has, or to advance it, or to do away with crying and cruel evils now existing, is to expect altogether too much. It is like expecting a city to be built in a day because some of the chief artisans and implements and material for the building are already on the ground.