In connection with Dickens' remark about Ireland, we may quote the remarkable statement of Mr. Michael McCarthy, himself a Roman Catholic, in his book, Five Years in Ireland, pp. 65 and 66, where, after describing the welcome of the Belfast Corporation to Lord Cadogan on his first visit, in 1895, to the Protestant North of Ireland, and their glowing statements about the peaceful and prosperous condition of their city and district, he contrasts this happy condition with the unhappy state of the "rest of Ireland," meaning by that the Roman Catholic parts. "In the rest of Ireland there is no social or industrial progress to record. The man who would say of it that it was 'progressing and prospering,' or that 'its work people were fully employed,' or that there existed 'a continued development of its industries,' or that its towns 'had increased in value and population,' would be set down as a madman. It is in this seven-eighths of Ireland that the growing and great organization of the Catholic Church has taken root."
Mr. Gladstone, in an article on "Italy and her Church," in the Church Quarterly Review for October, 1875, says: "Profligacy, corruption and ambition, continued for ages, unitedly and severally, their destructive work upon the country, through the Curia and the papal chair; and in doing it they of course have heavily tainted the faith of which that chair was the guardian." Elsewhere he says, "There has never been any more cunning blade devised against the freedom, the virtue and the happiness of a people than Romanism."
Nathaniel Hawthorne, in his Marble Faun, which, by the way, contains the most charming of all the descriptive writing about Rome, put the case none too strongly when he spoke of being "disgusted with the pretense of holiness and the reality of nastiness, each equally omnipresent" in the city of the popes. The new government has wrought a great change in this respect, and Rome is in many parts of it now quite a clean city.
There, then, are the facts as to the influence of the Roman Catholic Church. I am, of course, very far from saying that there are no good people in that church. As I have already stated, I believe that there are many good people in it, but my own observation has satisfied me that the verdict of history as to the baleful influence of the system is absolutely correct.
"What, then," some one may ask, "do the good people in that church think of all the immoralities and frauds that it has condoned and fostered?" The answer is that the really good people in that church must grieve over them and deplore them just as the good people in other churches do.
P. S.—It is generally believed, and apparently with good reason, that the new Pope, Pius X., is a better man than many of his predecessors, and that he cannot be charged with the immoralities or the ambition and avarice which characterized them. Let us hope that he will have the courage to attempt some real reform in the lives of many of his clergy.
FOOTNOTES:
[17] It was a bad day for the cause of truth when Foxe's Book of Martyrs was allowed to go out of general circulation. When I was a boy it was no uncommon thing to see copies of it in American homes. Now it is rarely seen. A new and corrected edition of it ought to be brought out and given wide circulation. There have been not a few indications this year that our people are forgetting some of the most instructive history of all the past, and those who seem to be most oblivious of it are the editors of some of the secular newspapers.
[18] There are other indications of some improvement in this matter, but an Anglican resident in Italy, quoted by the Review of Reviews as "a painstaking and fair-minded" witness, says, "People are not shocked by clerical immorality, but regard it as natural and inevitable." To an Anglican friend a Roman prelate lamented that a certain cardinal was not elected at the late conclave. But the Anglican replied, "He is a man of conspicuous immorality." "No doubt," was the answer, "but you Americans seem to think there is no virtue but chastity. The Cardinal has not that, but he is an honest man."