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RELIGIOUS

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prietorship and other reforms; and that the influence of the priest in the legitimate field of faith and morals will perish along with his power in purely secular affairs. The rebound into irreligion of a people such as the Irish would be very serious. It is a vast pity that we have in Ireland no Roman Catholic in a position analogous to that of the Duke of Norfolk in England, one who could represent at Rome the fact-I am sure it is a fact-that a revolt against religion will surely take place if the interference of the hierarchy and the priest in temporal affairs is not checked. In what I have said about sacerdotalism do not misread me as applying it to all bishops and priests. I believe the majority are good though ignorant men, anxious for the welfare of the country, and concerned only for the spiritual and moral condition of their flocks. But the militant temporal bishops and priests dominate the majority, and they have all the strings of the moneybags and of the Press in their hands. If the priests would preach and preach, and keep on preaching (1) love of truth, (2) sense of duty, (3) the necessity of nourishing the body as well as the soul, (4) that stewed tea and white bread are poison to children, (5) the dignity of labour, and (6) cleanliness-Ireland would be a very different country in ten years."

It may be doubted, however, whether the Catholic Church at all desires Ireland to be "a very different country." As devout Catholics, putting the Church before any mundane interest, they have every reason to be satisfied with Ireland and the Irish people, and, I will add, the British Government in Ireland, just as they are. From the point of view of the Church there can hardly be any change that is not a change for the worse; in the eyes of a zealous hierarchy the Ireland of to-day must be very nearly the ideal country. The people dwindle, but the Church thrives; emigration continues, but those who are left behind seem to yield themselves more and more to priestly guidance and authority. Convents and monasteries multiply, Irish missionaries scatter over the world, the wealth and power and property of the Church grow from year to year, and British statesmanship has thoroughly assimilated the maxim that the road to peace lies in governing Ireland with and through the priesthood. Protestant England is, indeed, one of the main bulwarks of the secular power of Irish Catholicism. Every official in the country, from the Lord-Lieutenant to an inspector on the staff of the Board of Works, quickly learns that to get anything done he must have the Church on his side. Every Secretary of State soon becomes aware that the bishops and their subordinates are the most useful friends or the most powerful enemies--and never more powerful than when they appear to be altogether indifferent and in the

'RELIGIOUS

background-of the policies he projects. There is hardly a Board, or Council, or Committee anywhere in Ireland, outside of a corner of Ulster, that is not directly or indirectly swayed by clerical influence. Whatever party is in power in Great Britain the Church acts largely as its intermediary in the government of Ireland, distributes no small proportion of the official patronage, and may always be sure that its wishes and representations will be listened to with the most cordial deference. Its hold over education is such as it hardly possesses in any other land; and in return it has consistently, but not always effectively, interposed a moderating and pacifying influence between the people and their rulers. Its spirit, in Ireland as elsewhere, is and must be essentially conservative; and to-day, strictly in proportion to its growth in wealth and property, it is more conservative than ever. It does not stand, and never has stood, for real Nationalism or real democracy. Individual priests have often and genuinely stood for the former, and in a few rare cases may even have been sufficiently democratic as to contemplate popular control over education. But the hierarchy, while always inflexible on the school question, has never allowed its sympathies with Nationalism to override or interfere with its primal duty of safeguarding Catholic interests.

It would be perhaps too blunt a way of putting it to say that the Church in Ireland is for Home Rule only so long as it is sure of not getting it. But it is at least certain that its attitude towards any Home Rule Bill that stood the slightest chance of becoming law would be highly equivocal. The influence of many scores and hundreds of the younger priests, whose Nationalism is as undoubted as their popularity; the apprehensions aroused by the multiplying bonds between the Irish Nationalist party and the English Labour party, and by the certainty that British legislation will be directed with a constantly increasing decisiveness against property and against clericalism; the extreme probability that an Irish Parliament would be a Tory Parliament and an instinctive upholder of vested interests, and that Ireland under Home Rule would be less exposed to the subversive and rationalising spirit of British politics and British literature-these are factors that would urge the Church to accept and advocate autonomy. But the factors pulling the other way are stronger. A people possessed of self-government, unless all history is a lie, is a difficult team for a Church to drive, and the priesthood under Home Rule could not hope to retain the power it wields at present. Already there are incipient signs of anti-clericalism. The whole Irish-Ireland movement is impregnated with a spirit, and is forming a type of character, that are instinctively, though not

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so far avowedly, hostile to sacerdotal rulership in the secular affairs of life. Agricultural co-operation and technical instruction are likewise developing backbone and self-reliance. The County Councils accept the co-operation of the priests, but no longer follow their lead as automatically as they did. The mass of the people continue to pay their dues, but they are beginning to grumble and inquire. An educated laity is revealing a suspicious interest in educational problems, and in spite of the new University, with its wealth of professors and paucity of lectures and students, Trinity has to-day more Catholic undergraduates on its books than ever. Peasant proprietorship, again, means, not only a new social order, but the inevitable, if tardy, emergence of a new set of ideas, none of which are likely to be favourable to priestly authority. If Ireland had Home Rule no power on earth could prevent these forces-at present faint and dispersed--from combining into a formidable, and in the end a successful, onslaught, first, upon the clerical hold over the schools, and secondly, but long afterwards, upon the congregations. With a Parliament in session on College Green the Church might feel that it possessed a greater security for its property than any that is likely to be forthcoming when Labour holds the balance of British politics and both Liberals and Conservatives are bidding for its support. But it would feel at the same time that the flood-gates had been opened to democratic impulses threatening its secular privileges, and that from being the ally of the British Government its position had shifted to that of an object of contention and attack in the political life of Ireland. It is not merely a desire to gratify the Vatican, which is indifferent to Ireland but enormously interested in England, by not depriving English Catholics of the Parliamentary support of the Nationalist party, that ranges the Church against Home Rule. It is, above all, that in its own mind its temporal and spiritual powers are inseparably linked and that Home Rule must first loosen and then destroy its absolute and deeply cherished control of education. One may, therefore, with some confidence anticipate that if the coming Home Rule Bill proves unsatisfactory to the more ardent Nationalists, if it withholds from the Irish Parliament, for instance, the control of the customs, if its financial provisions are held to be inadequate, if it can be represented, like the Councils Bill of five years ago, as "a sham and an insult to the Irish people," the Church will do nothing to facilitate its passage into law, will perhaps even assume the mantle of outraged patriotism, will more probably look on with tacit encouragement while the Sinn Feiners and the O'Brienites engineer its rejection by the inevitable Convention. But, as I said in the November issue of this Review, the

political power of the Irish hierarchy, while great, is not illimitable; and if Mr. Birrell's Bill were to prove a full and genuine grant of self-government, striking the imagination and capturing the enthusiasm of the masses, the Church could not and would not oppose it, knowing that to do so would merely advertise once more the fact that in the face of a national movement, and when the passions of the people are really aroused, its power to influence or restrain disappears and that nothing is left for it but submission and patience.

On the whole, therefore, it would seem as though the Church had as good reason to be satisfied with itself, and its situation, and Ireland and the Irish people, and the British Government, as any Church these days can hope to have, and that it would be quite content to go on with things as they are. An onlooker, however, can only share this satisfaction after certain deductions. He cannot, for instance, for one moment blind himself to its failure as an instrument of learning. Except in the case of the Christian Brothers, the Catholic Church in Ireland is a blight upon-one might almost say the enemy of a modern and efficient system of education. There are other aspects, too, of its policy and organisation that he is bound to canvass. The Church is the second Irish landlord, and the yearly tribute it receives can be little, if at all, less than the moneys annually paid out by the people in rent and purchase-instalments. What becomes of it all no one knows. The laity are inflexibly excluded from the smallest share of Church administration, and no priest in Ireland renders any account of the sums that pass into his hands. One reads in the papers of an endless flow of bequests into the ecclesiastical exchequer, of the expensiveness of marriage and burial fees, and of the generous proceeds of the Easter and Christmas offerings, and of the half-yearly "stations" at which the priest collects his dues in person. Priests occasionally leave considerable fortunes behind them, and there is a general belief that they live very well. But there is a marked absence of the social and philanthropic and charitable enterprises that engage so much of the time and energy and money of other churches in other lands; and the most palpable fruit of the sums subscribed is to be seen in the towering, ungainly churches that spring up in the midst of hovels. So long as the people retain the power of the purse they have a formidable weapon of compulsion in their hands, and it is, indeed, often puzzling to decide whether the people influence the priests, or the priests the people, the most. But in any event, it is an unhealthy system, inasmuch as it materialises too many of the priesthood, robs the laity of all real responsibility, and constitutes a heavy drain on the economic vitality of the people.

The universal preference in Ireland for dealing only with banks that have Protestant managers, is due to the fear that otherwise the priest might learn the size of each customer's account and increase his demands accordingly; and the Irish trick of looking and living below one's means, while it was fostered by landlordism and misgovernment, is undoubtedly maintained by a dread of priestly exactions. And in other and more vital matters the inquirer into the realities of Irish life finds himself abruptly confronted by the evidences of clerical power. He sees the Hierarchy warring on and suppressing journals that refuse to subordinate to its interests, whatever aspirations they may cherish for a united and regenerated Ireland, and he asks how freedom of thought can exist in such conditions. He hears from manufacturers of the hindrances placed in their way by the Church, with her restrictions and demands, and he is tempted to believe that Ireland is one of the last battlegrounds of the age-long conflict between Catholicism and industrialism. He regards the inordinate drink bill of the Irish people and wonders whither the spirit of Father Mathew has filed. He cross-examines the emigrants at Queenstown, and begins to suspect that the policy of dragooning the people in their homes and diversions, if it has helped to make the Irish the most continent of nations in the single matter of sex, has also done much to blast the innocent pleasures and gaiety of the countryside, and to invest the prospect of escape into life with a new attractiveness; and the census figures of the United States and of England are there to confirm his forebodings that, once free from the special atmosphere of Ireland and released from the confinement of a penitential code, the faith of but too many of the Irish emigrants will prove a fragile barrier against the seductions of freedom and the onsweep of an unaccustomed commercialism. The great and continuous defection from Catholicism of the Irish in America is a menon at least as much explicable by the environment they have left as by that they have entered. He forms, finally, such estimate as he can of the mind and character of the Catholic masses, and finds himself asking whether a people barely emerging from the anthropomorphic phases of belief, penetrated with the listlessness of fatalism, and conspicuously deficient in virility, self-confidence, perseverance, and straightforwardness, is a people that does much credit to the teachings of its Church.

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There are some to whom these defects of the Irish character and these features of the Catholic policy and discipline seem arguments against Home Rule, who forecast a régime of religious intolerance and persecution, and flourish Papal decrees in the affrighted faces of the British electorate. But over nineteen

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