England was secretly
guided by worldly motives, while ostensibly professing religious ones,
was his concern and not the pope's: whose business was to weigh the
merits of the case, not by reasons imputed, but by those propounded;
which, if he found them, from the religious point of view of his
times, sound, he was justified in accepting.

Now, there is the best evidence in cotemporary writings, especially in
those of Giraldus and St. Bernard, that Ireland was, as above said,
given up in the 12th century, to the worst demoralization in Church
and State, that a country, not wholly pagan or savage, could be.
Giraldus, who travelled in Ireland in the suite of King John, and
attentively observed its condition, expresses in his work [3] written
on the subject, his surprise that a nation, in which the Christian
faith had been planted so far back as the days of St. Patrick, and had
gone on increasing more or less ever since, should yet in his age be
so ignorant in the very rudiments of religion. "A nation" as he
proceeds to describe it, "filthy in the extreme, buried in vice, and
of all nations the most ignorant of the rudiments of the faith." In
support of this severe censure, he accuses the Irish of "despising
matrimony, of being addicted to incest, of refusing to pay tithes, and
of totally neglecting attendance at Church." In another place he
writes, that the people in many districts continued still to be
pagans, through the indifference of the clergy. St. Bernard draws a
picture not less darkly shaded. In his life of St. Malachy, [4]
adverting to the state of the Irish church on the promotion of that
saint to the episcopacy, he describes how the new bishop soon found
out that he had to do with "brutes and not with men; how that nowhere
he had met with such barbarism of every sort; nowhere found a race so
perverse in their morals, so savagely opposed to religious rites, so
impious towards the faith, so headstrong against discipline, so
barbarous towards the laws, so filthy in their habits of life; a
people, Christians in name, but heathens in practice, who paid no
tithes, who contracted no lawful marriages, who never confessed their
sins, who had hardly any one among them to ask or give a penance, in
whose churches neither the voice of the preacher nor the chorus of the
chanters was ever heard."

The political was in complete harmony with the religious state of the
country. Parcelled out among petty kings and chiefs, who s