d receiving a sacramental certificate on their
road to Dublin. Others, to save their property from confiscation,
sacrificed their inclinations, often what they held to be their hopes of
salvation, to the exigencies of the situation, and nominally embraced
Protestantism. Old Lady Thomond, for instance, upon being reproached by
some stricter co-religionist for thus imperilling her soul, asked with
quick scorn whether it was not better that one old woman should burn
than that the Thomonds should lose their own. The head of the house
would thus often present himself or herself at the parish church, while
the other members of the family kept to the old faith, and the chaplain,
under the name of the tutor or secretary, celebrated mass in the
harness-room or the servants' hall.

To the credit of Irish Protestants it may be said that, once the first
violence of fanaticism had died out, there was little attempt to enforce
the legal enactments in all their hideous atrocity. According to the
strict letter of the law, no Roman Catholic bishop, archbishop, or other
dignitary; no monk, nun, or member of any religious fraternity, could
set foot in Ireland; and any one who harboured them was liable at the
third offence to confiscation of all his goods. A list of parish priests
was also drawn up and certified, and their names entered, and when these
had died no others were by law allowed to come, any so doing being
liable to the penalties of high treason. As a matter of fact, however,
they came with very little hindrance, and the succession was steadily
kept up from the Continent. The attempt to stamp out a religion by force
proved to be the most absolute of failures, although, as no rule is
without its exception, it must be added that in England, where exactly
the same penal laws were in force, and where the number of Roman
Catholics was at the beginning of the century considerable, they
dwindled by the end of it almost to the point of extinction. In Ireland
the reverse was the case. The number of Roman Catholics, according to
the most trustworthy statistics, increased rather than diminished under
the Penal code, and there were many more conversions from Protestantism
to Catholicism than there were the other way.

This, no doubt, was in great measure due to the neglect with which the
scattered Protestant communities were treated, especially in the south
and west. The number of Protestant clergymen was extremely small, as
many as six,