uld be said of the Church is the thing we have all
heard said of it. How can we say that the Church wishes to bring us back
into the Dark Ages? The Church was the only thing that ever brought us
out of them.

I added in this second trinity of objections an idle instance taken from
those who feel such people as the Irish to be weakened or made stagnant
by superstition. I only added it because this is a peculiar case of a
statement of fact that turns out to be a statement of falsehood. It is
constantly said of the Irish that they are impractical. But if we
refrain for a moment from looking at what is said about them and look at
what is _done_ about them, we shall see that the Irish are not only
practical, but quite painfully successful. The poverty of their country,
the minority of their members are simply the conditions under which they
were asked to work; but no other group in the British Empire has done so
much with such conditions. The Nationalists were the only minority that
ever succeeded in twisting the whole British Parliament sharply out of
its path. The Irish peasants are the only poor men in these islands who
have forced their masters to disgorge. These people, whom we call
priest-ridden, are the only Britons who will not be squire-ridden. And
when I came to look at the actual Irish character, the case was the
same. Irishmen are best at the specially _hard_ professions--the trades
of iron, the lawyer, and the soldier. In all these cases, therefore, I
came back to the same conclusion: the sceptic was quite right to go by
the facts, only he had not looked at the facts. The sceptic is too
credulous; he believes in newspapers or even in encyclopaedias. Again the
three questions left me with three very antagonistic questions. The
average sceptic wanted to know how I explained the namby-pamby note in
the Gospel, the connection of the creed with mediaeval darkness and the
political impracticability of the Celtic Christians. But I wanted to
ask, and to ask with an earnestness amounting to urgency, "What is this
incomparable energy which appears first in one walking the earth like a
living judgment and this energy which can die with a dying civilisation
and yet force it to a resurrection from the dead; this energy which last
of all can inflame a bankrupt peasantry with so fixed a faith in justice
that they get what they ask, while others go empty away; so that the
most helpless island of the Empire can actually help itse