deep
impression on my mind. After attending a meeting of farmers in a very
backward district in the extreme west of Mayo, I arrived one winter's
evening at the Roman Catholic priest's house. Before the meeting I had
been promised a cup of tea, which, after a long, cold drive, was more
than acceptable. When I presented myself at the priest's house, what was
my astonishment at finding the Protestant clergyman presiding over a
steaming urn and a plate of home-made cakes, having been requested to do
the honours by his fellow-minister, who had been called away to a sick
bed. A cycle of homilies on the virtue of tolerance could add nothing to
the simple lesson which these two clergymen gave to the adherents of
both their creeds. I felt as I went on my way that night that I had had
a glimpse into the kind of future for Ireland towards which my
fellow-workers are striving.

It is, however, with the religion of the majority of the Irish people
and with its influence upon the industrial character of its adherents
that I am chiefly concerned. Roman Catholicism strikes an outsider as
being in some of its tendencies non-economic, if not actually
anti-economic. These tendencies have, of course, much fuller play when
they act on a people whose education has (through no fault of their own)
been retarded or stunted. The fact is not in dispute, but the difficulty
arises when we come to apportion the blame between ignorance on the part
of the people and a somewhat one-sided religious zeal on the part of
large numbers of their clergy. I do not seek to do so with any precision
here. I am simply adverting to what has appeared to me, in the course of
my experience in Ireland, to be a defect in the industrial character of
Roman Catholics which, however caused, seems to me to have been
intensified by their religion. The reliance of that religion on
authority, its repression of individuality, and its complete shifting of
what I may call the moral centre of gravity to a future existence--to
mention no other characteristics--appear to me calculated, unless
supplemented by other influences, to check the growth of the qualities
of initiative and self-reliance, especially amongst a people whose lack
of education unfits them for resisting the influence of what may present
itself to such minds as a kind of fatalism with resignation as its
paramount virtue.

It is true that one cannot expect of any church or religion, as a
condition of its acceptance,