int. Excessive and extravagant church-building in the
heart and at the expense of poor communities is a recent and notorious
example of this misdirected zeal. It has been, I believe, too often
forgotten that the best monument of any clergyman's influence and
earnestness must always be found in the moral character and the
spiritual fibre of his flock, and not in the marbles and mosaics of a
gaudy edifice. And without doubt a good many motives which have but a
remote connection with religion are, unfortunately, at work in the
church-building movement. It may, however, to some extent, be regarded
as an extreme re-action from the penal times, when the hunted _soggarth_
had to celebrate the Mass in cabins and caves on the mountain side--a
re-action the converse of which was witnessed in Protestant England when
Puritanism rose up against Anglicanism in the seventeenth century. This
expenditure, however, has been incurred; and, no one, I take it, would
advocate the demolition of existing religious edifices on the ground
that their erection had been unduly costly! The moral is for the present
and the future, and applies not merely to economy in new buildings, but
also in the decoration of existing churches.[18]

But it is not alone extravagant church building which in a country so
backward as Ireland, shocks the economic sense. The multiplication--in
inverse ratio to a declining population--of costly and elaborate
monastic and conventual institutions, involving what in the aggregate
must be an enormous annual expenditure for maintenance, is difficult to
reconcile with the known conditions of the country. Most of these
institutions, it is true, carry on educational work, often, as in the
case of the Christian Brothers and some colleges and convents, of an
excellent kind. Many of them render great services to the poor, and
especially to the sick poor. But, none the less, it seems to me, their
growth in number and size is anomalous. I cannot believe that so large
an addition to the 'unproductive' classes is economically sound, and I
have no doubt at all that the competition with lay teachers of celibates
'living in community' is excessive and educationally injurious. Strongly
as I hold the importance of religion in education, I personally do not
think that teachers who have renounced the world and withdrawn from
contact with its stress and strain are the best moulders of the
characters of youths who will have to come into direct co