. To good
foreign art, indeed, one could not, within certain limits, object. It
might prove a valuable example and stimulus. But the articles which have
actually been imported, in the impulse to get everything finished as
soon as possible, generally consist of the stock pieces produced in a
spirit of mere commercialism in the workshops of Continental firms which
make it their business to cater for a public who do not know the
difference between good art and bad. Much of the decoration of
ecclesiastical buildings, whether Roman Catholic or Protestant, might
fittingly be postponed until religion in Ireland has got into closer
relation with the native artistic sense and industrial spirit now
beginning to seek creative expression.

[19] The following extract from a statement of the Most Rev. Dr. O'Dea,
the newly elected Bishop of Clonfert, is pertinent:--'There is another
cause also--i.e. in addition to the absence of university education for
Roman Catholic laymen--which has hindered the employment of the laity in
the past. Till very recently, the secondary Catholic schools received no
assistance whatever from the State, and their endowment from private
sources was utterly inadequate to supply suitable remuneration for lay
teachers. It is evident that a celibate clergy _can_ live on a lower
wage than the laity, and they are now charged with having monopolized
the schools, because they chose to work for a minimum allowance rather
than suffer the country to remain without any secondary education
whatever. Two causes, then, operated in the past, and in a large measure
still operate, to exclude the laity from the secondary schools,--first,
these schools were so poverty-stricken that they could not afford to pay
lay teachers at such a rate as would attract them to the teaching
profession, and, next, the Catholic laity as a body were uneducated,
and, therefore, unfit to teach in the schools.'--_Maynooth and the
University Question_, p. 109 (footnote).

[20] See, _inter alia_, an article "Ireland and America," by Rev. Mr.
Shinnors, O.M., in the _Irish Ecclesiastical Record_, February, 1902.
'Has the Church,' asks Father Shinnors, 'increased her membership in the
ratio that the population of the United States has increased? No. There
are many converts, but there are many more apostates. Large numbers
lapse into indifferentism and irreligion. There should be in America
about 20,000,000 Catholics; there are scarcely 10,000,000. Ther