Romish ascendency in
Ireland. Home Rule in practice will destroy the control of Great
Britain, and, therefore, involves the removal of the bulwark against
Roman Catholic ascendency.

The contention of the Irish Protestants is that neither their will nor
their religious liberties would be safe in the custody of Rome. In an
Irish Parliament civil allegiance to the Holy See would be the test of
membership, and would make every Roman Catholic member a civil servant
of the Vatican. That Parliament would be compelled to carry out the
behests of the Church. The Church is hostile to the liberty of the
Press, to liberty of public speech, to Modernism in science, in
literature, in philosophy; is bound to exact obedience from her own
members and to extirpate heresy and heretics; claims to be above Civil
Law, and the right to enforce Canon Law whenever she is able. There are
simply no limits even of life or property to the range of her
intolerance. This is not an indictment; it is the boast of Rome. She
plumes herself upon being an intolerant because she is an infallible
Church, and her Irish claim, symbolised by the Papal Tiara, is supremacy
over the Church, supremacy over the State, and supremacy over the
invisible world. Unquestioning obedience is her law towards her own
subjects, and intolerance tempered with prudence is her law towards
Protestants. It is a strange hallucination to find that there are
politicians to-day who think that Rome will change her principles at the
bidding of Mr. Redmond, or to please hard-driven politicians, or to make
Rome attractive to a Protestant Empire. Rome claims supremacy, and she
tells us quite candidly what she will do when she gets it.

Here is our difficulty under Home Rule. Irish Protestants see that they
must either refuse to go into an Irish Parliament, or else go into it as
a hopeless minority, and turn it into an arena for the maintenance of
their most elementary rights; in which case the Irish Parliament would
be simply a cockpit of religio-political strife. But it would be a great
mistake to suppose that the religious difficulty is confined to Irish
Protestants. It is a difficulty which would become in time a crushing
burden to Roman Catholics themselves. The yoke of Rome was found too
heavy for Italy, and in a generation or two it would be found too heavy
for Ireland. But for the creation of the Papal ascendency in Ireland,
the responsibility must rest, in the long run, on Great Br