ven to the popular cause in
Ireland by a considerable section of the higher clergy.

To Protestant Nationalists I would commend that expression of opinion of
the greatest of their number--Edmund Burke--who, speaking of the
religion of the mass of his countrymen, declared that in his opinion "it
ought to be cherished as a good, though not the most preferable good if
a choice was now to be made, and not tolerated as an inevitable evil. It
is extraordinary that there should still be need to emphasise the fact
that the Catholicism of Ireland is inevitable and that there is no hope
of making the country abjure it--but this is the case."

Half a century ago, when proselytism was in full swing in a country
weakened by famine, Protestants were sanguine on this point. Sir
Francis Head, in a volume which bears the very naive title of "A
Fortnight in Ireland," declared that within a couple of years there can
exist no doubt whatever that the Protestant population of Ireland will
form the majority, and Rev. A.R. Dallas, one of the leading
proselytisers in the country, borrowing a Biblical metaphor, announced
that "the walls of Irish Romanism had been circumvented again and
again, and at the trumpet blast that sounded in the wailings of the
famine they may be said to have fallen flat. This is the point of hope
in Ireland's present crisis."

With the maintenance by the Church of her hold over the people
governments have recognised the influence of the priests, and have tried
to turn it to their own use by methods into which they have been afraid
to let the light of day; and for the rest, with every trouble and every
discontent, has arisen the parrot cry of _cherchez le pretre_.
Conscientious objections to certain forms of education are respected in
England when they are emphasised by passive resistance. How many times
have the same objections in Ireland been put down to clerical
obscurantism? The priest in politics we have been told _ad nauseam_ is
the curse of Ireland, but clerical interference is not unknown in
English villages, and one has heard of dissenting ministers whose hands
are not quite unstained by the defilement of political partisanship. It
is not the habit that makes the monk, and it is possible for
sacerdotalism to be as rampant among the most rigid of dissenters as in
Church itself. An example of the falsehoods which have at intervals to
be nailed to the counter was the one which declared that under the
compulsion