1,600 clergy minister, and as the
population of that sect amounts to very little more than half a million
it appears that there is one parson for every 363 parishioners, 800
Presbyterian ministers serve nearly a half million of people in the
proportion of one for every 554 of that communion. 250 Methodist
ministers are sufficient for 62,000 people in the ratio of one for every
248, and the 3,711 Catholic priests, who serve nearly four million of
souls, are in the proportion of one for every 891, while in England the
priests of the same communion amount to one for every 542. These figures
show the measure of truth in the alleged swamping of Ireland with
priests. In proportion to the number of their flocks all the other
denominations have a much larger relative number of clergy in the
country, and until the very much more flagrant drainage due to
emigration has ceased, it is to be hoped that we shall hear a good deal
less about the danger in an increase of celibates in Ireland, a
danger--if it be one--which after all she shares with every other
Catholic country in the world. The alleged extortion of money by the
clergy from a poverty-stricken peasantry is scarcely borne out by the
evidence before the Royal Commission on the Financial Relations, in
which Dr. O'Donnell, Bishop of Raphoe, calculated that the average
contribution to the clergy in the West of Ireland, including
subscriptions for the building and maintenance of churches, is 6s. or
7s. a year per family.

That strange accusation of Sir Horace Plunkett, that "the clergy are
taking the joy--the innocent joy--from the social side of the home
life," was, I think, sufficiently answered by the apposite reply of M.
Paul-Dubois, that this is a strange reproach in the mouth of a
Protestant who has undergone the experience of spending a Sunday in
Belfast. The truth is that attacks on the Irish priesthood came ill from
Englishmen or Anglo-Irishmen who have found in the Catholic Church the
most powerful agent of social peace in the country. That Irishmen have
on this ground any reason to blame the priesthood for lack of patriotism
I as strongly deny, for though one may not think necessarily that God is
on the side of the big battalions, armed resistance, which from the
nature of things must be borne down by sheer force of weight, is as
insensate as it is destructive.

The figure of Father O'Flynn, drawn by the son of a bishop of the
Protestant Church, professes to be as m