organized them, it trained them, it kept them true to the Christ
preached by St. Patrick; it built the fortress of the temple, and the
rampart of the school; it kept them a people apart, it kept them
civilized, saved them from inevitable apostasy, and founded a force from
which you collect your revenues for battle with your enemies; a force
which fights England all over the earth night and day, in legislatures,
in literature and journalism, in social and commercial life ... why,
man, you are a fragment, a mere fragment, you and your warriors, of that
great fight which has the world for an audience and the English earths
for its stage."

"When did you evolve this new fallacy?" said Ledwith hoarsely.

"You have all been affected with the spirit of the anti-Catholic
revolution in Europe, whose cry is that the Church is the enemy of
liberty; yours, that it has been no friend to Irish liberty. Take
another look at that cathedral. When you are dead, and many others that
will live longer, that church will deliver its message to the people who
pass: 'I am the child of the Catholic faith and the Irish; the broad
shoulders of America waited for a simple, poor, cast-out people, to dig
me from the earth and shape me into a thing of beauty, a glory of the
new continent; I myself am not new; I am of that race which in Europe
speaks in divine language to you pigmies of the giants that lived in
ancient days; I am a new bond between the old continent and the new,
between the old order and the new; I speak for the faith of the past; I
voice the faith of the hour; the hands that raised me are not unskilled
and untrained; from what I am judge, ye people, of what stuff my
builders are made.' And around the world, in all the capitals, in the
great cities, of the English-speaking peoples, temples of lesser worth
and beauty, are speaking in the same strain."

Honora anxiously watched her father. A new light shone upon him, a new
emotion disturbed him; perhaps that old hardness within was giving way.
Ledwith had the poetic temperament, and the philosopher's power of
generalization. A hint could open a grand horizon before him, and the
cathedral in its solemn beauty was the hint. Of course, he could see it
all, blind as he had been before. The Irish revolution worked fitfully,
and exploded in a night, its achievement measured by the period of a
month; but this temple and its thousand sisters lived on doing their
good work in silence, fighting