ost to a sense of decency and dignity that
numbered among its children such a man as St. Laurence O'Toole.
Abuses there were, it is true, consequent on long continued war,
though these abuses were increased rather than lessened by the coming
of the Anglo-Normans, and to such an extent that for more than two
centuries there is not a single great name among Irish scholars
except Duns Scotus.

The fame of Duns Scotus was European, and the Subtle Doctor, as he
was called, became the great glory of the Franciscan, as his rival
St. Thomas was the great glory of the Dominican, order. But he left
no successor, and from his death, at the opening of the fourteenth
century, till the seventeenth century the number of Irish scholars or
recognized Irish saints was small. Yet, in the midst of disorders
within, and despite oppression from without, at no time did the love
of learning disappear in Ireland; nor was there ever in the Irish
church either heresy or schism.

The attempted reformation by Henry VIII and his daughter Elizabeth
produced martyrs like O'Hurley and O'Hely; and there were many more
martyrs in the time of the Stuarts, and especially under the short
but sanguinary rule of Cromwell.

Those were the days of the penal laws, when they who clung to the old
religion suffered much. But nothing could shake their faith; neither
the proclamations of Elizabeth and James, the massacres of Cromwell,
nor the ferocious proscriptions of the eighteenth century. The priest
said Mass, though his crime was punishable by death, and the people
heard Mass, though theirs also was a criminal offence; and the
schoolmaster, driven from the school, taught under a sheltering
hedge. The clerical student, denied education at home, crossed the
sea, to be educated at Louvain or Salamanca or Seville, and then,
perhaps loaded with academic honors, he returned home to face poverty
and persecution and even death. The Catholic masses, socially
ostracised, degraded, and impoverished, shut out from every avenue to
ambition or enterprise, deprived of every civil right, knowing
nothing of law except when it oppressed them and nothing of
government except when it struck them down, yet clung to the religion
in which they were born. And when, in the latter half of the
eighteenth century, the tide turned and the first dawn of toleration
appeared on the horizon, it was found that the vast majority of the
people were unchanged, and that, after two centuries of t