fective
expedients. He is naturally a rebel, because the state proclaims
herself his enemy. He naturally thinks it monstrous that any
proprietor of the soil should have it in his power to refuse the
inhabitants a spot of ground on which to celebrate their religious
rites; that men, women, and children should be obliged to walk
five, six, and even ten miles to the nearest place of worship; that
education should be constantly refused, except coupled with open
and systematic proselytism; that terrorism and coercion, the mean
contrivances of bigotry, should be suffered to do their worst,
without the strong hand of government intervening to lighten the
blow, or provide means of protection"--pages 28, 29.

All this is well said: nor is the author less happy in his description
of the tyrannising temper which it fosters on the part of the
Protestants.

"And if the Establishment works ill as regards the Catholic masses,
its effects on the privileged minority seem to us scarcely less
disastrous. It engenders a tone of arrogant, violent, uncharitable
bigotry, which happily is unknown in this country beyond the
precincts of Exeter Hall and the columns of the 'religious'
newspapers. Indeed, we have only to turn to 'Good News from
Ireland', to assure ourselves of the detestable temper in which
these modern Reformers set about the process of evangelisation, and
of the extraordinary hardihood of assertion by which their
ministrations are characterised. The creed of an Irish peasant may
be superstitious--where is the peasant whose creed is anything
else?--but religion in Ireland has at any rate, in the true spirit
of Christianity, found its way to the wretched, the degraded, the
despairing: it has refined, comforted, ennobled those whom
external circumstances seemed expressly designed to crush them into
absolute brutality. The Irish peasant is never the mere animal that
for centuries English legislators tried to make him. He is a
troublesome subject, indeed, and has a code of his own as to the
'wild justice' to which the oppressed may, in the last instance,
resort; but in the domestic virtues, chastity, kindliness,
hospitality, he stands, at least, as well as English or Scotch of
the same condition in life. As regards domestic purity, indeed,
Ireland, by universal con