Chapter II: Front Matter (2)

We thus find God preparing Ireland for a future, then hidden to all but Himself. For the day of trial came at last. She was reposing in peace, under the shadow of the Gospel, when the barbaric invasion, that swept before it every vestige of learning and religion in many parts of Europe, reached her shores. Ireland was the only country that rolled back its wave. But she did this at the cost of her life’s blood. For two centuries the Dane trampled her sons under foot. His cruelties yet re-echo in the national traditions. But the Irish race at last arose in its might, and drove the barbarian from its shores. The churches of the country had been pillaged, its monasteries plundered, its institutions of learning destroyed—everything that the sword could smite, or fire consume, had perished; but the Irish race came out of the ordeal preserving its own integrity, and the jewel which it prized above all else—its glorious faith.

Not long after this deliverance, and before Ireland had succeeded in obliterating the traces of Danish cruelty, another invader set his foot on her shores. Availing himself of the discords naturally arising from the disorganized state of society, he succeeded in gaining a foothold. By fanning these discords, he kept possession and gained strength. The rule of the Saxon became thus almost as severe a calamity as had been the oppression of the Dane. To the hatred, which is generally greater in the oppressor than in the oppressed, were added, in time, religious fanaticism and the desire of plunder, which became its associate and assumed its garb. The _mere_ Irishman, who was hated under any circumstances on account of his race, was now hunted in his own country as if he were a wild beast. The property of the Catholic people was confiscated, and most stringent laws were enacted to prevent its renewed acquisitions. Priests, wherever found, were put to death, and the severest penalties were inflicted on those who would harbour any that escaped detection. Extermination by fire and sword was ordered in so many words, and was attempted. When this failed, a system of penal laws was established, which were in full force until lately, and which a Protestant writer of deservedly high repute (Burke) calls a “machine of wise and elaborate contrivance, and as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment, and degradation of a people, and the debasement in them of human nature itself, as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of man”. Upon the partial abandonment of this form of oppression, a system of proselytism was adopted, and is yet in full vigour (for it has become an institution, and the best supported institution in Ireland), which, by bribes to the high and the low, appeals to every base instinct to draw men away from the faith.

Yet neither confiscation of property, nor famine, nor disgrace, nor death in its most hideous forms, could make Ireland waver in that faith which our forefathers received from St. Patrick. There were, of course, from time to time, and there are, a few exceptions. Did not these occur, the Irish must have been more than men. But, as a general rule, the places that could not be procured or retained, except by apostacy, were resigned. The rich allowed their property to be torn from them, and they willingly became poor; the poor bore hunger and all other consequences of wretched poverty; and though every Earthly good was arrayed temptingly before them, they scorned to purchase comfort at the price of apostacy. During the four years from 1846 to 1850, nearly two millions either perished from hunger or its attendant pestilence, or were forced to leave their native land to escape both. In the midst of the dead and the dying, proselytisers showed themselves everywhere, well provided with food and money, and Bibles, and every one of the sufferers felt, and was made to feel, that all his sufferings might have been spared had he been willing to barter his faith for bread. Yet the masses could bear hunger and face pestilence, or fly from their native land; but they would not eat the bread of apostacy. They died, or they fled; but they clung to their faith.

In vain, I think, will history be searched for another example of such vast numbers, generation after generation, calmly, silently facing an unhonoured death, without any support on earth but the approving voice of conscience.

This fidelity can be predicated with truth of the whole Irish race, notwithstanding the numbers of those in Ireland who are not Catholics. For these, besides being a minority of the inhabitants, are but an exotic, planted in Ireland by the sword. They were imported, being already, and because they were, of another faith, for the purpose of supplanting that of the inhabitants. Many of them adopted the faith of the old race, so that the names that indicate their origin are not a certain test of their religion. But so steadily has the old stock adhered to its faith, that an Irish “O”, or “Mac”, or any other old Celtic name, is almost sure to designate a Catholic. Indeed, such names are usually called “Catholic names”. Whenever an exception is found, it is so rare an occurrence that the party is considered a renegade from his race as well as from his religion.

It would, however, be not only unfounded to flatter ourselves that this stability in the faith is the result of anything peculiar in the Irish nature, but it would be, I may say, a blasphemy to assert it. God alone can preserve any one in the paths of truth and virtue; how much more must we attribute to Him the fidelity of a whole race, under the trying circumstances here enumerated?

Such grace may have been given, as many believe, in reward of the readiness and the fulness with which our ancestors first received the faith of the Gospel, and it is hoped that God will to the end grant the same grace of fidelity to their descendants. Our great Apostle is said to have asked this favour from God for the nation which so readily responded to his call. Let us unite our prayers with his, and, like Solomon, ask for our race not riches, nor power, but true wisdom, which is, above all and before all, allegiance to the true faith. This was the prayer, no doubt, which the millions of our martyred ancestors poured out. They themselves sacrificed property and liberty; they gave up everything that man could take away, that they might preserve this precious jewel. They believed that in doing this they were following the dictates of true wisdom, and, in their fondest love for their remotest posterity, they wished and prayed that similar wisdom might be displayed by them. May their prayer be heard to the end.

This prayer has been heard, or at least this grace has been granted, up to the present. When the sons of Ireland on this day return in thought to the homes of their fathers, they may indeed look back upon a land inferior to many in the elements of material greatness. They may behold her castles and rich domains in the possession of the stranger. They may view the masses of their race with scarcely a foothold in the land of their fathers, liable to be ejected from the farm, and driven out on the public highways, and from the highways into the crowded town, and from the hovels of the crowded town into the poorhouse, and even at the poorhouse denied the right of admission. But amidst all the miseries of those who yet dwell in the old land—in spite of the wiles of unscrupulous governments, and heartless and tyrannical landlords, and hypocritical proselytizers—in spite of open violence and covert bribes, their undying attachment to the faith remains unaltered, unshaken—a monument of national virtue more honourable than any which wealth or power could erect, or flattery devise.

But all this is a grace, a great grace of God. It reveals a purpose of Heaven more bountiful in regard to this people than if he had raised them to the highest place in material power amongst the nations of the Earth.

Temporal prosperity, in its various forms, though a favour from God, is not his most precious blessing. He himself selected the way of the Cross. In abjection and suffering he came into the world; he lived in it despised and persecuted, he died amidst excruciating torments. To those whom he loved in a special manner, he says, “Can you drink the chalice which I am to drink, and be baptized with the baptism with which I shall be baptized?” and when they reply, they can, the promise that this shall be fulfilled, his leading them to follow him in the way of the Cross, his calling them to suffer for righteousness, is the best pledge of his greatest love.

This grace he has given to Ireland. Her children have received and accepted the call; they have reaped the reward. Indeed, I have found the opinion entertained by many clergymen of extensive experience, that there is not probably a people on this Earth of whom more, in proportion to their number, leave this world with well grounded hopes of a happy eternity. They do not, it is true, display a boastful assurance that they are about to ascend at once into Heaven. But vast masses serve God with humble fidelity in life, and, at death, acknowledging and sorry for their sins, doing all they can to comply with his requirements, they throw themselves, with resignation to his will, into the arms of his mercy.

Were nothing else apparent in the purposes of God, we might stop here. We would find a great and worthy object for all that Ireland has suffered, and cause to thank the Almighty Ruler for having given her the grace to suffer in union with and for the sake of his Son.

But God’s graces are often given for ulterior purposes; and it may be asked whether the extraordinary preservation of this nation’s faith has not another object in his wise and merciful counsels.

It appears to me that this is now clear in the case of Ireland. But, to understand it properly, we must reflect more closely on her connection with England, and on the condition of this latter country.

In the sixteenth century England abandoned the faith to which she had adhered for a thousand years. Her apostacy, though consummated by degrees, may be said to have become at last complete. The blood of her best sons flowed at Tyburn. The priests that were not of the number were banished, or forced to seek safety in hiding places. The same price was put on the head of a priest as on that of a wolf. The property of Catholics was confiscated, their children were taken from them, and educated in the religion of the establishment. These and analogous measures produced their effect at last. Were it not for these things, a great part of that nation, if not a majority, would be Catholic to-day. Though they desired no share in the plunder of the Church, and had no fancy for the new theories of the Reformers, they were weak enough to yield to a pressure, under which compromise first, and then apostacy, afforded the only means of escaping confiscation and the loss of every social advantage, frequently the only means of escaping death. The old faith stamped, indeed, its mark on the institutions of the kingdom in a manner that could not be blotted out. It left its memorials everywhere throughout the land. The noble universities, the gorgeous cathedrals, and the splendid ruins scattered over the surface of the country, are witnesses of its departed power; but it is itself effectually blotted out from the hearts of the people. Though the most noble kings and princes of the land had delighted in honouring Catholicity, though England had sent her apostles and her saints into many a clime, though her hills and valleys had re-echoed for centuries with the sweet songs of Catholic devotion, her people now know nothing more hateful than the faith under the auspices of which their fathers were civilized. They nickname it “Popery”, and the name expresses that which is to them most hateful.

Yet this England, this Catholic-hating England, has become one of the greatest nations of the Earth in the material order. Her fleets are mirrored in every sea; her banner floats on every continent. It has been truly said that the sound of her drums, calling her soldiers from slumber, goes before and greets the rising sun in its circuit around the globe.

But what is most remarkable, and certainly not without some great purpose in the order of divine Providence, England has become in our day the great hive from which colonies go out to people islands and continents in distant parts of the world; lands which were before vast wastes, tenanted only by the wild beast, or by the savage scarcely less ferocious. Indeed, she is the only nation in our day that seems to have received such a mission.

And is it then to an apostate nation exclusively that God has given the mission to fill up these wastes? Is it a corrupted faith only which is to be borne to these savage nations, and to be planted in those vast regions, which God has made known to civilized man in these latter days? Were this the case, we might tremble, though we should adore it as one of the inscrutable judgments of God, dealing with nations in his _great_ wrath.

But is such the fact? It would indeed be the fact were it not for faithful Ireland. But, united as England is with Ireland, the result is quite otherwise. The very ambition and desire for gain which impel England to extend her power and plant her colonies in the most distant countries of the globe, become the instruments for carrying also the undying faith of Ireland to the regions which England has conquered.

Saul went to seek Samuel, thinking only of finding his father’s asses. God was sending him to be anointed king over his people. England sends her ships all over the world, thinking only of markets for the produce of her forges and her looms. God is sending her that she may spread everywhere the faith of the Irish people.

Under the “Union Jack”, on which the crosses of St. George and St. Andrew are blended, but so blended as to prevent any Christian symbol being recognized (a fit emblem of the effect of the union of jarring sects, each professing to proclaim Christianity, but between them only obscuring and obstructing it)—the Irishman, too, is borne to the distant colony. He goes, probably, before the mast or in the forecastle, but he bears with him the true faith; and when he lands he hastens to raise its symbol. This may be at first over a rude chapel. But it is a signal to other way-farers, and they gather under its shade to offer up the sacred mysteries. As soon as his means permit, even before he can build a good dwelling for himself, he takes care that the house of God be, in every possible degree, worthy of its sacred character. And so the Church creeps on and grows, and regions that sat in darkness are now blessed by the offering of the Adorable Sacrifice and the announcement of the true faith.

The Irishman, generally speaking, did not leave home through ambition, or for conquest. He departed with sorrow from the shade of that hawthorn around which the dearest memories of childhood clustered. He would have remained content with the humble lot of his father had he been allowed to dwell there in peace. But the bailiff came, and, to make wider pastures for sheep and bullocks, his humble cottage was levelled, and he himself sent to wander through the world in search of a home. But in his wanderings he carries his faith with him, and he becomes the means of spreading everywhere the true Church of God.

It is thus that the tempest, which seems but to destroy the flower, catches up its seeds and scatters them far and near, and these seeds produce other flowers as beautiful as that from which they were torn, so that some fair spot of the prairie, when despoiled of its loveliness, but affords the means of covering the vast expanse with new and variegated beauties.

It is thus that the famine, and the pestilence, and the inhuman evictions of Irish landlords, have spread the faith of Christ far and near, and planted it in new colonies, which, when they shall have grown out of their tutelage, will look back to the departed power of England and the undying faith of Ireland as, in the hands of Providence, the combined causes of their greatness and their orthodoxy. Macaulay’s traveller from New Zealand, who will, on some future day, “from a broken arch of London Bridge, take a sketch of the ruins of St. Paul’s”, may be some Irish “O’” or “Mac” on a pilgrimage to the Eternal City, who passes that way—having first landed on the shores from which his ancestors were driven by the “crowbar brigade”, and visited with reverence the hallowed graves under whose humble sod lie the bones of his martyred forefathers.

It is thus that the Catholic faith is being planted in the British colonies of North America; it is thus it is carried to India, and to Australia, and to the islands of the South Sea. Thus are laid the foundations of flourishing churches, which promise, at no distant day, to renew, and even to surpass, the work done by Ireland in the palmiest days of faith, when her sons planted the Cross, and caused Christ to be adored, as he wished to be adored, in the most distant regions of the earth.

The magnitude of this work is not to be measured even by the importance of these transplanted churches at the present moment. The countries to which I have alluded are but in their infancy. We can see on this continent the rapid strides of such infant colonies. Within three quarters of a century this country has advanced in population from three to over thirty millions, and in most other elements of greatness in still grander proportions. If it continue to increase, as it has done regularly from the beginning, at the end of this century, or soon after, it will have a population of over one hundred millions—that is, as great as is now the population of France, and Spain, and Italy, and Great Britain combined. If this be expected in this country in forty years, what will the case be in one or two hundred, in this and so many others similarly situated?

Australia starts with all the advantages of this country, and some peculiar to itself, and is following it with giant strides. It may overtake it before long, if not outstrip it. But the position of Catholicity there is very different from what it was at the commencement, or even at an advanced period, in the United States. The Catholics in Australia occupy a position of practical social equality with others. They will grow with the growth and strengthen with the strength of their adopted country, and have their fair share in its importance.

England herself, from which the Catholic name was thought to have been almost blotted out, has been deeply affected by this exodus of Irish Catholics. In her cities, and towns, and hamlets, the Cross has been raised from the dust. At the side of the ancient monuments which remind England of her apostacy, humble spires rise in every part of the land, and tell that nation that the faith which they thought destroyed still lives, and is ready to admit them again to its wonted blessings. They stand there, and betoken the unity and stability of that faith of which they are the symbols—of that faith which reclaimed the fathers of that people from barbarism, and continued to be the faith of the land for a thousand years, and is yet a faith, and the only faith, in which men of every tongue and every clime are united. The English people see its unity and stability, while they are forced to witness the ever shifting and clashing forms of the religion that was substituted for it. For, in the name of the one Christ and the one Bible, altar is everywhere erected against altar, pulpit thunders against pulpit, the teaching of to-day is contradicted in the same pulpit on the morrow; yet each one proclaims his own device as the plain teaching of Scripture.

This confronting of unity with confusion, of steady adherence to truth with the ever varying shifts of error, of the mild but bright glory of an everlasting Church with the frivolities of the proudest inventions of men, is a grace, and a great grace, which God grants. It is a grace for the use of which that people will give strict account. And oh! may that use be, that they will make it fructify to their salvation. For while we appreciate the blessings granted to ourselves, we have no other feeling in their regard than a wish that they, too, may share in these blessings, and be like unto us in everything “except these chains”.

But whether well used or abused, whether unto “the ruin” or “salvation” of many in that country, this grace is given chiefly through the Irish emigration.

I am not unaware of, nor do I undervalue, the importance of the faithful remnant that has in England steadfastly continued in the faith once delivered to the saints, nor of the accession made to their numbers by the conversion of so many noble souls, to whom God gave light and strength to overcome the many difficulties that would have fain prevented their following that light. But of both we might not inaptly ask, “What are these amongst so many?” They are like those few tints that gild the skies here and there, when the sun’s light has all but departed; or like those stars that pierce at night the cumbered heavens—bright, indeed, and beautiful—but only showing forth more clearly the dark outlines of the heavy and murky clouds that shroud the horizon. They make us feel only more sensibly, and keep fresh in our memory, the loss of the sun that has set.

It is the Irish emigration that has chiefly supplied the multitudes who flock around English altars, that has made churches and schools spring up, that has finally called for the restoration of a numerous hierarchy; and, as if to mark this fact, and point out the great part that Ireland had in restoring Catholic life to England, God has so arranged it that the first head and brightest ornament of that new hierarchy should be the son of Irish emigrants; for such is the great and illustrious Cardinal Wiseman.

And even in these United States, let people say what they please, has not the Irish race held the first place in planting the cross throughout the length and breadth of the land?

In this, and wherever else I speak of the Irish race, I do not, of course, confine myself to those born in Ireland. The work which a race is called to do is to be done by those who now live, and by their children and their children’s children, wherever they happen to be born. Indeed, it would be a contradiction in terms to consider the father and son, wherever born, as belonging to different races. Be it for weal or for woe, be it unto honour or unto shame, the fathers cannot disown the children nor the children the fathers. If it depended on feeling or wishes, I, for one, would be very glad to dissolve connection with any one who insists that he owes nothing to the race that gave him a father or a mother. I would readily leave such a one to his proud claim of owning no paternity but the land on which he vegetates, and I only regret that he will scarcely bring to it much credit or advantage. He who is unwilling to acknowledge the father that begot him, or the mother that gave him suck, is not a prize worth contending for. But whatever we or he may wish, whatever be the results to us or to him, he is flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone. What God has united, neither he nor we can put asunder.

It is not that we should form separate classes or castes, or that we claim other rights or privileges, or have other duties than those of other races; but the one to which each man belongs has been fixed by the Almighty Provider in the very act of giving him being, and he who would fain conceal, or disown, or be ashamed of his race—that is, of the order of Providence to which he owes his existence—could succeed in nothing else but in proving himself unworthy the esteem of men of any race.

I know and gratefully acknowledge the important services rendered to Catholicity in the United States by persons of other races. There was, first of all, the Maryland colony, with whose noble history that of few, if any, of the other colonies can compare. By their justice and humanity in treating with the native tribes, by similar justice and fair dealing with other colonists, of every religion and every race, by their domestic virtues and patriotic course, the men of that colony deserved and received a high place in the esteem of their countrymen and of the world.

But their number is small, too small—indeed. Would that they were more. Were they all put together they would not form one average diocese of the forty-six now existing in this country.

God has sent us many illustrious men from France, and Belgium, and Italy, who have occupied the foremost ranks in the ministry, whose heroic virtues and zealous works are even now as beacon lights to all who labour for God’s glory. But as to the people from these countries, they are not many more than those from the Maryland stock. Germany has sent many of her hardy sons to labour with the steadfastness of their countrymen in building up the walls of the sanctuary. These are, indeed, a most important element, and are destined to become more and more important every day. They may yet exercise a greater influence on the destiny of the Church in this country than the Irish race. But so far, I think, no one will claim that they can be compared with it in numbers, or as to the results hitherto obtained. Of the converts in this country we may say the same thing as of those in England.

Giving all, therefore, what belongs to them—for there is not, nor should there be here, any room for jealousy—I think it will be admitted that it is above all others to the sons of Ireland and to their children that the spread of Catholicity is due in this land. No matter who ministered at the altar (though there, too, the sons of Ireland have had their share), in the body of the church you will find that, in the majority of places, they constitute the bulk, and in many the whole of the congregation. Their hard earned dollars were foremost in supplying means to buy the lot and raise the building from which the Catholic faith is announced. The priest, no matter what his own nationality, was nowhere more confident of finding help and support than among the Irish emigrants or their children. Wherever a railway, or a canal, or a hive of industry invited their sturdy labour, the cross soon sprang up to bear witness to their generosity and their faith.

Even the old Maryland colony, though consisting chiefly of English Catholics, seeking here a freedom of conscience denied them at home, had its Irish element, and that not the least noble in deeds nor the least conspicuous in virtue.

When at the period of the Revolution the noblest men of this land stood together, shoulder to shoulder, and issued that Declaration of Independence to which they pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honours, it was a Catholic of the Irish race who affixed his signature for Maryland. In doing this he pledged an honour as pure, and a life as precious as any of the rest, but he staked a fortune equal to, if not greater than, that of all the others put together. When he signed his name, one standing by said, “There go some millions”. Another remarked, “There are many Carrolls; he will not be known”. He overheard the remark, and to avoid all misconception, wrote down in full, “_Charles Carroll, of Carrollton_”.

Yet this noble scion of the Irish race, for so many years the pride and the ornament of his native state, while fulfilling all the duties of an illustrious citizen, was not ashamed of the race from which he sprang. Instead of selecting amongst French _villes_ or English _parks_ or _towns_ a name for his princely estate, he stamped on it a title with the good old Celtic ring. He called it after a property of one of his Irish ancestors, _Doughoregan Manor_, thereby telling his posterity and his countrymen that if they feel any pride in his name, they must associate him with a race which so many affect to despise.

Let all the sons, and the sons of the sons, of Ireland be, like him, faithful to their duties as citizens, ready to sacrifice their all for their country, whether that all be little, or as great as was his vast wealth; just and respectful and charitable to men of all races and creeds, not anxious either to conceal or obtrude their own, but rather to live worthy of both; determined, in a word, faithfully to discharge all their civil and Christian duties, let them be earnest in elevating the one by greater fidelity to the other. Acting thus, they will imitate Charles Carroll, of Carrollton, and fulfil all I would wish them to do out of fidelity to their country, their religion, and their race.

It was also one of the Maryland stock, but of this same Irish race—another Carroll—who was chosen the first bishop, and the founder of the hierarchy, of the young American Church; as if Providence here too wished to indicate from which race the chief strength of Catholicity was to be derived in this land.

Would it be overstraining matters to say, that a hint of this was also given by Providence in the Irish name of the future metropolitan see of the United States—the first in time, and always to be the first in dignity? The word _Baltimore_ is an Irish word, and, through the founder of the colony, was derived from an Irish hamlet, which from the extreme south-west coast of Ireland, is looking, as it were, over the waters of the Atlantic to this continent for the full realization of its name. The word, in the Irish language, means “the town of the great house”, and it was beyond the Atlantic that Baltimore, in becoming the chief see of a great church, has truly become “the town of the great house”, for the church, or house at the head of which it stands, extends probably over a wider surface than any other church or churches amongst which any one bishop holds pre-eminence, excepting only the church governed by the Vicar of Jesus Christ, to whom is committed the care of _all_ the sheep and lambs of God’s fold, that is, the whole of Christ’s Church. In names, which God has given, or permitted to be given, he has frequently foreshadowed the destinies of individuals and races. Would it be superstitious to suppose that in the Irish name of this American ecclesiastical metropolis—the only important city in this country that has an Irish name—Providence pointed, on the one hand, to its future position in the Christian hierarchy, and on the other to the character of the chief portion of the family of that house or church?

But, be this as it may, it was a scion of the Irish race who was the founder of the new American hierarchy. For some time he held the crozier alone. The whole country was his diocese. But he did not depart until he saw suffragans around him forming a regular hierarchy, that was destined to multiply and, mainly on Irish shoulders, carry, everywhere, the ark that would spread blessings throughout the land.

The work that has thus been commenced is no doubt destined to prosper. It is not without a motive that in this country the lines are drawn, and the foundations laid by Providence for a noble church. Its beginnings (for we may say it is yet in its infancy) bear many of the marks of the process by which the work was effected, It is destined to grow, and may it grow, particularly in the mild beauty of Christian virtue, and win, by love, the homage of all the children of the land, that all may receive through it the graces of Heaven, and even their Earthly prosperity be consolidated and become the means of their acquiring higher blessings.

But whatever be said of the United States, the Irish race is certainly almost alone in the work of diffusing Catholicity in the various other countries in which the English language is spoken.

The sufferings of Ireland were, therefore, the means, and evidently intended by God as the means to preserve her in the faith, to give her its rewards in a high degree; and this preservation of her faith was as evidently intended to make her and her sons instruments in spreading that faith throughout the English-speaking world. This is, therefore, what I claim to be, in the counsels of God, the DESTINY OF THE IRISH RACE.

Did we endeavour to draw this conclusion by far-fetched arguments, we might fear the delusions of fancy, but I think it is plainly written in the facts to which I have alluded, when looked at with faith in an overruling Providence. The diffusion of the true faith enters too closely, and is too primary a thing in the designs of God, to suppose it for a moment to be the work of accident. It is his work first of all. Where it exists it exists because he so willed it. The instruments that effected it must be those which he has chosen and placed to the work with this very view. When, therefore, the results obtained, and those we see in the certain future, and the means by which they are obtained, are a matter of intuition, rather than of reasoning, the conclusion drawn seems to me to have all the force of demonstration, and in no way liable to be considered the product of fancy or of national pride.

This interpretation of the facts of history will, by some, be considered a complicated theory, and therefore unworthy of God. But the simplicity of God’s operations by no means excludes multiplicity and combination of agents in themselves most inadequate or discordant. Our inclination to exclude these, though we imagine the very contrary, is the result of the consciousness of our own weakness, which we would fain attribute to God. _We_ may, indeed, be overwhelmed, or at least embarrassed, by many instruments; and therefore we think it wise to avoid their use. But, it is as easy for God to use and direct many as few, or to produce results by his own immediate action. Nay, though sometimes he performs wonderful works in a moment, he is more often pleased to act through numerous and far-reaching instruments, which, at times, seem even to work in opposition to his designs, and by overruling and directing them, to prove that he is Ruler and Master over all things in action, as well as the Author of their being.

By one word he made the Earth produce “every green herb” and “every fruit-tree yielding fruit according to its kind”; but he is now pleased to make the fertility of the earth, and the various ingredients of the air, and the heat and light of the sun, labour through a whole season to produce the flower, that for a few days wastes its fragrance on the meadow. At one time he sends his angel to strike down in one night myriads of the enemies of his people; at another he is pleased “to hiss for the fly, that is in the uttermost parts of the rivers of Egypt, and for the bee that is in the land of Assyria” (_Is._, vii. 18), that they may come and be the instruments of his vengeance. At one time he rains down bread from Heaven to feed a whole multitude; at another, he sends his angel to take the prophet by the hair of his head from Judea, even unto Babylon, that he may supply food to his servant.

It is not for us to prescribe ways to Providence, but to study His design in the events which we witness, and to bow down and adore his Power, his Wisdom, and his Goodness.

To give power to an apostate and persecuting nation, and the grace of fidelity to another; to use and even to create the material resources of the first as the instrument of his design over the latter, may appear a circuitous course, but it is only another instance of that unity of purpose and multiplicity, variety and apparent incongruity of means, which we witness in almost all his works.

When the people of God were carried away into captivity, “the priests took the fire from the altar, and hid it in a valley where there was a pit without water”. There “they kept it safe”, while the Gentile hosts reigned triumphant in the land. But “when many years had passed”, and the people returned, they sought the fire, but found only “thick water”. This they sprinkled on the new sacrifices that were prepared, and “when the sun shone out, which before was in a cloud, there was a great fire kindled so that all wondered”. (II. _Mach._, i. 19, 22).

An analogous phenomenon, methinks, has been presented in Ireland. That combination of frenzy and irreligion, which men have called “The Reformation”, swept before it almost every vestige of faith from many of the northern countries of Europe, and seemed in a special manner to have enveloped in darkness the islands of the West. Men were like “raging waves of the sea, foaming out their own confusion”, boasting of liberty and light, but treating the faithful with savage cruelty, and showing their own inability to hold fast any positive principles which they proclaimed as truth. The ancient faith of these islands, overwhelmed in the waters of tribulation, seemed hidden in the hearts of the Irish people, saddened by persecution and sufferings of every kind.

But the day has come for pouring forth this water on nations. By their sufferings, the Irish race, driven into many lands, mingles with the progeny of its oppressors. The sun of God’s grace, which seems under a cloud, is now shining forth, and a great fire is enkindled and is spreading its light and its heat far and near. The Church of God is everywhere showing itself again in its pristine beauty. English-speaking nations that were the ramparts of heresy, are beginning again to fall into the ranks of Catholic unity, and, as happened once before, the light of faith that took refuge in the most distant island of the West, is, from that sacred spot, sending forth its beams and gladdening the Church by giving her whole people as her children.

So far we are led, I may say, by the mere logic of facts. Were we to indulge in speculation, but in a speculation quite in conformity with the beneficent designs of God, we might expect still more from these effects of the steadfastness of Ireland.

Notwithstanding all the faults of England, the Catholic heart throughout the world has never lost its interest in that land, once so faithful. Other nations, once as Catholic, have been lost, and they are almost forgotten. The land where the Saviour Himself lived is, indeed, remembered on account of the sacred spots which he trod; but no hopes are entertained for the conversion of its people. The Churches planted by the Apostles have been destroyed. We cherish the memory of the holy confessors and martyrs who adorned them; but despair of their return to the truth is the only feeling in their regard that we can discover in the Catholic world.

But in one way or another the Catholic heart seems never to have despaired of the return of England. Opinions and expectations which are, probably, nothing more than an expression of the intensity of this feeling, are everywhere to be met. They exist among the learned and the high, as well as amongst the humble children of the Church, and are found to be cherished in different lands. England, with her long catalogue of saints, seems to be considered, not as an outcast, on whom the sentence of spiritual death has been executed, but rather as the prodigal, who in a moment of thoughtlessness demanded, what he called his own share, and wandered from his father’s house. The father is looking out, expecting every day to see the wayward one return, and is ever ready to kill the fatted calf, and to call on his friends and neighbours to rejoice and be merry, for “he that was dead is come to life again, and he that was lost is found”.

But, alas! there is much reason to fear that such joy is not to be expected. We know of no instance of a whole nation once fully and deliberately apostatising from the faith ever again returning. The grace of faith, if lost by individuals by formal apostacy, is seldom recovered. It has never yet been recovered by any nation that once enjoyed its full light, and deliberately abandoned it. It is not for us, to be sure, to place bounds to the mercies of God. Who knows but that in these latter ages God may do a work which he never did before? and, now that the Church has encircled the globe, and announced the Gospel to every nation under the sun, God may send her back on another mission more glorious than the first, showing forth his power in giving new life to fallen nations as he did before in converting those who knew not his name. His first work might be compared to that which he performed when he took the clay and breathed into it the breath of life; this, to his raising up the dead already mouldering in the tomb. But he has done both in the physical, and he may do both in the moral order.

Without having recourse, however, to this extraordinary dispensation, the hope of which would be unwarranted by anything we have yet seen, may not the hopes to which I have alluded, and which could scarcely have existed without some influence of the divine Spouse of the Church, be realized in the conversion of the children, rather than in that of the mother? May not the expectations of the Catholic world be realized by a return of English-speaking brethren in the various colonies which the mother country has planted? May _they_ not receive the graces which the latter has cast away, and thus more than compensate the Church for the loss of that one island?

Such results would be no anomaly in the experience of the Church. Several nations first learned Christianity under a heterodox form, and some of the most Catholic to-day are their descendants. Their errors were not their own faults, _as nations_, and God had pity upon them.

We may say the same thing of this, and of several other countries, where great and independent peoples will be found one day as they now are here. This nation has never apostatised from Catholic truth, simply because it never possessed it _as a nation_. At its birth it was already entangled in the meshes of heterodoxy, and it found the Catholic Church in its midst, with few adherents. Yet, at its very birth, it struck off the shackles by which she was bound. Several circumstances, it is true, aided this course of justice. But, who will say that these existed otherwise than by God’s Providence, and for the nation’s benefit, as well as for ours? This course of justice, moreover, was adopted cordially and fully by the founders of the country’s independence, and that at a time when the Church was so treated by few even of those nations on whom she had the best claims. Bigots, it is true, were not wanting, then, or since. But it is a great fact, that this nation, _as a nation_ and as a Government, has always, since its birth, treated God’s Church with justice.

A cup of cold water, given in the name of Christ, shall not be without its reward. Do we exaggerate in hoping that this mode of proceeding towards his Church shall have its reward from her Heavenly Spouse—that it will plead for this nation with the Divine Mercy, as the alms of Cornelius obtained for him the knowledge of Gospel truth and a share in its blessings? The grace of faith, with these blessings, is the greatest which God gives to man, nor is it the less valuable because it is not now appreciated or is even spurned. It is God’s grace that gives a hunger for divine things, as it is by Him that the hungry are filled.

Yes, I do not only desire, and send up the prayer, but I candidly avow the hope, that the light of faith is yet destined to shine brightly here, even amongst those who now look on it with contempt or hostility. In this I am strengthened by the desire for a knowledge of truth, which, notwithstanding the bigotry of many, is so widely spread. I am strengthened by the growth of the Church itself, which bears the marks of a higher purpose on the part of God than the mere preservation of those who came Catholics to our shores. I am strengthened by the very losses which the Church sustains in the falling away of many of her children. For surely God did not permit them to be driven hither by persecution that they might perish. He sent them forth to battle, in doing which, though many may be lost, he will grant victory to his own cause. I am strengthened by the very dangers by which we are surrounded; nor would my hope be shaken even if storms should impend. For it is according to the ways of God to reach his ends amidst contradictions.

Let it not be said that the humble condition or the faults of many of the children of the Church, forbid such a hope as this. God’s ways are not as our ways. It is not by the great or by the mighty that his truth is propagated. Flesh might otherwise glory in His sight, and men might say that, by their wisdom and their efforts was His kingdom established. So far from this being an objection, when other things inspire hope, the hope is strengthened by the humble form in which the Church presents itself. Our hope of its diffusion is better founded when we see it borne to our shores by humble labourers, than if it had come recommended exclusively by proud philosophers, cunning statesmen, or by men loaded with wealth.

What we hope for this nation, we may hope with greater reason for the other nations yet reposing in their infancy, or growing in giant proportions under British rule. I say, with greater reason, because in most of these the foundations of Catholicity are laid even more deeply than they are here. While it would be a great thing for God’s honour and glory, there is nothing to forbid the hope that these may one day be united in the true fold of the everlasting Church. The blood of Ireland and of England will mingle in their veins; and, while they will look back with shame on the apostacy of the sixteenth century, as a disgraceful chapter in the history of their forefathers, they will glory in the recollections of the saints and the heroes of religion who, for a thousand years, adorned both their mother countries. With feelings analogous to those with which we look back to the tyrants of the first centuries and their victims, they will set off the martyr heroes of one portion of their ancestors to the apostacy of the other, and the apostasy itself will be, in their history, but an episode proving how far human nature may stray, while their own conversion will be a standing monument of the power of the cross.

If these hopes be realized, the Irish race and its sufferings will have been the instruments in the hands of God by which the grand result will be accomplished; but whether they be realized or not, the main point which I have endeavoured to dwell upon seems to me to be established beyond doubt—that is, that this race has been preserved by God in the true faith in an extraordinary manner, for the purpose of spreading that faith throughout the English-speaking nations which now exist, or which are coming into being.

As Ireland owes the preservation of her faith to her being destined as the leaven of that mass, it is but assigning to God a purpose worthy of His goodness to say, that England owes her power to her mission to spread that leaven throughout so many vast regions. It will not, I presume, be considered rash to say that God, permitting her to acquire power, proposed to himself some higher object than that other nations should have cheap cotton or woollen fabrics, or that they should learn how to travel forty instead of four or ten miles an hour. In his goodness he designed that power for some purpose worthy of Heaven; and this purpose may be accomplished whether England herself will it or not, or even though she desire the very contrary. I have said before, that most learned and grave writers consider the Roman power to have been intended, in the counsels of God, to prepare a way for the diffusion of the Gospel. The rulers of Rome despised the Gospel and its heralds. Still Rome most probably owed to them her greatness, and but for this mission, she might have remained what she was in the beginning—an obscure village, a place of refuge for the thieves of the surrounding country. England may despise the Irish Catholic. Like Rome, she may look upon the professors of Catholicity as the great plague-spot of her system. Yet, in the designs of God, she most probably is indebted for her power to the part she is made to act in the diffusion of their faith. It is certain, at least, that the highest use of that power she has yet been allowed to make, is the carrying of frieze-coated Papists to distant shores, and the clearing of the forests where they are propagating, and are yet to propagate more extensively, the true faith. If a higher design in her behalf exist in the arrangements of Providence, it is yet to be made known. But for this she might have remained, as the poet described her, “a naked fisher” on her rock, and when she shall have ended her usefulness as an instrument for accomplishing this object, she may return “to her hook”, still musing, perhaps, her senseless “No Popery”, while the churches which she has unwillingly assisted to plant, will be growing up in beauty and praising God in one harmonious voice with the other children of his family throughout the world.