Death of the Pope.—The decease of Pope Leo XIII. took place on Monday, July 29th. His disease reached a fatal stage three weeks previous, and much cheap sentiment was indulged in by the editors and correspondents of Protestant papers, as well as by King Edward and the German Emperor, regarding the venerable and interesting figure who was gallantly fighting death in the Vatican. The Popes from first to last have been a very mixed lot, some of them being criminals of the biggest size. We suppose the late Pope was a favourable character in respect of intellect and morality. Testimonials, however, to his character as a man are quite frivolous and irrelevant. In his official capacity he was the
main pillar of an old, incurable system of superstition and error. His titles and assumptions were a life-long blasphemy; and the curse of centuries of bloodshed and cruelty was resting on his head. The Papacy is becoming strangely transfigured in the eyes of the leading men of the twentieth century, and either they or the founders of the Protestant world have been under a remarkable hallucination.
An Outspoken Irishman.—Mr. F. Hugh O’Donnell, the outspoken Roman Catholic author of the “Ruin of Education in Ireland,” has written a letter to the London Morning Post of June 22 on the subject of the depopulation of Ireland. His contention is that the new Land Bill with its loan of £150,000,000 will do nothing to remove the deep causes of Ireland’s decay, but will only be a further endowment of the hierarchy. That the priests and the Jesuits are the chronic ruination of Ireland and a standing menace to the stability of the King’s Government is a song that has been rehearsed in the ears of many British Governments, but for the most part quite in vain. The treacherous pro-Romish policy of the present Government has been a grief and offence to all patriotic minds. As if to vindicate the outraged Protestant sentiments of the nation, the providence of God has in these last days raised up in the Romish Church itself witnesses who say the identical things that Protestant lecturers have been expounding these many years, but with added force, fulness and point. Mr. O’Donnell’s letter to the Morning Post is very worthy the attention of Prime Ministers and politicians. He assigns five causes to explain why the Irish are deserting their native soil in such numbers—Gladstone land courts, unpaid family labour, clerical tyranny, improved education, clerical extortion. The letter is much too long for insertion, but we here subjoin the closing passage:—
“It would be an error to imagine that it is merely the influence and domination of the cleric, however intolerable they become to every mind above the herd, which makes life so hard for the Irish layman and laywoman. Even the poor servile herd are none the better off, in innumerable cases, for all their unresisting servility.
Unobservant Protestant writers are peculiarly prone to go into rupture over what are called convent industries and the like. ‘Here is an oasis in the desert,’ they cry, ‘thanks to the good religious.’ But all the lay trades and occupations which are undersold and extinguished by the ‘cheap labour’ at the disposal of the religious manufacturers have a different opinion, and the poor workers themselves, the profit on whose skill and toil raise the convent architecture and swell the treasury of the parent house, perhaps as far away as Rome—all these helpless ones know that there is no future but drudgery, without hope of advancement, without old-age provision, without promotion, without the possibility of saving or advance of any sort. The view of that hopeless labour and those trades extinguished by the convent competition
does not make Ireland a more inviting place for all who can hope to live elsewhere. The French have risen against these armies of manufacturing monks and nuns who swarmed by the hundred thousand. The Irish are ruled by non-Catholics, and are kept under the yoke accordingly. They cannot rise, but they emigrate.
If clerical competition hits the poorest poor, clerical begging and extortion are the terror of all who have made a little money. To support the Church, and to support it well, is the just pride of every Catholic. But these interminable extortions, on every pretext, or without pretext at all, the perpetual collections, the meanly avaricious fees for almost every sacrament, the battenning on the grief of the bereaved, the extortion of the last shilling before the priest will accord the decencies of the burial rite—these are grievances which are fiercely denounced wherever half a-dozen laymen meet together, but which are not mentioned by intending members of Parliament. And then there is the terror of every family that, when the head of the house lies on death’s border, the solemn adjurations of the ghostly comforter, the solemn advice of the spiritual adviser in the last awful hour of tottering reason, may whisk away from child and relative a larger and a larger portion of the family patrimony.
There is no account ever rendered for the enormous sums annually extorted from the Irish laity, but they form an appreciable aggravation of the struggle for existence. Whoever hears of public benefaction among the Catholic Irish? What funds for public education, what endowments of poor scholars, what grants for free libraries, what opening of social institutions can ever be set to the credit of the wealthy Irishman in his dying hour? There is an omnipotent adviser at the swooning creature’s pillow, and the service of man is never allowed to thwart the clutch of the hidden hand. Go into any Irish town. Question the local gossips on the rich people who died for the last score of years. ‘And what did they do for the old town?’ ‘They built three convents, and they’ll soon finish the fine houses for the clergy. And they gave a power o’ money to the bishop.’ But not a penny for the promotion of lay industry, for the uplifting of those bright young lads and lasses who might be the wealth of Ireland, but who must emigrate if they are ever to be anything. ‘The Catholic clergy can find money for everything except education,’ said, at Belfast the other day, the Catholic Commissioner of National Education. And what a sweet share they hope to milk of the £150,000,000 which the British taxpayer is asked to invest in buying peasant properties for the hereditary ‘milch cows’ of their reverences!
This is but a sketch of the realities of the Irish situation. No Protestant statesman seems to have any idea of what is the true scope and working of the modern organisation of Catholic Clericalism in Ireland. Assuredly the new land Bill, only accepted in thanklessness and with the design of further revolution, does not
touch a single one of the actual causes of Irish depopulation. On the contrary, it aggravates them by diminishing and discouraging the employing class, by exiling every thinking class, by enriching the priest-ridden class, and by handing over the country to the dominant priest and his peasant slave. I deny that Irish Clericalism is the necessary outgrowth of the Catholic Church. It has been created, encouraged, and maintained by non-Catholic calculations of political expediency, destructive as shortsighted for Ireland and England both.”—Yours, &c., F. HUGH O’DONNELL.
Anglican Bigotry.—From the British Weekly we cull the following:—A respected Baptist minister in London has told of a poor widow, a member of his church, who sent her son to the nearest school, which happened to be Anglican. The clergyman called and pressed for the baptism of the child. The mother replied that his father had been a Baptist, and she did not wish the boy to be baptised till he made a profession of his faith. The clergyman looked at a photograph on the wall and said, “Is this your husband?” Receiving a reply in the affirmative, he went on “Then he is in hell, and the child will follow him there.” The point of this is the priestly bigot’s tenet that salvation is only possible through the sacraments administered by a Churchman. It is a sample of delirious bigotry, and logically lands every Dissenter within the jurisdiction of the Inquisition.
Another Dupe.—Rev. Henry Graham, Established Church minister of Avondale, Lanarkshire, and a member of the Scottish Church Society, has gone over to Rome. It is about a year ago since the Rev. John Charleson, Established Church minister of Thornliebank, led the way over the fatal precipice, and now the fashion has set in, the folly may be epidemical. We have no new thing to say in regard to such doings. Professing Protestants, especially if they be clergymen, who lapse so foully as this, declare plainly that they have never known the secret of the Lord. “The man that wandereth out of the way of understanding shall remain in the congregation of the dead.”
To Popularise Atheism.—The Secular Society are presently conducting a forward movement on the lines of cheap bookselling. Sixpenny reprints of the masterpieces of unbelief are being put on the market. The free-thinking holidaymaker can now vary his sixpenny novel with Haekel’s “Riddle of the Universe,” Clodd’s “Pioneers of Evolution,” Matthew Arnold’s “Literature and Dogma,” and several other perverted efforts of cultured unbelief. This is another sign of the times.