heard for more than a mile; his features were frightfully harsh,3 but with large soft grey eyes. He had all the passion for instruction still characteristic of his countrymen, which in that early age showed itself in the desire of copying manuscripts. On old Langharad, the recluse of Ossory, whose bare legs were clothed with a thick covering of white hair, who refused to Columba permission to examine his works, he discharged the irse that his writings might become for ever illegible. From is master Finnian he contrived to steal by night a copy of his most valuable psalter. For this breach of copyright he was prosecuted by Finnian, who had detected him by looking through the keyhole.5 King Diarmid, the founder of the learned sanctuary of Clonmacnoise, was not an unsuitable judge in such a lawsuit. At Tara he pronounced the famous decree, 'To every cow its calf; to every book its booklet.' By this judgment the copy was awarded to the owner of the original manuscript. But Columba refused to restore it. The whole tribe of the O'Donnells took part in the war. The contested copy became the Fighting Psalter'-the palladium of the O'Donnell tribe. It was borne on the breast of their priest into the thick of the battle. It still remains in Dublin, a monument of the Irish Church of that militant age. The fierce battle of Culdrevny was the result; and in the horror excited by the torrents of blood that were shed, Columba was ordered to expiate his crime by crossing the seas to Scotland. In all this the Apostle of Scotland was but the ancestor of the wild, faction-fighting peasant and priest of the present day.8 Attractions But Columba's own career is mixed with traits as touching and as fascinating as the fierce curses with which the hills of Donegal and the rocks of the Hebrides alike reof the Celtic sounded are repulsive. That passionate longing for his native country which finds its vent in stories as true to the Irish nature now as they are beautiful in themselves-that home-sickness for the beloved scenes of Bangor Church. and Derry, that breaks out in the poems which, if not actually his, are at least as characteristic of him as they are of his race -that pathetic record of his death on the rocky shores of Iona with his weeping friends, and his favourite white pony sharing in the human sorrow-belong to the same attaching influence which no race in these dominions except the Irish has been able to exercise over even its proudest conquerors and its bitterest opponents. It is thus no less true that some of the more elevating characteristics of Irish religion must be traced rather to the national Celtic character than to the great Church to which that race owes allegiance. And thus hardly anywhere else in Europe has the Roman hierarchy been enabled to secure, amidst the nations subject to it, such purity of domestic life as is said to be the glory of the squalid cottages of Ireland.9 Hardly anywhere else has such a moral movement pervaded a great Catholic population, and struck down, at least for the moment, its besetting sin, as the Temperance movement under Father Mathew. Nowhere could we find such traits of heroic fidelity and tenderness, combined with such traits of barbaric perfidy and cruelty, as we read in Mr. Trench's 'Realities of Irish Life.' The Celtic character, with all its winning attractiveness, no less than its apparently incorrigible pliability and ferocity, is the field in which all subsequent labourers have to toil. It furnishes that magic charm, that touch of romance, so well described by Matthew Arnold in his 'Lectures on Celtic Litera"ture,' by the side of which all merely English culture seems stale and flat. If there is a grain of historic truth in the legend which represents the Stone of Destiny, on which the English kings are still enthroned, to have come from the Hill of Tara, there is a still deeper poetic truth in the legend which represents the most romantic sanctuary of England, Stonehenge, to have been transported from the plain of Naas in Leinster to the plain of Salisbury to witness the coronation of the ideal, fairy, Celtic prince, the founder of chivalry, the lost, lamented Arthur.2 Hence comes that tangled, many-coloured web, by which the Irish Penelope for ever baffles her political suitors, for ever unweaving by night what she or they seem to have woven by day; which no outward change of church after church, or chief after chief, has ever been able to bring to completion. 9 This is the true Church of the aboriginal people which will Naples alone is said in this respect to rival it. 1 Bishop Doyle (Fitzpatrick, ii. 486) had already begun to denounce the Irish drunkenness. " Giraldus, Dist. ii. 18. remain, the stuff out of which they will be formed, irrespectively of Pope or Orangeman, of Whig or Tory, of statesman or of sectary. It is something apart from Catholicism, apart from Protestantism. Even as late as 1825, a scheme was disIrish Pa- cussed by the Irish Roman Catholic bishops for the triarchate. establishment of an Irish Patriarch,' who should become the real head of the old national Church; a scheme fostered by the most powerful of all the Roman Catholic prelates of that time, Bishop Doyle, partly, it has been conjectured, from his having been familiarised with the idea in Portugal, where he was educated, and where a ‘Patriarchate of Lisbon' has long existed.3 But it also fell in with the national spirit of Ireland, just as the like institution had coincided with the independent spirit of the Portuguese Church, and, before that, of the Venetian. It was a sentiment akin to that which caused the Irish Church, in defiance of the rest of Catholic Christendom, to adhere, during the last century, to the principles of Jansenism. To trace the exact causes of this would require a deeper discussion of the controversy than can be entered upon here. But the fact, which seems undoubted, is not the less instructive, as showing the insulated and insubordinate character of Irish ecclesiastical life. It is a tendency which may again one day revive, and convert the most obedient sons of Rome into her most deadly enemies. The Roman What the Roman hierarchy itself has been and is, in Ireland, so far as it represents the Celtic race, and with the marked exceptions hereafter to be mentioned, is a story which can hardly be told by a stranger. But its main peculiarity has arisen from its identification with the people. This has been its glory and also its bane. Its glory, because under Catholic the terrible penal laws of the last century the clergy Hierarchy. became the natural leaders of the people, and the people the natural protectors of the clergy. Those who had gathered together for their most solemn acts of worship, under dripping rocks, and on wild morasses and in roofless ruins, were drawn together with a closeness of affection and interest, like to that which, for the same reason, drew together the ministers and the flocks of the Scottish Covenanters. The result has been that in no Roman Catholic country in Europe have the priesthood obtained such an ascendency over the people.5 Nowhere is their blessing more eagerly sought, their curses more dreaded. This situation has also been their bane, because it has brought about that dependence on their flocks, both materially and morally, to counteract the evils of which has been the object of almost every eminent statesman of whatever party; because it has engendered in them a necessity of descending to the manners, almost the vices, of the lower classes, a dread of placing themselves in opposition to any popular movement, however unreasonable, that foreign or domestic agitation may set on foot. One portrait, again, for good or evil, may stand for all-the Pope of Ireland at the Bishop beginning of this century-Dr. Doyle, Roman Doyle. Catholic Bishop of Kildare—the original 'Lion of 'the tribe of Judah.' 6 We almost seem to see his 'long unfleshy arms, his pointedly lean shoulders,' his high broad forehead, his long dark eyelashes, his half-closed eye and sly Irish smile. We recognise his commanding character even in the smallest traits :-When you act as a bishop be always in the right, and stand to it.' But what if I am in the wrong?' 98 No matter, be always in the right.' 'Give me something to I do,' he exclaims when he is ill;9 'I don't ask for a Father of 'the Church; but give me something, for the love of God, if it 'is only the Pagan Tacitus.' When asked to remain at his fireside, and spare himself by sending a letter to the synod, 'Pshaw! I might as well send this poker.' Nothing is more triumphant than his leadership of the Roman Catholic Relief movement. Nothing is more praiseworthy than his struggles in defence of national education, and against the Whitefoot and Blackfoot insurgents. Nothing is more tragical than his mixture of despondency and terror at the prospect of coming into collision with the popular agitators, which at last wore him out.2 His tomb in the Roman Catholic cathedral of Carlow is the lasting monument of his fame and of his sorrows. 2. From the Church of the Celts we turn to the Church of the English settlers. The founder of that Church is blished not Henry VIII. or Elizabeth. He sleeps in Christ Church Cathedral, beside Eva, the Irish Helen— But, almost contemporaneously The Esta Church. Strongbow, Earl of Pembroke. 1 3 with the landing of Strongbow at Waterford, another new element had appeared in Ireland, which materially conduced to the first formation of an 'Established Church.' The first 'es'tablisher,' or organiser, of any regular ecclesiastical system in Ireland was Malachi, or Maal-Maadhog O'Margair, of Armagh, Malachi of the friend of St. Bernard, of whom that saint says Armagh. that he was no more affected by the barbarism ' of his nation than fishes by the saltness of the sea.' He first broke the succession of the lay prelates of Armagh, and grasped the episcopal insignia which were in possession of one of the chiefs of the O'Neills. He first, or nearly the first, broke through the practice of his countrymen, by exchanging wooden wattled buildings for stone churches, and was met with the indignant cry, since repeated in many tones, 'We are Scots,1 and 'not Frenchman;' or, as his countrymen in later times would say, 'We are Irishmen, and not Englishmen.' Through him the Cistercian monks were first brought from Clairvaux into Ireland; and the exquisite ruin in the retired vale of Mellifont recails, not only in its architecture, but in its situation, the like remains of the Gallican Cistercians; the more from its contrast with the bleak, bewildered groups of diminutive chapel and tower, and rudely-carved crosses, in the adjacent sanctuary of Monasterboice-the one as certainly native and Irish, as the other is certainly continental and French. French influence. It may be that, even had no English conquest supervened, this French influence would have either created a new Church or materially modified the old one. But, in point of fact, the arrival 5 of the Norman knights from Pembrokeshire was the signal of the decisive intrusion of an alien Church upon the Irish nation. It was not that Ireland had in any way before this made herself independent of the See of Rome, or disconnected herself from Catholic Christianity as then professed by Western Christendom. But the change was hardly less marked than if a new form of religion had been inNorman troduced. Pope Adrian IV., who was the only Pope of English origin, and to whom, by a singular coincidence, it fell to make the present of Ireland to his country Conquest. |