being brought under the Gospel yoke. Many quack doctors have been trying to heal her wounds, but all their attempts have failed. To remedy her evils is beyond the power of politicians. Let us bring her to the Physician who is able to heal every disease. The Gospel is His panacea, and it is the one thing needful for Ireland. The Gospel only can unite her to England.” Then Mr. Howels told his own Welsh experience as to national feeling. "I remember about the time of the first French Revolution my mind was so impregnated with hatred towards England from reading Welsh history, that I actully harangued my fellowscholars on the propriety of shaking off the galling yoke of the Saxons. My hatred continued till I went to Oxford, and at Oxford the Gospel first reached my heart from the lips of an Englishman. From that time forth I loved Englishmen as warmly as before I hated them. There are hundreds of thousands in Ireland who bear the same rancorous hatred towards the English, whom nothing would better please than to slake their vengeance in the blood of our sons; nothing could subdue this hatred but the Gospel. Nothing but the Gospel can identify the Irish with us, and united to us by that tie, though all Europe, though the world in arms should surround our shores, we might bid them all defiance."

CHAPTER XI.

CATHOLIC AND PROTESTANT CONTRASTS.
CATHOLIC

The Real Root of Ireland's Sorrows-Protestant and Catholic Lands Contrasted-North and South of Ireland-The Remedy for Ireland's Troubles.

N the second volume of the Life of Charles Dickens,

IN

in the account of his residence in Switzerland, we read the following, in a letter to Mr. Forster: "I don't know whether I have mentioned before, that in the valley of the Simplon hard by here, where (at the Bridge of St. Maurice over the Rhone) this Protestant Canton (Vaud) ends and a Catholic Canton begins, you might separate two perfectly distinct and different conditions of humanity, by drawing a line with your stick in the dust on the ground. On the Protestant side, neatness, cheerfulness, industry, education, continued aspiration, at least, after better things. On the Catholic side, dirt, disease, ignorance, squalor, and misery. I have so constantly observed the like of this, since I first came abroad, that I have a sad misgiving that the religion of Ireland lies as deep at the

root of all its sorrows even as English misgovernment and Tory villainy."

"I have a sad misgiving that the religion of Ireland lies at the root of all its sorrows!" If this were said in a speech at Exeter Hall, or by a Protestant zealot, it might be set down to prejudice and bigotry. But it is the conclusion at which a man so "liberal" in religious views as Charles Dickens was led by personal observation. The idea was apparently new to him, or at least the expression of it; as it seems also to be to his biographer, who remarks that "something of the same kind appears in one of Lord Macaulay's later works." The passage to which Mr. Forster alludes is in one of Lord Macaulay's most celebrated essays, originally printed in the Edinburgh as a review of Ranke's "History of the Popes." He is comparing the social condition of the Catholic and Protestant nations of Europe. "The geographical frontier between the two religions has continued to run almost precisely where it ran at the close of the Thirty Years' War, nor has Protestantism given any proof of that expansive power which has been ascribed to

* In another letter, from Geneva, in 1846, describing the opposing parties at the time, Mr. Dickens says, "If I were a Swiss I would be as steady against the Catholic cantons and the propagation of Jesuitism as any radical among them; believing the dissemination of Catholicity to be the most horrible means of political and social degradation left in the world.”

it. But the Protestant boasts, and boasts most justly, that wealth, civilization, and intelligence have increased far more on the northern than on the southern side of the boundary, and that countries so little favoured as Scotland and Prussia are now among the most flourishing and best governed portions of the world; while the marble palaces of Genoa are deserted, while banditti infest the fruitful shores of Campania, while the fertile sea-coast of the Pontifical States is abandoned to buffaloes and wild boars. It cannot be doubted that since the sixteenth century the Protestant nations have made decidedly greater progress than their neighbours. The progress made by those nations in which Protestantism, though not finally successful, yet maintained a long struggle and left permanent traces, has generally been considerable. But when we come to the Catholic land, to the part of Europe in which the first spark of reformation was trodden out as soon as it appeared, and from which proceeded the impulse which drove Protestantism back, we find at best a very slow progress, and on the whole a retrogression. pare Denmark and Portugal. When Luther began to preach, the superiority of the Portuguese was unquestionable. At present, the superiority of the Danes is no less so. Compare Edinburgh and Florence. Edinburgh has owed less to climate, to soil,

Com

and to the fostering care of rulers, than any capital, Protestant or Catholic. In all these respects Florence has been singularly happy. Yet whoever knows what Florence and Edinburgh were in the generation preceding the Reformation, and what they are now, will acknowledge that some great cause has, during the last three centuries, operated to raise one part of the European family and to depress the other. Compare the history of England and that of Spain during the last century. In arms, arts, sciences, Letters, commerce, agriculture, the contrast is most striking. The distinction is not confined to this side the Atlantic. The colonies planted by England in America have immeasurably outgrown in power those planted by Spain; yet we have no reason to believe that at the beginning of the sixteenth century the Castilian was in any respect inferior to the Englishman. Our firm

belief is, that the north owes its great civilization and prosperity chiefly to the moral effect of the Protestant Reformation, and that the decay of the southern. countries is to be mainly ascribed to the great Catholic revival."

The same truth has been illustrated by many writers. "It is religion," says M. de Tocqueville, "that has given form to the Anglo-Saxon communities in America. In the United States, religion is blended with the national customs, and with all those