A charge of another kind has of late been often brought against the Roman Catholic clergy, which has a direct bearing upon the economic aspect of this question. Although, as I read Irish history, the Roman Catholic priesthood have, in the main, used their authority with personal disinterestedness, if not always with prudence or discretion, their undoubted zeal for religion has, on occasion, assumed forms which enlightened Roman Catholics, including high dignitaries of that Church, think unjustifiable on economic grounds, and discourage even from a religious standpoint. Excessive and extravagant church-building in the heart and at the expense of poor communities is a recent and notorious example of this misdirected zeal. It has been, I believe, too often forgotten that the best monument of any clergyman's influence and earnestness must always be found in the moral character and the spiritual fibre of his flock, and not in the marbles and mosaics of a gaudy edifice. And without doubt a good many motives which have but a remote connection with religion are, unfortunately, at work in the church-building movement. It may, however, to some extent, be regarded as an extreme re-action from the penal times, when the hunted _soggarth_ had to celebrate the Mass in cabins and caves on the mountain side--a re-action the converse of which was witnessed in Protestant England when Puritanism rose up against Anglicanism in the seventeenth century. This expenditure, however, has been incurred; and, no one, I take it, would advocate the demolition of existing religious edifices on the ground that their erection had been unduly costly! The moral is for the present and the future, and applies not merely to economy in new buildings, but also in the decoration of existing churches.[18]