But I suppose Dr Croly, Mr M’Neile, and such folks--who seem to read their Bibles by the blue light of brimstone--believe that the extra money given to the Roman Catholic priests of Ireland will only be so much powder and shot with which they may bring down Protestants. Well, if money is to make converts, what has the Irish Protestant Church been about, that has always had a full money-bag at her girdle, and more than that--plenty of leisure to reclaim the fallen? She has always had a golden crook whereby to bring stray lambs into the fold, and yet has added nothing to her flock. Now, according to my opinion, the folks who abuse Maynooth ought rather to feel glad that money is to be given to her priests, seeing what an abundance of money, and good things purchased by money, have done for the Irish Protestant Church. It has become slow as it has become fat. Stuff even a pulpit-cushion with bank-notes, and it is strange to see how religion will sleep upon it. And therefore people ought to rejoice that the Catholic is to be made a little comfortable in worldly matters! Excellent, worthy Churchmen, who can command the sports of the field and all the pleasures of the table, are not the busy, troublesome folks to go about converting their benighted neighbours! And though the Maynooth pupils may not--like their beneficed rivals--keep fox-hounds, and enjoy the dearest turtle, pineapples, and all that, they will not, I think, be in after-life more dangerous to the Protestant Church, because when at college they slept not more than two in a bed. But there’s a sort of people in the world that can’t bear making any progress. I wonder they even walk, unless they walk backwards! I wonder they don’t refuse to go out when there’s a full moon, and all out of love and respect for that “ancient institution,” the old one. But there always were such people, grandmother--always will be. When lucifers first came in, how many old women, stanch old souls--many of ’em worthy to be members of Parliament--stood by their matches and tinder-boxes, and cried out “No surrender!” And how many of these old women, disguised in male attire, every day go about at public meetings professing to be ready to die for any tinder-box question that may come up! Yes, ready, quite ready to die for it; all the readier, perhaps, because dying for anything of the sort’s quite gone out of fashion. Even Sir James Graham says the time is gone by for ill-using Ireland. “The time is gone by!” And yet how many men before Sir James, have stood up and declared _their_ time--the time “gone by”--was the best time possible for Ireland, that what was doing for her could not be improved; and having thundered this, have sat down, secure in a majority that has voted for the evil to continue! What a long time it is before men in power will learn to call things by their proper names! What a time it takes to teach ministers to call evil, evil--and lies, lies!