The Catholic World, Vol. 11, April, 1870 to September, 1870Various
Religion
The Catholic World, Vol. 11, April, 1870 to September, 1870
Various
Catholic Church -- Periodicals
be too presumptuous to attempt to forecast a triumphant progress for
those principles, it will yet be not wholly profitless to denote the
perils and obstructions which beset the way.
The disturbances and outrages which in Ireland preceded and followed
the passing of the disestablishment bill, were the natural result of
the violent harangues uttered by the fanatic debaters of the Church
Defence Association, many of whom announced to their excited auditors
that the land bill of Mr. Gladstone would confiscate the property
of Protestant land-owners in Ireland. The evil passions of men thus
deceived into a belief that a wrong was intended not only to their
church but to their lands, found vent not merely in hard words and
cruel threats, but in merciless deeds. Some Protestant landlords
withheld the accustomed local charitable contributions which, as
owners of property, they had hitherto given to various institutions.
Others issued notices of ejection against their tenants, and these
attempted ejections produced--as capricious injustice is certain
to do--ill-will and resistance. Outrages, even assassinations,
occurred. But such offences against public order may be expected to
cease when the causes of them are removed. Time will allay the heat
of bygone party conflicts. Agrarian outrages will, if the land bill
be good for any thing, occur as rarely in Ireland as in America.
Industrious laborers will, it is to be hoped, find it easy to rent
or purchase small holdings on which they may expend their toil, and
in which they may invest their savings without fear of their being
appropriated to the use of felonious landlords by means of notices
to quit. It is when the excitement of the land and church questions
shall have yielded to the pressure of other momentous questions, that
the real danger will threaten the onward march of those principles
which, in the opinion of many, can alone safely guide the mutual
relations between England and Ireland. The education question will
be a highly perilous one. If the liberal party put forward a scheme
for compulsory, or secular, or sectarian education, which shall, on
whatever pretext, either nominally or practically, tend to withdraw
the education of Catholic children from the immediate control of
the priests, the result will be disappointment and disaster. Free
education, in the sense of an education independent of religion,
has great charms in the eyes of English and Irish liberals. Some
Catholics are inclined to favor any scheme which would place a
superior system of secular instruction within the reach of the great
bulk of the poorer and middle class, even though it should not
provide for that religious training which is a characteristic of a
strictly Catholic education. But the Catholic clergy of Ireland, to
a man, and those members of Parliament who represent Irish Catholic
constituencies, will give strenuous and effectual opposition to
undenominational or secular education under its open guise, although
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