TOPICS OF THE DAY.
IRISH HOME-RULE AND IRISH JACOBINISM.
IT is evident that the Times' correspondent in Rome entirely agrees with the Duke of Norfolk and his English Catholic co-signatories, on the subject of the rela- tion of Irish Home-rule to the religious life of Irish Catholicism. In the letter which was published in the Times of Thursday week by the Duke and a large number of the most distinguished English Catholics, it is very curious to find that substantially the same opinion is ex- pressed as to the serious peril which the most genuine Irish Catholicism will incur, if the Home-rule movement succeeds, which had been expressed by Irish Presbyterians, Irish Quakers, Irish Anglicans, Irish Wesleyans, Irish Unitarians, and Irish Nonconformists of other shades of opinion, on the same subject. Indeed, some of the most influential of the English Quakers have recently met in conference, and expressed precisely the same opinion as to the religious dangers of the situation, which the Duke of Norfolk, from a very different point of view, has con- veyed so forcibly to the world. Now, nothing can be more impressive than the complete agreement of religious Churches so profoundly divided in their creed, as to the moral and religious effect of the Home-rule movement ; and nothing can better prove that what is really at stake is not the mere religious creed of any single Church, but the moral and spiritual foundation of every Christian creed, in- deed faith in the very essence of. the Christian Revelation. It is evident, too, from the Times' correspondent's letter, that the fears of all the non-Catholic Churches of Ireland, and of the most earnest Catholics and Quakers of England, are entertained by Leo XIII. himself, as to the consequences of this political revolution ; so that wherever Catholics have nothing political to gain by this revolution, and are interested only in the religious, or rather irreligious, prospects which it opens out, they cast in their lot not with Mr. Bryce and those English statesmen who repre- sent the cause of Catholicism as bound up with the cause of the Anti-Parnellites, but with the view of the English Unionists as to the great peril which Home-rule involves to the sincere Christianity of Ireland, whether it be Catholic or Protestant. The late Cardinal Cullen used to say, as we are told by the Times' correspondent at Rome, that if ever laws were again passed against the Catholic Church in Ireland, it would be by an Irish Parliament ; and that is evidently the expectation en- tertained by the Duke of Norfolk and the Catholic Unionists. What the Pope fears is that the Irish priesthood, in their eagerness to retain their hold of the Irish peasantry, will yield more and more to the political demands of the Irish Jacobins till, at last, they will find themselves in the very position in which the French priesthood found themselves in the last de- cade of the last century,—either compelled to sacrifice their own faith, or deserted by the population they have sought so shortsightedly to conciliate, and whose worldly greed they have stimulated instead of controlled. That is precisely what the Duke of Norfolk and the Catholic Unionists of England anticipate in their letter of last week ; and it is also the fear which the Bishop of Derry with the Irish Episcopalians, and the Irish Quakers, and the Irish Presbyterians and Unitarians in their different language express as to the natural consequence of giving a triumph to the party which has set the Decalogue at defiance in order to further the purposes of the Land League.
" The agitation which has been carried on in Ireland since 1879," say the shrewd English Catholics, "has been based to a great extent upon principles which are mani- festly identical with those of the European revolution, so often and so authoritatively reprobated by the Holy See, and as an inevitable consequence the movement has been stained by many grievous offences against natural, divine, and civil law. Many of the teachers who helped to in- doctrinate the Catholic people of Ireland with these anti- Christian tenets now stand high in the Home-rule Party. They include those whose language has been most extreme, whose action has been the most reprehensible, and who have exhibited in both the most flagrant disregard for the fundamental doctrines of Christian morals. Amongst them are conspicuous several Catholics who have notoriously taken a chief part in inculcating the use of boycotting and the Plan of Campaign,—practices solemnly condemned as sinful by the Holy See. Some, at least, of their number have not scrupled to display with ostentatious insolence their contempt of this authoritative decision, and sharply to deny the right of the Supreme Pontiff to judge the moral quality of their political acts. None of them, so far as we are aware, have publicly disavowed the condemned. methods, or publicly withdrawn their scandalous repudia- tion of the Papal jurisdiction." That, of course, is language which the Protestant Churches and sects could not use, since to them it is the infraction of the moral code itself, not the disobedience to the Pope's enforcement of the moral code, which has been the great scandal. And of course, too, the Protestant Churches have insisted on the- danger to their own Protestant liberties involved in the • triumph of a Jacobin party over the Irish priesthood, on which the Duke of Norfolk and the Catholics of England do not insist, though we have not the least doubt that they would deprecate as much any attempt to invade the liberty of Protestants, as they would any attempt to overrule the religious principles of Catholics. But making allowance for these natural divergences of view, the remarkable result emerges that impartial Catholics, who are not identified with the National League and its tactics, are- entirely at one with Irish Protestants of all shades, and with the more independent Irish Catholics, in regarding the growing Jacobinism of Ireland as the most formidable of the consequences of the Home-rule movement, and in antici- pating a great extension of that Jacobinism as the natural consequence of what has already happened in Ireland, as well as of the influence exerted over the Home-rulers by the American-Irish, who have supplied so large a propor- tion of the funds for the strategy of the National League. So far as we know, the only independent religious bodies which have befriended Irish Home-rule have been the English Nonconformists ; and even they have been much divided. In spite of their devotion to Mr. Gladstone's• person, in spite of their hope that his ascendency will lead to Disestablishment in Wales and Scotland, and ulti- mately perhaps to Disestablishment in England, the English Nonconformists are gravely divided on the sub- ject, and are gravely divided just because they see how great is the danger to Christianity itself, in the triumph of this thoroughly Jacobin form of Irish agrarianism. Had not Mr. Gladstone been the leader, and had he not given in his adherence to the policy of Disestablishment in three distinct parts of the United Kingdom, we do not think that any substantial fraction of Nonconformist opinion in England would have identified itself with Irish Home- rule. We may, we believe, claim every stream of purely religious conviction in England as siding against the cause of Irish Home-rule, and as siding against it pre- cisely because the Home-rulers have shown so violently Jacobin and Antinomian a spirit in the support they have given to agrarian lawlessness and to anti-social suspicion. Nor could any other result have been expected, when he who was at one time the very greatest of the political moralists of England has, in his enthusiasm on behalf of those Home-rulers who made boycotting and the " Plan of' Campaign" their chief weapons against the Union, openly extenuated, and indeed apologised for, such demoralising practices as Mr. Parnell, Mr. O'Brien, and Mr. Dillon hact devised.
It seems to us that this complete consensus of all independent Christian convictions, Catholic and. Pro- testant alike, against the party of Home-rule in Ireland, is a very remarkable phenomenon. The Irish priesthood are not independent ; they are far too much identified with the peasantry from whose ranks they spring. The majority of English Nonconformists are not inde- pendent; they have long been Mr. Gladstone's most devoted personal adherents, and the prospect of Disestab- lishment in Wales and Scotland has almost turned their heads. But with these exceptions, it is impossible to find any thoroughly Christian stream of opinion which does not regard the Act of Union as the best guarantee against a kind of political anarchy which is as essen- tially atheistic in spirit as it is iconoclastic in politics. The Catholicism of the Home-ruler is so deeply tainted with Fenian and Jacobin elements, that only those who look at it under the spell of Fenian and Jacobin prepossessions are at all satisfied with it. Protestants and Roman Catholics alike regard the British Government as the only efficient breakwater against the devastating floods of moral and religious atheism.
Previous page
