We implore the Government, before they proceed in their policy
of combining Home Rule with Conscription to a point at which retreat will become impossible, to consider most anxiously the meaning of the grave fact that the Roman Catholic Hierarchy has placed itself at the head of the anti-Conscription movement. This is by far the most serious fact in the whole situation. It means that religions animosity; which for ages hue-lain at the root
of all Irish troubles, will be acutely, and perhaps fatally, accentu- sted. We have always been most careful to distinguish between the splendid record of patriotic Roman Catholics in the British Empire and the political manipulations of the Vatican. That there should always be this painful distinction or discrepancy is inevitable, so long as the Vatican clings to temporal power, which postulates political interference at many points. If " Protestant- ism " is set against Roman Catholicism, it is impossible to see what the end may be. Even if it be true that Vaticanism—to use this term as expressing the political as distinct from the spiritual energies of the Papacy—is wholly innocent of any prejudices against the Entente Affiance, it is nevertheless a fact that deep suspicion of Vatieanism exists. That suspicion is bound to animate Protestant- ism, as it has always done in the past, only more so. The Govern- ment alone have it in their power to stop this.
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