S

GRACE ABOUNDING

A CHAPTER OF IRELAND'S STORY-IX

BY REV. E. J. QUIGLEY

EVERAL agents were sent from this island of scholars

to rouse and to round up English bigots. Respectable Protestants in Ireland were heartily ashamed of the religious war and its warriors; and in England those men appealed to a large section of the populace, but by no means to the majority of the people, who did not care a straw for Rome or for Ireland; they loved peace and plenty; Popery had no charms or fears for them.

The two chief apostles to the land of the Saxon were Rev. M. O'Sullivan, Kerry, and the Rev. R. M'Ghee, of Tyrone. O'Sullivan is immortalized by Moore in his Fudge poems. He was clever, eloquent, of imposing appearance, but bitter and unscrupulous. Those heavenly twins, like other heavenly twins, e.g., Castor and Pollux, always travelled together and played their pastoral duets together on the stage of Exeter Hall before an audience of two thousand, including clergy, members of Parliament, army officers, and huge crowds of ladies. Humour is generally lacking in pious people; and serious people do not smile in public; they never laugh. But how O'Sullivan kept a grave demeanour, when he saw the pranks and heard the words of his companion actor, is, to me, a puzzle. M'Ghee was a pure, all-wool, Ulster bigot on fire with zeal against Rome, Pope, Popery, and priests. His superiors in Ireland could not control him. He lied so generally and so atrociously that several Protestants contradicted him and denounced him and his lying methods. A pervert scholar, Rev. W. Phelan, was very wrath on the Rev. Richard's lies and forgeries. He invented a Papal bull, quoted it, and refused to make apology. But several times he was forced to make

humble apology and to retract his lies. He was in great demand as a platform orator. He usually spoke for four hours without even a minim pause.

The lives of those apostles were not all sunshine, and O'Sullivan was told by The Morning Chronicle that the lectures were degrading, unchristian, unfair to Ireland and her Church, and, worse, that he knew that his pictures of Catholic life and practices were untrue because he was a Catholic, and veered for the loaves and fishes. Trinity College perverted Murtagh O'Sullivan and changed his name to Mortimer. The Rev. Mortimer O'Sullivan replied

There was something peculiar in my bringing up. I have reason to be thankful to parents who made me acquainted with the Bible. I am never to forget that in the course of my reading, and in the course of my opportunity for experience, I have heard no such condemnation of the Church of Rome as I have heard under my own paternal roof. I was the son of a man whose abhorrence of Popery was not to be matched. He did not regard Popery as a religion; he regarded Popery as the instrument of a foul despotism. (Cheers.) He gave me all the opportunity which he was able to afford me of hearing the preaching and discourses of men who testified against that Church; and although the affection of a child induced me to go where that parent to whom my love was most fondly given went, yet my experience in after life taught me where it was that truth lay. (Cheers.) [A sweet Kerry mixture!]

M'Ghee and O'Sullivan performed in many parts of England, and had a good and a bad Press. The scores of smaller news-sheets followed the lead of The Times in praising and giving detailed accounts of those pious men and their meetings. But the bad, naughty Press knew they were humbugs, charlatans, hirelings, and flayed them. The Morning Chronicle, May 27, 1837-to take one specimen of the bad Press-shows M'Ghee arriving on the stage in Exeter Hall, with a heavy looking and time-worn trunk, from which he at once unpacked his implements of warfare. What were they? they? Eight volumes of the Moral Theology The ladies applauded the appearance of these books, from which extracts to delight the prurient were sure to be read. Then the orator produced a small book, with a knowing wink, then a big Bible, papers, books,

of Peter Dens.

pamphlets of all ages and sizes and colours, which were arranged with the same method and care upon the table as an Indian juggler would have shown with his cups and balls.' They had summoned Dan O'Connell and R. Lalor Shiel to meet them in a word battle! Neither appeared, and Mortimer O'Sullivan was glad, for he dreaded Dan of Kerry. M'Ghee and O'Sullivan had been denounced by The Sun of May 19, 1837, and M'Ghee replied, and, 0! such a reply. He scorned the cowards, O'Connell and Shiel-they were afraid to face him. He scorned Dr. Wiseman and Archbishop Murray, whom he invited to meet him at Exeter Hall. They were cowards. But he had a precious volume which would alarm and confound them all. It was a rare volume, unseen by Protestant eyes; unhandled by Protestant hand, a volume which he ordered his bookseller to buy at an auction of priests' books, a cheap volume, but a costly volume-for by the plottings and biddings of priests his bid of £7 10s. was not received, and he was told that the priests would pay £50 to keep their darling volume, their hidden, sinful volume, from him. But he had got it, got the book, the Statuta Dioecesana, 'edited and promulgated by Archbishop Murray, Bishops Keating, Doyle, and Kinsella.' The crowd cheered the charlatan; and he told them that he had from that little book proved the total and universal baseness of Irish Catholicism. There was no longer room for doubt that Rome in Ireland was utterly base, vile, and rotten. Why? The book was edited by Bishops and referred to the necessity of theological conferences, and the questions to be discussed were in the order in which they stand in the pages of Peter Dens. Could anything be more clear, more logical, more veracious? 1

I said that those and other spies were sent into the land of promise, the land flowing with bigotry and British gold. The spies united the currents of bigotry into one mighty current, transmitted to and transformed in Ireland. The current brought currency and the Biblicals rejoiced

1 The Edinburgh Magazine, 1837, p. 298,

muchly, for currency played a big part in the Souper wars in Ireland. And the current, it was hoped, must necessarily bring life to the weak and dying Church, dosed and doctored by her English planters. She was a petulant, barren creature, who for centuries received every care, whose every whim and wish were gratified, who was fostered and fondled and petted and praised by all her patrons. But early in the nineteenth century cold winds of criticism, frosty questions in Parliament, very candid and pointed newspaper and magazine articles, tithe wars, and home discontent were weakening the old lady, never robust, nor of active disposition. People had read of Galvani and his frog; could the current and the currency of English zeal make juvenescent the weak and waning Lutheran body in Ireland?

She was always a peculiar old body. The Reverend Jonathan Swift, Dean of St. Patrick's, Dublin, made a long and strong effort to have himself appointed a bishop. The poor quality of the bishops sent by England to shepherd her Irish sheep shocked the Dean, and after mature judgment he knew how such men reached Ireland. The good, humble men, adorned with all the Pauline notes of good bishoping, left London with their writs of appointment to guard and guide their scattered flocks in fateful Erin; crossing Hampstead Heath they were ambushed and waylaid by highwaymen, robbed, murdered, and their writs of appointment brought to Ireland by those wicked highwaymen, who, pretending that they were the persons named in the documents, got reception and possession of Irish sees and, though wolves in shepherd's clothing, suitably and wolfishly ruled the Protestant sheep and lambs of Ireland. The Dean may have spoken truly, for they were a surly and mixed lot, sent to convert the Celt, the quickwitted Celt. And they were hand-picked men.

Thyrhit, Bishop of Raphoe, could not bear the loneliness of Donegal, so he returned to London's gaiety and, practising as a highwayman on the Heath, received a bullet which relieved him of further mitral functions on

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earth. Wordsworth, of Enniskillen, stood three trials in public court for murder. A Bishop of Waterford was hanged for murder; a Bishop of Clogher, Vice-President of the Society for Discountenancing Vice,' fled before his trial on a charge of Sodomy. These are only a few of the heroes sent to convert Ireland. The imported bishops won no golden opinions but they annexed gold. Their moneygathering was told by dozens of pens. It was of worldwide notoriety, and I give one extract, quoted by Rev. James Maher: The Court Journal of March, 1865, gives the following interesting notice under the heading of the Church of Ireland: The Most Rev. Dr. Fowler, Archbishop of Dublin, died worth £150,000; Beresford, Archbishop of Tuam, £250,000; Agar, Bishop of Cashel, £400,000; Stuart, Archbishop of Armagh, £300,000; Knox, Bishop of Derry, £100,000; Hawkins, Bishop of Raphoe, £250,000; Porter, Bishop of Clogher, £250,000; Bernard, Bishop of Limerick, £60,000; Cleaver, Bishop of Ferns, £50,000.' These figures could be repeated for every diocese; for chief shepherds were sent by England to guard her sheep in Clonfert, Kilfenora, Kilmacduagh, Clare, Kerry, Mayo. The labour was light, but the rewards were many and gratifying. For it must have pleased those shepherds to have no pens, no sheepfolds, few under-shepherds, and few sheep and yet to wallow in wealth, drawn from the sweat and tears of famished men and women, who were dying with cold and hunger and nakedness, and yet forced to pay tithe to a religion they hated and for work unattempted because it was impossible, the turning of the Celt to Lutheranism, Calvinism, Knoxism. To many of those persons and prelates, tithe, its nature, and its methods of collection were very regrettable things. But to many they were not sources of sorrow or of shame. And events, like the incident mentioned by Bishop Doyle at the Lords' Committee of 1825 must have gratified many hearts :

'Is it usual, in cases in Ireland, for the Roman Catholic clergy to be charged for their tithes by the Protestant clergyman?'

1 Op. cit. p. 375.