Thus the burden of persecution was finally taken away.  To those who imposed it, the system of Penal Laws will remain a deep dishonor.  But to those who bore that burden it has proved a safeguard of spiritual purity and faith.  The religion of the indigenous race in Ireland was saved from the degeneration and corruption which ever besets a wealthy and prosperous church, and which never fails to engender hypocrisy, avarice and ambition.  In England, the followers of the Apostles exercise the right to levy a second tax on the produce of all tilled lands, a second burden imposed upon the conquered Saxons.  As a result, the leaders of the church live in palaces, while the people, the humbler part of their congregation; have sunk into practical atheism.  In France, the reaction against a like state of things brought the church to the verge of destruction, and led the masses to infidelity and materialism.  The result to the moral life of the people is too well known to need remark.  Not less evil consequences have flowed from the enriching of the church in other lands.  That wealth has always carried with it the curse, so prophetically pronounced, against those who trust in riches.  For the ministers of religion, in a supreme degree, the love of money has been the root of evil.

We may, therefore, see in the spirituality and unworldliness of the native church in Ireland a result of all the evil and persecution the church suffered during almost three hundred years.  From this purification by fire it comes that the people of Ireland are almost singular throughout Christendom in believing sincerely in the religion of gentleness and mercy—­the kingdom which is not of this world.

In 1829 the Catholics were at last freed from the galling burdens which had weighed on them since 1537, when they failed to recognize Henry VIII as the representative of God on earth.  They were still, however, under the shadow of a grave injustice, which continued to rest on them for many years.  When their church lands were confiscated and their faith proscribed by law under the Tudors, a new clergy was overlaid on the country, a clergy which consented to recognize the Tudors and their successors as their spiritual head.  As a reward, these new ministers of religion were allowed to levy a second tax on land, exactly as in England; and this tax they continued to collect until their privilege was finally taken away by Gladstone and the English Liberals.  Needless to say that through three centuries and more four-fifths of this tax was levied on the indigenous Catholics, in support of what was to them an alien, and for most of the time a persecuting church.

One heavy disability still lay on the whole land.  With its partial removal a principle has emerged of such world-wide importance in the present, and even more in the future, that we may well trace its history in detail.