Te Deum; a terrible persecution was raging not only throughout the Protestant districts of France but also on the Rhine, in Hungary, Savoy and the Alpine Valleys; if Ireland had remained a separate kingdom ruled by the ally and admirer of Louis XIV, the next step would certainly have been an invasion of England by the joint forces of France and Ireland.  All that we in modern times include in the term “religious liberty” hung on the issue of the battle that was fought and won on the banks of the Boyne.

CHAPTER V.

The period of the penal laws.

The flight of James II brings us to the era of the “penal laws.”  To one who lives in the twentieth century and is embued with the spirit of modern thought, the whole subject is more than painful—­it is detestable.  But to pass it over in silence is impossible; and in order to get a clear view of the position it is necessary to examine what the penal laws were, what they were not, and what were the circumstances of the time during which they were in force.

The penal laws were a series of enactments carefully planned so as to harass the Roman Catholics at every moment of their lives, in the hope of inducing them to abandon their religion.  The unhappy people were prohibited from becoming or voting for members of Parliament; they were excluded from corporations, the army, the navy and the legal profession.  They were forbidden to bear arms, or even to possess a horse worth more than L5.  Education was denied to them, as they could not send their sons to the university and were forbidden either to have schools of their own in Ireland or to send their children abroad.  They were not allowed to possess freehold estates in land, and even as to leaseholds they were seriously restricted.  On the death of a Roman Catholic his estate was divided amongst his children equally, unless the eldest son became a Protestant, in which case he inherited the whole.  And as no Roman Catholic was allowed to act as a guardian, a man never knew that if he should die his children might not be brought up in a faith that he detested.  The performance of Roman Catholic worship was barely tolerated, as no bishops or other dignitaries were allowed to remain in Ireland, and the only priests authorized to say mass were those who were “registered” and had taken the oath of abjuration—­that is, an oath declaring that the Pretender had no right to the throne.

Such in brief were those terrible statutes.  But without attempting to excuse them, there are various matters which must be taken into account if we are to judge them fairly.  In the first place, the political aspect of the question should not be forgotten.  The Protestant minority might justly fear that if the Roman Catholic party were as powerful as their numbers would naturally cause them to be, they would aid in bringing about a French invasion for the restoration