the limits so denned was proved in the famous Meath election petition in 1892, in which the Judge who tried it, himself a devout Catholic, declared:  “The Church became converted for the time being into a vast political agency, a great moral machine moving with resistless influence, united action, and a single will.  Every priest who was examined was a canvasser; the canvas was everywhere—­on the altar, in the vestry, on the roads, in the houses.”  And while an election was in progress in County Tyrone in 1911 a parish priest announced that any Catholic who should vote for the Unionist candidate “would be held responsible at the Day of Judgment.”  A still more notorious example of clericalism in secular affairs, within the recollection of Englishmen, was the veto on the Military Service Act proclaimed from the altars of the Catholic Churches, which, during the Great War, defeated the application to Ireland of the compulsory service which England, Scotland, and Wales accepted as the only alternative to national defeat and humiliation.

But these were only conspicuous examples of what the Irish Protestant sees around him every day of his life.  The promulgation in 1908 of the Vatican decree, Nec Temere, a papal reassertion of the canonical invalidity of mixed marriages, followed as it was by notorious cases of the victimisation of Protestant women by the application of its principles, did not encourage the Protestants to welcome the prospect of a Catholic Parliament that would have control of the marriage law; nor did they any more readily welcome the prospect of national education on purely ecclesiastical lines.  Another Vatican decree that was equally alarming to Protestants was that entitled Motu Proprio, by which any Catholic layman was ipso facto excommunicated who should have the temerity to bring a priest into a civil court either as defendant or witness.  Medievalism like this was felt by Ulster Protestants to be irreconcilable with modern ideas of democratic freedom, and to indicate a temper that boded ill for any regime which would be subject to its inspiration.  These were matters, it is true,—­and there were perhaps some others of a similar nature—­on which it is possible to conceive more or less satisfactory legislative safeguards being provided; but as regards the indefinable but innumerable minutiae in which the prevailing ecclesiastical standpoint creates an atmosphere in which daily life has to be carried on, no safeguards could be devised, and it was the realisation of this truth in the light of their own experience that made the Ulstermen continually close their ears to allurements of that sort.

The Roman Church is quite consistent, and from its own point of view praiseworthy, in its assertion of its right, and its duty, to control the lives and thoughts of men; but this assertion has produced a clash with the non-ecclesiastical mind in almost every country, where Catholicism is the dominant religious faith.  But in Ireland, unlike Continental countries, there is no Catholic lay opinion—­or almost none—­able to make its voice heard against clerical dictation, and consequently the Protestants felt convinced, with good reason, that any legislature in Ireland must take its tone from this pervading mental and moral atmosphere, and that all its proceedings would necessarily be tainted by it.