Ireland In The New Century eBook

Horace Curzon Plunkett
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 279 pages of information about Ireland In The New Century.

Ireland In The New Century eBook

Horace Curzon Plunkett
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 279 pages of information about Ireland In The New Century.
a deep impression on my mind.  After attending a meeting of farmers in a very backward district in the extreme west of Mayo, I arrived one winter’s evening at the Roman Catholic priest’s house.  Before the meeting I had been promised a cup of tea, which, after a long, cold drive, was more than acceptable.  When I presented myself at the priest’s house, what was my astonishment at finding the Protestant clergyman presiding over a steaming urn and a plate of home-made cakes, having been requested to do the honours by his fellow-minister, who had been called away to a sick bed.  A cycle of homilies on the virtue of tolerance could add nothing to the simple lesson which these two clergymen gave to the adherents of both their creeds.  I felt as I went on my way that night that I had had a glimpse into the kind of future for Ireland towards which my fellow-workers are striving.

It is, however, with the religion of the majority of the Irish people and with its influence upon the industrial character of its adherents that I am chiefly concerned.  Roman Catholicism strikes an outsider as being in some of its tendencies non-economic, if not actually anti-economic.  These tendencies have, of course, much fuller play when they act on a people whose education has (through no fault of their own) been retarded or stunted.  The fact is not in dispute, but the difficulty arises when we come to apportion the blame between ignorance on the part of the people and a somewhat one-sided religious zeal on the part of large numbers of their clergy.  I do not seek to do so with any precision here.  I am simply adverting to what has appeared to me, in the course of my experience in Ireland, to be a defect in the industrial character of Roman Catholics which, however caused, seems to me to have been intensified by their religion.  The reliance of that religion on authority, its repression of individuality, and its complete shifting of what I may call the moral centre of gravity to a future existence—­to mention no other characteristics—­appear to me calculated, unless supplemented by other influences, to check the growth of the qualities of initiative and self-reliance, especially amongst a people whose lack of education unfits them for resisting the influence of what may present itself to such minds as a kind of fatalism with resignation as its paramount virtue.

It is true that one cannot expect of any church or religion, as a condition of its acceptance, that it will furnish an economic theory; and it is also true that Roman Catholicism has, at different periods of history, advantageously affected economic conditions, even if it did not act from distinctively economic motives—­for example, by its direct influence in the suppression of slavery[17] and its creation of the mediaeval craft guilds.  It may, too, be admitted that during the Middle Ages, when Roman Catholicism was freer than now to manifest its influence in many directions, owing to its practically unchallenged

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Ireland In The New Century from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.