A charge of another kind has of late been often brought against the Roman Catholic clergy, which has a direct bearing upon the economic aspect of this question.  Although, as I read Irish history, the Roman Catholic priesthood have, in the main, used their authority with personal disinterestedness, if not always with prudence or discretion, their undoubted zeal for religion has, on occasion, assumed forms which enlightened Roman Catholics, including high dignitaries of that Church, think unjustifiable on economic grounds, and discourage even from a religious standpoint.  Excessive and extravagant church-building in the heart and at the expense of poor communities is a recent and notorious example of this misdirected zeal.  It has been, I believe, too often forgotten that the best monument of any clergyman’s influence and earnestness must always be found in the moral character and the spiritual fibre of his flock, and not in the marbles and mosaics of a gaudy edifice.  And without doubt a good many motives which have but a remote connection with religion are, unfortunately, at work in the church-building movement.  It may, however, to some extent, be regarded as an extreme re-action from the penal times, when the hunted soggarth had to celebrate the Mass in cabins and caves on the mountain side—­a re-action the converse of which was witnessed in Protestant England when Puritanism rose up against Anglicanism in the seventeenth century.  This expenditure, however, has been incurred; and, no one, I take it, would advocate the demolition of existing religious edifices on the ground that their erection had been unduly costly!  The moral is for the present and the future, and applies not merely to economy in new buildings, but also in the decoration of existing churches.[18]

But it is not alone extravagant church building which in a country so backward as Ireland, shocks the economic sense.  The multiplication—­in inverse ratio to a declining population—­of costly and elaborate monastic and conventual institutions, involving what in the aggregate must be an enormous annual expenditure for maintenance, is difficult to reconcile with the known conditions of the country.  Most of these institutions, it is true, carry on educational work, often, as in the case of the Christian Brothers and some colleges and convents, of an excellent kind.  Many of them render great services to the poor, and especially to the sick poor.  But, none the less, it seems to me, their growth in number and size is anomalous.  I cannot believe that so large an addition to the ‘unproductive’ classes is economically sound, and I have no doubt at all that the competition with lay teachers of celibates ‘living in community’ is excessive and educationally injurious.  Strongly as I hold the importance of religion in education, I personally do not think that teachers who have renounced the world and withdrawn from contact with its stress and strain are the best moulders of the characters of youths