Charles Dickens is looked upon not only as the strenuous denouncer of vice, but as the happy exponent of the higher and purer feelings of human nature also.  For three-fourths of his life he wrote like a man who felt he had a mission to preach toleration, philanthropy—­universal benevolence.  He had travelled much.  He had been over Belgium and France; he was through the Rhenish Provinces; in all which places the people are Catholics; they have received the highest praise from travellers and writers for their industry; their thrift; their cleanliness; Charles Dickens saw all this, but it never occurred to him to credit their religion with it.  When the contrary occurs, and when fault is to be found, Popery, like a hack-block kept for such purposes, is made responsible, and receives a blow.  He had, indeed, a sad misgiving that the religion of Ireland lay deep at the root of her sorrows.  Surely this is enough to try one’s patience.  We have passed through and out-lived the terrible codes of Elizabeth and James and Anne and the two first Georges, under which, gallows-trees were erected on the hill side for our conversion or extinction; we have even survived the iron heels and ruthless sabres of Cromwell’s sanctimonious troopers; and we can go back upon the history of those times calmly enough now.  But this “sad misgiving” of Mr. Dickens; this patronizing condescension; this contemptuous pity, is more than provoking.  It is probable he had not the time or inclination to read deeply into Irish history, but he must have had a general knowledge of it more than sufficient to inform him, that there were causes in superabundance to account for the poverty and degradation of our people, without going to their religion for them.  Instead of doing so, he should have confessed with shame and humiliation, that his own countrymen, for a long series of years, did everything in their power to destroy the image of God in the native Irish, by driving them like beasts of chase into the mountains, and bogs, and fastnesses, and over the Shannon.  Our people suffered these things and much more for conscience sake; inflicted, as they were, by Mr. Dickens’s countrymen, in the name of religion; in the name of conscience; in advancing, as they pretended, the sacred cause of the right of private judgment. He makes Popery responsible for the results.

Those who held that Popery was the real cause of the potato-rot were influential, if not by their numbers, at least by their wealth; so they set about removing the fatal evil energetically.  Large sums of money were collected, and a very active agency was established throughout the West of Ireland for this purpose; with, it would seem, very considerable success.  But whilst those engaged in, the work, maintained, that the conversions were the result of instruction and enlightened investigation, others believed that most of the converts were like the poor woman mentioned by the late Dr. Whately, in a conversation with Mr. Senior.