of the community, because they would not join him in robbing and killing the Protestants.  But it is not a little surprising that an enlightened, learned, and liberal Catholic priest, writing in Dublin in the year 1868, should give his deliberate sanction to this unchristian and barbarous policy.  Yet Father Meehan writes:  ’But no; not even the dint of that manifesto, with the ring of true steel in its every line, could strike a spark out of their hearts, for they were chalky.’[1]

[Footnote 1:  Page 34.]

It was very natural that the English Government should act upon the same principle of intolerance, especially when they had the plea of state necessity.  They did not yet go the length of exterminating Catholicity by the means with which the O’Neill threatened his peaceable and industrious co-religionists in the towns.

All they required was that the Catholics should cease to harbour their priests, and that they should attend the Protestant churches.  Remarking upon the proclamation of Chichester to this effect Mr. Meehan says:—­’Apart from the folly of the king, who had taken into his head that an entire nation should, at his bidding, apostatise from the creed of their forefathers, the publishing such a manifesto in Dungannon, in Donegal, and elsewhere was a bitter insult to the northern chieftains, whose wars were crusades,—­the natural consequence of faith,—­stimulated by the Roman Pontiffs, assisted by Spain, then the most Catholic kingdom in the world.’  Does not Mr. Meehan see that crusading is a game at which two can play?  And if wars which were crusades were the natural consequence of the Catholic faith, were stimulated by the Roman Pontiffs, and assisted by Spain, for the purpose of destroying the power of England, everywhere as well as in Ireland, and abolishing the Reformation,—­does it not follow as a necessary consequence that the English Government must in sheer self-defence have waged a war of extermination against the Catholic religion, and have regarded its priests as mortal enemies?  No better plea for the English policy in Ireland was ever offered by any Protestant writer than this language, intended as a condemnation, by a very able priest in our own day.  It was no doubt extreme folly for King James I. to expect that a nation, or a single individual, should apostatise at his bidding; but it was equal folly in the King of Spain to expect Protestants to apostatise at his bidding; and if possible still greater folly for O’Neill to expect the Catholic citizens of Munster to join him in the bloody work of persecution.  It was, then, the Spanish policy stimulated by the Sovereign Pontiff that was the standing excuse of the cruel intolerance and rancorous religious animosity which have continued to distract Irish society down to our own time.  Persecution is alien to the Irish race.  The malignant virus imported from Spain poisoned the national blood, maddened the national brain, and provoked the terrible system of retaliation that was embodied in the Penal Code, and which, surviving to our own time, still defends itself by the old plea—­the intrusion of a foreign power attempting to overrule the government of the country.