on a rock or in a poor hut, it was none the less acceptable to God, and none the less efficacious to the worshippers.  These shepherds of the flock were specially obnoxious to the Government.  They preached patience, but they were accused of preaching rebellion; they confirmed their people in their faith, but this was supposed to be equivalent to exciting them to resist their oppressors.  The three fathers were at last seized by a party of cavalry, in a remote district of the Queen’s county.  They were tied hand and foot, and conducted with every species of ignominy to the garrison of Abbeyleix.  Here they were first flogged, then racked, and finally hanged[451], drawn, and quartered.  The soldiers, brutalized as man can be brutalized by familiarity with scenes of blood, scoffed at the agonies they inflicted, and hardened themselves for fresh barbarities.  But there were men who stood by to weep and pray; and though they were obliged to conceal their tears, and to breathe their prayers softly into the eternal and ever-open ear of God, the lash which mangled the bodies of the men they revered lacerated their souls yet more deeply; and as they told to others the tale of patient suffering endured for Christ and His Church, the hearts of the people were bound yet closer to their faithful pastors, and they clung yet more ardently to the religion which produced such glorious examples.

The other execution is, if possible, more barbarous.  If the duty of an historian did not oblige me to give such details, I would but too gladly spare you the pain of reading and myself the pain of writing them.  The name of Dermod O’Hurley has ever stood prominent in the roll of Irish martyrs.  He was a man of more than ordinary learning, and of refined and cultivated tastes; but he renounced even the pure pleasures of intellectual enjoyments for the poor of Christ, and received for his reward the martyr’s crown.  After he had taught philosophy in Louvain and rhetoric at Rheims, he went to Rome, where his merit soon attracted the attention of Gregory XIII., who appointed him to the see of Cashel.  O’Sullivan describes his personal appearance as noble and imposing, and says that “none more mild had ever held the crozier of St. Cormac.”  His position was not an enviable one to flesh and blood; but to one who had renounced all worldly ties, and who only desired to suffer like his Lord, it was full of promise.  His mission was soon discovered; and though he complied with the apostolic precept of flying, when he was persecuted, from one city to another, he was at last captured, and then the long-desired moment had arrived when he could openly announce his mission and his faith.