Now, if our young men set to work to popularise our native saints, and in their lives dig up the buried glories of our Catholic past, if each diocese produced even one crisp well-written life, what a splendid step in advance.

But the demand for our literary activities is far wider than the shores of Ireland.

[Side note:  America and Australia]

The American and Australian Churches are daughters of this soil.  We are proud of them; they are the frontier regiments of our fighting army; they are daily advancing Patrick’s standard over fresh fields of conquest:  but what help have we given them?

The present generation of priests there are builders.  But, like the men on Jerusalem’s walls, they have to grasp the sword in one hand and the trowel in the other.

Protestantism in those lands is fast running to its final declension—­naked infidelity.  Now the infidel knows no rest; activity is the law of his existence.  The buried ghosts of past heresies are resuscitated and draped in all the attractiveness of modern dress.  The arsenal of error stored by every perverse genius from Arius to Tyndal is daily discharged into the Catholic ranks.  There is scarcely a truth free from truculent assault.

It is hard to ask the men toiling in the glare of the camp fires, to fight the battles and manufacture the shells.

Now, all that is best of French Catholic intellect has been given to this cause for the past century.  The priest who would devote a few winters to the holy toil of translating this into a shape suitable to the needs of our fighting millions would do an act of merit that God alone could measure.  Yet what ammunition have we supplied to our brave soldiers?  Scarcely a grain of shot.

[Side note:  The Causes of Sterility]

Why this sterility?  Why this barrenness?  Is it our native lethargy or our native modesty? or the defective training of our colleges in neglecting to foster literary tastes?

We will not pause to enquire.  That there is one sad cause is beyond all question—­the bitterness of clerical criticism.  The Irish priest who takes to the cultivation of letters ought to choose St. Sebastian for his patron saint; for he will have an arrow planted in every square inch of his body.

While we have no word of condemnation for the writers who are sucking the life-blood of Faith from our people, should one of ourselves show style in his sermons, or attach his name to a magazine article, the amount of mordant criticism he has to face is sufficient to make the stoutest heart sink.

The average Irish skull in the hands of a phrenologist will show a development of destructive bumps surpassed by none, but when he searches for constructive ones, a glass of no small magnifying power must come to his aid.

The habit of sneering criticism begins in the college and should be killed in its birth-place.  The man who drops an icy or an acid word into the warm enthusiasm of a young heart commits a great crime.  He may paralyse the purpose of a noble life.  Let us reserve all our hard blows and hard words for Christ’s enemies, and a cheerful encouragement to His friends should not cost us a drop of blood.