The merchant was a great friend of the parish priest, who always told the people if they did not pay their debts they would burn for ever and ever in hell.  “The fires of eternity will make you sorry for the debts that you did not pay,” said the priest.  “What is eternity?” he would ask in a solemn voice from the altar steps.  “If a man tried to count the sands on the sea-shore and took a million years to count every single grain, how long would it take him to count them all?  A long time, you’ll say.  But that time is nothing to eternity.  Just think of it!  Burning in hell while a man, taking a million years to count a grain of sand, counts all the sand on the sea-shore.  And this because you did not pay Farley McKeown his lawful debts, his lawful debts within the letter of the law.”  That concluding phrase, “within the letter of the law,” struck terror into all who listened, and no one, maybe not even the priest himself, knew what it meant.

There is light in Ireland to-day, and hope for an Irish culture; the thing to be noted is that it comes from two movements, one for agricultural co-operation and the other for political independence—­both of them definitely and specifically non-religious.  This same thing has been true of the movements which have helped on happier nations, such as the republics of France and America, which have put an end to the power of the priestly caste to take property by force, and to dominate the mind of the child without its parents’ consent.

This is as far as any nation has so far gone; it has apparently not yet occurred to any legislature that the State may owe a duty to the child to protect its mind from being poisoned, even though it has the misfortune to be born of poisoned parents.  It is still permitted that parents should terrify their little ones with images of a personal devil and a hell of eternal brimstone and sulphur; it is permitted to found schools for the teaching of devil-doctrines; it is permitted to organize gigantic campaigns and systematically to infect whole cities full of men, women and children with hell-fire phobias.  In the American city where I write one may see gatherings of people sunk upon their knees, even rolling on the ground in convulsions, moaning, sobbing, screaming to be delivered from such torments.  I open my morning paper and read of the arrest of five men and seven women in Los Angeles, members of a sect known as the “Church of the Living God”, upon a charge of having disturbed the peace of their neighbors.  The police officers testified that the accused claimed to be possessed of the divine spirit, and that as signs of this possession they “crawled on the floor, grunted like pigs and barked like dogs.”  There were “other acts, even more startling”, about which the newspapers did not go into details.  And again, a week or two later, I read how a woman has been heard screaming, and found tied to a bed-post, being whipped by a man.  She belonged to a religious sect which had found her