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Dr. Newman, in 1845, not ten years after he had left Oxford, came as a ‘poor English innocent’ to Catholic Ireland, Ireland broken after the famine, after the days of Davis, into the political generation of Sadlier and Keogh, the generation when the Irish language had begun quickly to melt away, when Ireland’s poor emigrants were rushing to success or to ruin in America; and the Irish at home were being brought up in ‘National’ Schools, where no history might be taught, and where every influence tended to take from a people right national pride. Yet this people had one unbroken bond with the past, its religion; though the chiefs thereof were bishops fundamentally opposed in their ideas, as to how the religious life of the Irish should be reorganized and prepared for England’s new equalizing political rights, putting Catholics into positions of public trust, infiltrating anglicization at all pores of the Irish body politic, attending to give the needed higher education by the hands of a Protestant power unready to satisfy the instincts, or to build upon the principles, of an old Catholic people, who desired perhaps they knew not what, but who were ready to follow their bishops, and were conscious of distress in the new glare of what was brought by the foreign schoolmastering, with its worship of material success, its unimaginative practical commonplace, its dreary official irreligion, and its ideals of cleanliness, order, industry, and commercialism, together with dull uniformity, and a British imperialism; the whole thing, ‘Philistine,’
1 ‘On the side of beauty and taste, vulgarity; on the side of morals and feeling, coarseness; on the side of mind and spirit, unintelligible—this is Philistinism’ (Arnold, M., inCeltic Literatur, VIII. Google Scholar
2 M. Arnold, Essays in Criticism.
3 ‘He belongs to the race of giants in literary industry and research—a race now almost extinct,’ says M. Arnold (Celtic Literature, p. 28).
4 ‘Our high Catholics are rotten to the heart's core, and our middle classes are fast corrupting in the same manner, the love of self and place. In no country can one find a faithful people that has suffered so much for the unworthy, ungrateful, and iniquitous representatives who have betrayed them, as the Catholics in Ireland.’
5 Historical Sketches, 1, 68.
6 Sixtus V (1585–90), legislating even for the Catholic remnant, in the English college at Rome, directed ‘that an English Rector should be given to Englishmen,’ who had found the Italian Rector's discipline ‘adapted rather for young children than for youths growing into manhood.’
7 ‘Faith ought to be tried and tested, if it be faith. I don't like that faith, which (as I have seen written to a new convert) is a “precious tender plant” to be sedulously guarded under a glass cover, or in a hothouse … Our religion is a tough principle within us, bearing heavy weights and hard work, or it is worth very litle.’ So: ‘I have little belief in true vocations being destroyed by contact with the world—such intercourse as is natural or necessary … What I shrink from with dread, as the more likely danger, is not the Church losing priests whom she ought to have had, but gaining priests whom she never should have been burdened with’