The state of Ireland a hundred years ago was sad. Acute, and widespread poverty, hunger, rags, hovels met the eyes of travellers at every turn in every town, village and roadside. The Irish knew the causes. Visitors and those who there sat in the seats of the mighty knew that all evils in Ireland and elsewhere came from one, and only one source, the Catholic Church.
Hence with an overpowering zeal the State-paid Church in Ireland, with its followers, judges, lord lieutenants, army officers, landlords, land agents, squires, government officials, and parsons, banded themselves together to cure permanently Ireland’s woes, to extirpate the Catholic Faith, to convert to Protestantism of any shade all the Irish from Cork to Derry. It was rather a big programme, a big campaign, and had proved for centuries a failure disastrous. New methods were adopted. The sword had failed, eviction had failed, well engineered poverty and crime had failed. An appeal to the souls of the poor misguided Papishes, a big campaign of Bible distribution, of blasphemy by well-trained bigot parsons, by tracts deriding the Mass, Confession, the Pope, Mary, the Mother of God. Every market and fair had its street preachers, with their select blasphemy, lies, filthy stories about convents. In Westmoreland Street, Dublin, in a window of a leading shop was a picture in two parts, a hideous Indian idol, and a mouse gnawing a Host, and beneath were the words, ‘Two Idols.’ People were pestered by insulting remarks on Catholic doctrine, with tracts galore, and were pained by the reports of the sermons, the speeches, the boastings of the thousands and thousands of converts flocking daily to the services in Protestant churches, renouncing Rome, embracing the Bible, reading it hourly and blessing God for the light of the Gospel denied them by the accursed church of Rome, the harlot of the Seven Hills.