Nor can there be a spectacle presented by history more sad than the fate
of the unfortunate Fenian leaders. The Irish who have died directly for
their faith in the dungeon, on the rack, or upon the gibbet, have had the
crowning consolation of martyrdom and the bright light of heaven when
their sufferings were over. Those who fell victims of extermination, of
hunger, want, and exile, might, at least indirectly, trace their sorrows
to the same cause—grand, unalterable fidelity to the Church of God. The
martyr’s hope lit up their lives. The joy they had even in famine, even
in death, no man could take from them. From their perishing bodies came
forth the radiance of immortality. Their souls, naturally, the noblest
souls, the most gifted, the very purest, given by God to this earth,
conquered the very world that scorned and crucified them, with HIM they
loved and feared not to follow. They endured the pangs of starvation,
cold and rags just as they did the gaol, the fever-ship, and the gallows,
with a sublime, godlike fortitude. Godlike, for it came from God indeed.
Who ever heard of one of these millions of slowly-tormented victims
seeking death by suicide—the remedy of the disbeliever? Who ever knew
of one of them to seek to lengthen life by means which a section now
condones, indeed half praises, in the case of the no more than equally
tried man-slayers and cannibals in a shipwreck? Who that remembers the
dread years of the great famine of ’47 and ’48 does not know of thousands
and of tens of thousands of Irishmen and Irishwomen, aye, of Irish little
children, that then laid down their lives in horrible agonies, sooner
than receive from a hellish so-called “charity” the food, clothing, and
patronage that would enable them to live in comfort,—a “charity” which
callous proselytizers offered everywhere at the price of one single act
of apostasy—at the price of even eating meat on a Friday in contempt of
God’s Church? I myself have known of such cases. And I have seen this.
I have seen downright honest pity manifested by these same starving but
noble people of God for the rich man who lived in wealthy splendour, and
then died in a great house near them, when they knew that by want of
the Faith he ought to have, his life was without hope and his eternity
without God. Never since the days of Christ did a whole people realize
more vividly or act more truly upon the teaching conveyed in the parable
of the rich man lost and Lazarus saved. The long eternity of hell, the
want of the drop of water, never to be obtained, the eternal contempt and
the eternal pain awaiting the sumptuously-living sinner, was no myth. It
came from the mouth of Him who had the knowledge of the fact, because he
was the Creator and the Judge. As vividly came the vision of their own
bright, peaceful, wealthy rest, figured by the lot of Lazarus reposing in
a bosom far brighter, far sweeter than that of Abraham—in the Heart of
Jesus Christ, in the beautiful vision of God, in the embrace of Mary, the
loved Mother of Ireland—and so these millions passed peacefully through
the dark valley of famine, until, worn and weary, their bodies sank like
the rain drops, forgotten, beneath the green sward of Erin, and their
souls passed for ever to the joy of the blest. How different is the case
of the few apostates amongst them who sold their faith! Who may not tell
of the agony of mind, the desolation, the suicides of these? But next
to them in melancholiness is the fate of the Irishman who first begins
to listen to the seducer of the secret society, and afterwards becomes
himself a seducer, a leader, perhaps a traitor, in the deadly, secret
conspiracy to ruin religion, to destroy God. His career is often this: At
first a hopeful, young, ambitious student of his country’s history, he
begins to feel indignation at her wrongs, and wishes to right them. In a
fatal hour he meets the tempter. He is sworn into the terrible sect. He
gets a command, an importance in the organization. He is youthful, but
the season of life wherein to make an honest livelihood passes rapidly
in intrigue. He knows that the course into which he has fallen is bad,
is injurious to religion, but he hopes to repent. Alas! little by little
his conscience, his Faith passes from him. The day comes surely when
he realizes his sad position, and knows the advice of the Church to be
right. But having lived his best days to conspire, he now must “conspire
to live,” and inured to bad habits, he is at last ready for anything.
Like the wretch who preys upon the little left to the Irish emigrant,
now as a guide, now as a broker in New York or Liverpool, he, too, will
wrench by every means fraud can devise the hard earnings of the poor,
under pretence of injuring England, if not of liberating Ireland. He
will stop at nothing, and so the existing conspirator is made. He has no
further scruple to join if he can the worst class of the Atheistic and
Socialist plotters of Paris. He herds with them. And this is strange, for
while the Irish conspirator may be as able to plot mischief as the worst
of the miscreants with whom he associates in France, he differs from
them in this, that in the secret of his soul he never loses his Faith.
They know this well, and they watch him, use him, but never fully trust
him. Many a broken Irish heart the children of the Revolution in Paris
have made already. Many a one of those Irish victims wish again for the
days of his boyish innocence and blessed faith. A life wasted, hopes
blasted, happiness departed, a cheerless, neglected, old age, are little
recompense for the free-thought and free-act which a system of Atheism
and irreligion, never really believed in, conferred upon any Catholic
Irishman.