Ireland's Religious Question
‘NOBODY respects the Christian religion more than I do,’ Lord Melbourne declared on one occasion, ‘but really, when it comes to intruding it into private life . . .’ If one substitutes ‘public’ for ‘private’ in Melbourne’s sentence, one gets an excellent definition of what in Ireland to-day is regarded as the perfection of good political manners.
This attitude, I admit, is not unnatural in a country where, in certain areas at least, an attempt to discuss the religious problem, however honest the intentions of the controversialists may be, is more likely than not to end in police charges in back streets and a multitude of broken heads. In Belfast — where, by the way, even football teams are labeled Orange or Green — I have lively recollections of a strike in which Protestants and Catholics fought side by side, and in order to preserve their cohesion invented the slogan, ‘To hell with the man that names religion!’ Their idea of religion was aptly described by an Orangeman who, in giving evidence in favor of a prisoner, protested that his friend could not have marched at the head of a mob cursing the Pope, as he was ‘never a religious man.’
It must not be thought that in everyday life Irishmen of different denominations sit glowering darkly at one another. The convention which bars as bad form in mixed company any allusion to existing divisions enables Protestants and Catholics to rub shoulders without friction. An agreement to differ is of course infinitely better than no agreement at all, but it has its drawbacks in that an attempt to investigate the causes and consequences of the differences between the creeds, even if undertaken in a spirit of scientific detachment, is certain to offend one side or the other, and not improbably will be resented by both. Yet I am convinced that the agreement is at once the most important and the most intriguing factor in Irish life, if for no other reason than that the new political entities which have been created in Ireland were delimited roughly in accordance with sectarian groupings. Upon the ability of the majority in each enclave to arrive at an understanding with its minority depends, not only the harmonious management of domestic affairs, but the possibility of eventual reunion — or at least of a working arrangement in regard to problems common to both Irish Governments, the desirability of which is as freely admitted by Sir James Craig as by Mr. Cosgrave.
I
As usual in Ireland, things are working out in a way that confounds the prophets. Nobody who knew Southern Ireland expected that the transfer of power to a popular legislature would mean the squeezing out of the Protestant element. But few, if any, imagined that when at last an Irish State took shape a considerable proportion of Catholic priests would be perched dubiously on the fence while Protestant bishops united in singing its praises. The paradox, I admit, is less baffling than it may appear to outsiders. In theory the Treaty was a pis aller and even its signatories professed at the time to regard it merely as a stepping-stone to the Republic. Naturally a good many Sinn Fein priests, like a good many Sinn Fein politicians, while accepting the settlement, did not feel inclined to fling up their hats too exuberantly in its honor, and the ferocious vendettas of the civil war confirmed them in their views as to the wisdom of walking delicately.
Irish history provides singularly little evidence in support of the theory which presents the Catholic bishops as a body of extraordinarily astute politicians. On the contrary, of all the organizations which have played a part on the Irish political stage during the present generation, I think it would be difficult to find one with a longer tally of blunders to its account than the Catholic Church. These blunders were not due, as Protestants may be tempted to assume, to a passion for ecclesiastical domination or to a desire to subordinate to its will members of other communions. Nothing could be more fantastically false than the picture by Dean Inge in his recent survey of postwar England in which he depicts the Free State as ‘relapsing into barbarism’ under the tutelage of a crafty and tyrannical priesthood. Politically the Church in Ireland has followed rather than led, and when it took a line that ran counter to the popular will it has invariably met with the most uncompromising opposition from Catholics who were prepared to yield it unquestioning obedience in spiritual affairs. Daniel O’Connell, the greatest champion of its rights, declared he would as soon take his politics from Rome as his religion from Constantinople, and at one of his meetings during the Veto controversy effigies of the Catholic bishops who were hostile to his views were burned in the streets of Dublin by Catholic mobs. Leaders of all popular movements, from the Young Irelanders to Parnell and John Redmond, found themselves at some stage in their careers in conflict with the hierarchy, and none of them failed on this account to secure backing from the masses for their cause.
Priests in politics may be undesirable, but it is only fair to remember that throughout the nineteenth century without priests no effective political organization would have been possible, for the simple reason that over the greater part of the country they were the only class qualified by education and training to act as leaders. Not a little of the friction which has arisen of late years is due, I believe, to the slowness of the Church to realize that with the spread of education laymen are emerging who feel themselves competent to take in secular affairs the place which in the old days was allotted to the cleric as a matter of course.
I know Catholics who maintain that on purely ecclesiastical grounds the continuance of British rule offered more solid advantages to their Church. Under the old régime the chances of friction between laity and clergy were reduced to a minimum, while the British authorities, in order to ensure the smooth working of the administrative machine, found it good business to placate the hierarchy. A new Chief Secretary, on landing in Ireland, was less concerned to get in touch with lay political leaders than to discover exactly where he stood with the Archbishops of Armagh and Dublin. I do not suggest that the bishops individually were not believers in self-government, but as a body they were by no means so certain about its implications as the general run of curates and parish priests. Their decision to range themselves against the Parliamentarians after the Easter Rebellion was due less to their dislike of partition — which a few years later they swallowed without a protest — than to their fears of what they believed to be the anticlerical bias of leaders like Redmond, Dillon, and Devlin.
One of the turning points in modern Irish political history was the Maynooth declaration by the Catholic bishops, in the spring of 1918, that the Conscription Act recently passed through the Imperial Parliament was ‘an oppressive and inhuman law, which the Irish people have the right to resist by all the means that are consonant with the law of God.’ This action increased enormously the prestige of the Church, especially as the Coalition Cabinet, wisely shirking a conflict, made no attempt to enforce compulsory military service. Trouble began, however, when Sinn Fein, dropping passive resistance, resorted to physical force in order to establish the Republic. Throughout the AngloIrish struggle there was constant friction between the Republican leaders and churchmen who declined to admit that the shooting of police was morally justified. During the Conscription crusade a well-known theologian, Father Peter Finlay, S. J., laid down the doctrine that ‘laws of Parliament may be just or unjust, binding or not binding upon the conscience; and when we Catholics doubt their justice and binding force, we appeal, not to politicians or civil courts for guidance, but to the Catholic bishops. In this sense we set our bishops above Parliament and the laws of Parliament, as every true Christian sets his individual conscience.’
Apparently it was a different thing when episcopal pronouncements ran counter to popular sentiments. The Bishop of Cork (Dr. Cohalan), who toward the end of 1920 launched a sentence of excommunication against the murderers of policemen and others, was warned by the local Sinn Fein organization not to interfere in politics. Commenting on other ecclesiastical criticisms of the I. R. A. (Irish Republican Army) and its methods, a prominent Sinn Fein paper declared: ‘We are loath to accuse the bishops of treason, but it is time for Dail Eireann to assert itself.’
The heads of the Church never admitted that the I. R. A. shootings were justifiable; but some of them, as Mr. O’Hegarty — himself a thoroughgoing Separatist — admits in his book, The Victory of Sinn Fein, ‘mixed their ethics with politics and made the case worse.’ A good many priests left ethics out of the question altogether, and used language in pulpits and on platforms which could not be reconciled either with the teaching of their superiors or with the formulas of canon law.
II
In effect the Sinn Fein position may be described, I think not unfairly, as a practical acceptance of the fundamental principle of Protestantism, inasmuch as it maintained the right of private judgment and challenged the authority of the Church to declare certain issues to be matters of faith and morals. The clash became still more acute when Sinn Fein split over the Treaty. The bishops, as they were bound to do, denounced rebellion against an Irish government established by the will of the people. Republicans — or Irregulars, as they were now called by Sinn Feiners who accepted the Treaty — repudiated flatly the claim of the bishops to forbid the exercise of private judgment in relation to the question of whether it was obligatory upon Irish citizens to render allegiance to the Free State. They put forward a theologian of their own in the person of a Catholic curate, Father O’Flanagan, who had been suspended by his bishop for his political activities. Father O’Flanagan is still one of the pillars of militant Sinn Fein, and his periodic indictments of his ecclesiastical superiors at open-air meetings in the streets of Dublin surpass in pungency any utterance I have heard from Orange platforms. Ireland, he protests, is not priest-ridden but ‘bishopridden,’ and while Republican clergy are muzzled, their Free State fellows ‘are given a free leg, even to the extent of desecrating the altars of Almighty God.’ On one occasion I heard him assert in reference to an Irregular to whom the Church had denied burial. ‘I would rather go to Heaven with Denis Barry than to Hell with a procession of high ecclesiastics.’
Mr. de Valera, who sets up to be something of an amateur theologian, never seemed to me to be quite comfortable in alliance with Father O’Flanagan; and I imagine his political break with Miss McSwiney was sweetened by the reflection that it enabled him to part company with the redoubtable curate.
When the bishops began, in the phrase of one of their number, to ‘count the cost of the gunman’s holiday,’ they found themselves face to face with things even more objectionable than the oratory of Father O’Flanagan. In his Lenten Pastoral, 1923, issued after the final collapse of the armed revolt against the Free State, Cardinal Logue said that ‘the plague of bloodshed, destruction, pillage, rapine, robbery, even sordid theft . . . left in the shade even the most outrageous excesses of the Blackand-Tans.’ The Archbishop of Tuam, in a speech delivered about the same time, bewailed the fact that murder to-day is ‘almost commonplace’; as a distinguished Jesuit put it, ‘Men shot their fellow countrymen with as little compunction as they would shoot a snipe or pheasant.’
The gunman who killed for political reasons was more easily subdued than the host of imitators who, bettering his instruction, shot for private vengeance or personal profit. It sounds like a fable, but it is a true tale that a Dublin golfer, urging his caddy to look for something better than a blind-alley job, received the reply, ‘I’d be out of it to-morrow, sir, only I can’t get a revolver till I’m sixteen.’ And behind the gunman emerged the no less sinister figure of the maker of poteen. If one section of Irishmen inaugurates a political upheaval by burning police barracks, another finds it simpler and more profitable to darken the sky with the smoke of whiskey stills on every mountain side. Such is the pitch of proficiency which has been attained that, whereas we are importing German engineers, Belgian electricians, and Dutch builders, it was stated recently in a Donegal trial that our brewers of poteen are being offered fancy prices to cross the Atlantic and place their expert knowledge at the service of American moonshiners. In the old days the Church was strong enough to smash this traffic; up to the present the new breed of poteen-makers appear to care as little for its threats as its pleadings, though it is satisfactory to know they are acquiring a wholesome fear of the Civic Guards.
The amazing thing is that leaders of religious thought assumed that Ireland was an exception to the rule that the making of omelettes entails the breaking of eggs. Nothing is more certain than that revolutions, especially if they are fought on the lines of the Irish conflict, inevitably produce a backwash of sexual immorality. Almost the only prohibition imposed on the Black-and-Tans was that there must be no interference with women; in the very few cases where offenses of this kind were proved, ruthless measures were adopted by the British authorities. The hysteria generated by the struggle, together with the flood of illicit whiskey, has resulted in an increase of such offenses in the Free State, and illegitimate births are more numerous than under British rule. The Catholic Bishop of Galway declared a couple of years ago that he bowed his head with shame at the thought of the number of ‘lapses from virtue with their terrible consequences’ which had occurred in his diocese. ‘I know,’ he said, ‘that some of our Irish girls are becoming regular devils — girls who have gone on the streets of the big cities, who had been brought up in Catholic homes, but had become a scandal and disgrace to the countryside.’ I fear it is characteristic of a general refusal to face facts that the Bishop of Galway should lay the blame, not on our demoralization or on the inability of priests and presbyters to cope with it, but on Sunday papers, ‘foul stuff, the product of degenerate England.’
In the same way, in the old days, the parade of courtesans in Dublin streets after dark, which startled visitors, was always attributed to the immorality of the British garrison. The garrison has gone, but the courtesans remain. So confident is the Church that its precepts are an effective safeguard that the Free State authorities are debarred from taking measures to protect the health of their troops, which have been found necessary in other armies. The superior virtue of raw lads herded Into barracks may render such precautions superfluous, but the cold fact remains that venereal disease is now invading rural areas where it was formerly unknown.
III
When the Church came down on the Free State side of the fence, steps were taken to deal with anti-treatyite fanatics in its ranks. Father O’Flanagan was the only cleric who was deprived of his faculties, but a large number of others were summarily silenced, and representatives at Rome secured the transfer from Ireland to new and distant spheres of labor of members of monastic orders, mainly Dominicans and Franciscans, who had sided with the Republican activists. There was, however, a widespread tendency on the part of the clergy, largely in order to avoid friction with dissentients among their flocks, to keep clear of any contact with the Government — a course which not unnaturally caused them to lose influence with both sides. This attitude has been modified of late, and once again, as in the days of Parnell and Redmond, priests are appearing on platforms in support of a popular political movement, though it is now assumed, almost as a matter of course, that their part in the business is to play second fiddle to laymen.
Many Catholics hold the view that a concordat, such as that which existed in France, ought to be arranged between the Free State Government and the Vatican. I doubt if the proposal would commend itself to ministers, and I am certain it would have few attractions for the Church in Ireland, which already enjoys most of the advantages that it could hope to obtain from a formal concordat without its attendant limitations and restrictions. The clergy, though eligible, have been neither elected nor nominated to seats in the Oireachtas, and their influence is not nearly so powerful in the work of administration as it was under Dublin Castle. On the other hand, in legislative and administrative matters which have a bearing upon issues that the Church regards as its special preserve, Free State ministers pursue on their own initiative a line in keeping with that which the Church would adopt if its leaders wielded executive powers.
No episcopal pressure was required to induce the Oireachtas to prevent legislation in regard to divorce. I should say that under British rule Irish courts had no power to grant more than a judicial separation, and that divorce a vinculo matrimonii could be obtained only by private-bill legislation at Westminster, a procedure so costly as to be prohibitive to all save the wealthy few. Northern Ireland retains this method, with the difference that private divorce bills have now to pass through the local instead of the Imperial Parliament. The same course was open to the Free State, and it was a foregone conclusion that in neither the Dail nor the Senate would any measure of the kind have obtained even a first reading. To make assurance doubly sure, however, ministers proposed and carried a resolution in the popular Assembly directing that the standing orders should be so framed as to prevent the introduction of bills of divorce. This decision led to a tussle with the Senate, though the controversy turned not so much on whether facilities for divorce should be granted as on the constitutional point of whether the ministerial policy did not establish the dangerous precedent of legislating by means of standing orders.
The Protestant churches made a vigorous protest, but they did not push it to extremes, though the annulment of the Marlborough marriage strengthens their contention that, while Rome recognizes there are cases in which the bond should be loosed, Free State Protestants are denied relief. Much the most formidable opponent of the anti-divorce party is the poet, Mr. W. B. Yeats, whose speech in the Senate was an extraordinarily brilliant effort, which, however, gave as little satisfaction to orthodox Protestants as to orthodox Catholics, leaving their leaders, as was said at the time, ‘in one red burial blent.’ On the other hand, his fellow poet, Mr. George Russell (Æ), whom no one is likely to accuse of obscurantism, while objecting to the method adopted by the Government, took the line in his paper, the Irish Statesman, that the overwhelming majority of all creeds in Ireland were hostile to legislation that might serve to weaken the marriage tie, and that, in effect, the plea de minimis non curat lex covered the claims of the few who under the old system were rich enough to promote Parliamentary bills to secure divorce a vinculo.
The intellectuals are engaged in skirmishes with the churches on other subjects than divorce. Official Protestantism has always been suspicious of the literary movement on account of its nationalist sympathies; official Catholicism suggests that this lip service to nationalism is merely a device to cover a crusade in favor of paganism.
The charge is specifically made in an article by Archbishop Sheehan, ‘A Pagan Literary Movement,’ reprinted in the Irish Rosary for November 1926.
Our Dublin school, while professing to be Irish or Celtic, is neither one nor the other; it is but a toadstool growth on the ancient oak, a poisonous thing, skillfully charged with the subtle venom of the artistic calumniator. It is tinged with Protestant rancor, unrelieved by Protestant Christianity, and on a chemical analysis would be found to show traces of half-baked philosophies and half-held superstitions, mixed up with the squalid and unclean. Its disciples make Ireland their subject, their mine of copy, and pick up human beings from among our Catholic people. In these pages we sometimes appear as the victims of irrational terror adding ‘shivering prayer to prayer,’ or, as in Robinson’s Whiteheaded Boy, as a gang of sickening snobs, a filthy crowd of sanctimonious hypocrites, hiding a very sordid soul under the garb of oral religion.
Dr. Sheehan acquits the non-Catholic leaders of the movement, Yeats, Russell, and Stephens, of the charge of ‘personal grossness,’ but condemns them for ‘the patronage which they have extended to the grossness of others.’ I confess I am a little puzzled when I find that the writers whose grossness they are denounced for applauding are all products of Catholic training. It was certainly not Protestant rancor that inspired the picture of Dublin in James Joyce’s Ulysses, a vision bitten in with corrosive acid, beside which the bitterest Protestant onslaught is a decoration in rose color.
There is little to pick and choose between the Irish churches in their attitude to literature, the main difference between them being that the guides to whom Catholics look assume that if English influences were eliminated the source of the evil would dry up, while Protestants have not the same faith in the beneficent effect of Gaelic formulas. Catholic Kilkenny declines to place Bernard Shaw’s books in its public library. Not so long ago a leading Dublin newspaper dealt with a performance of Getting Married under the heading, ‘Shavian Slush.’ Protestant Belfast pronounced a similar ban against Nietzsche years before the war. Northern parsons use precisely the same language about imported Sunday papers as Southern priests, though I admit they have not gone quite so far as the Catholic Truth Society, which has given its official blessing to a scheme for licensing venders of books and papers that in practice would subject the sale of reading matter to restrictions almost as severe as those which limit the purchase of laudanum and cocaine.
There is a spice of truth as well as wit in the remark of a Dublin cynic, that Ireland has less to fear to-day from Anglicization than from ‘Los Angelesization.’ We are, however, taking measures to safeguard against this danger. In films exhibited in the Free State nothing is permitted to appear which would suggest that such an institution as a divorce court exists anywhere in the world. In our picture theatres all marriages are indissoluble, and irregular unions are unknown — a prohibition which ensured the banning of Chaplin’s ‘ Woman of Paris’ until by excisions and changes which reduced the story to nonsense the position of the heroine was regularized. This kind of thing is carried so far that the prolongation of kisses is forbidden, and film lovers, instead of clinging to one another ecstatically, are constrained under the stern frown of the cinema censor merely to touch lips and part.
These things are the offspring less of Puritanism than of prudery, which is nowadays almost the one bond the heads of all our creeds have in common. Their sense of perspective is so warped by this bias that robbery under arms produces no fiercer ecclesiastical tirades than those directed against the users of lip sticks; and to listen to the thunders provoked by the short skirts and artificial-silk stockings of the latterday country girl one would never imagine that the Irish peasant woman had gone kilted to the knee for centuries, and in the Gaelic-speaking districts, whose chastity is exalted, wears as a rule no stockings at all.
Speculative unbelief, against which Catholicism elsewhere girds on its armor, does not trouble the peace of the Irish priesthood. Up to the present the only hint of a challenge to their authority has been in political matters; and I think the events of the last five years have convinced the clergy that to insist upon clerical leadership in the management of secular affairs is to run the risk of sacrificing the substance for the shadow. Educated Catholics deplore in private the parochial outlook of the majority of their spiritual guides, and resent their neglect of literature and art and their suspiciousness of innovations that do not conform to stereotyped ideas. Some day these things may become a menace; so far they have proved a source of strength rather than of weakness, for it is largely because the preferences and prejudices of the great majority of Irish priests are also those of their flocks that their pastoral authority is so unquestioningly accepted.
IV
It was said during the Home Rule campaign that the two most surprised people in Ireland the morning after self-government became a fact would be the Protestant who found his throat had not been cut during the night by his Catholic neighbor and the Catholic who found he had to go to work as usual. This was certainly true of the Free State. Whereas a large body of Catholics took up arms in protest, Protestants speedily made the discovery that, in the words of one of their prelates, ‘men of all creeds are freer than ever before to dedicate themselves to the service of their country.’ Fifty years earlier the final overthrow of Protestant ascendancy by the Disestablishment Act, instead of destroying the Church, as all its spokesmen had prophesied, proved its salvation by deepening its spiritual life and increasing the devotion of its members. The new departure breaks the last evil tradition of the pre-Disestablishment era by ending the abnormal state of affairs under which the religious minority in the South was synonymous with the political minority. Free State parties are still in a state of flux, but, whatever their final form may be, it is certain that the line of cleavage will not be sectarian.
The future of Southern Protestantism depends upon Protestants themselves. ‘Our Church,’ the Archbishop of Dublin said, ‘will have the position she is worth — that and no more, but no less.’ The tact of its leaders and the unanimity with which they have rallied to the support of the new régime have done much to increase their prestige and extend their influence. It is well there are skilled hands to take the tiller, for the prospects of smooth sailing are anything but hopeful. There has been no attack on rights or privileges, nor is there likely to be, but the exodus of so many of the richer Protestants is a heavy drain, and the problem is complicated by the fact that a large proportion of the new generation seek abroad better livings than can be made at home. And this loss is complicated by mixed marriages, for in recent years Catholics are prohibited from entering into wedlock with Protestants unless provision is made that the children of the union shall be brought up in the Catholic faith.
The worst fear of many Protestants to-day is that they may be forced to sacrifice things that seem to them infinitely more important for the barren honor — as they regard it — of laying the foundations of a Gaelic civilization. I doubt if the fear is well founded, because, as far as I can see, the majority of Catholics are not particularly attracted by the idea of building a Gaelic Jerusalem in Ireland’s green and pleasant land, and have yet to be convinced by the language enthusiasts that the speaking of Irish is essential to national salvation. Curiously enough, it was Protestants who were the most strenuous hotgospelers of this dogma. The Gaelic League owes more to the missionary zeal of Dr. Douglas Hyde, the son of a Church of Ireland rector, than to anyone else; the historical background of the movement was provided mainly by Standish O’Grady, another Protestant; non-Catholics like Synge, W. B. Yeats, Æ., Lady Gregory, and James Stephens created the literary atmosphere from which the new faith derived its sustenance.
Sinn Fein nailed the language flag to the mast in its quarrel with Great Britain, but with relatively few exceptions its leaders knew little more of the tongue than the stumbling sentences which served, in Mr. Bernard Shaw’s phrase, as a Gaelic collect to preface their English speeches. If they were not prepared to learn Irish themselves, they soothed their consciences, once they stepped into office, by decreeing that the new generation should be dosed with it in double measure. I think few will now deny that the process of forcible feeding was speeded up too fast, Only a minority of elementary teachers had mastered the rudiments of Gaelic, and the short spell of intensive training which was all that was possible before the subject became part of the curriculum was wholly inadequate. The result is that throughout the country to-day bemuddled instructors are dinning into the ears of dazed pupils, with the aid of absurdly bad textbooks, what they call Irish, but what is at the best a kind of Volapük, stuffed so full of borrowed words and phrases that it has been sarcastically described as ‘a language intelligible only to those who know English.’
The cry is now being raised in certain quarters that compulsory Irish in Protestant schools amounts to an act of political and religious tyranny, and it is urged that its imposition constitutes a violation of the Anglo-Irish treaty. This seems to me sheer nonsense. So far, I am glad to say, the heads of the Church of Ireland have not given it official backing — indeed, the crusade of the enthusiasts is directed as much against their own bishops as against the Gaelic League. They protest, no doubt sincerely, that they are not animated by sectarian motives, but it is obvious to anyone who knows Ireland that their agitation, if it develops as it has begun, will be used to rekindle the dying embers of sectarianism, and equally certain that if it does, and if Irish becomes a bone of contention between the creeds, we may bid farewell to any hope of obtaining a modification of the existing educational programme.
If there has been no organized campaign on the Catholic side against the Gaelicizing of education, there has been no lack of plain speaking by Catholics, large numbers of whom are discovering, to their horror, that after three years of the new system their children are leaving school with a knowledge of neither Irish nor English. The worst blot on the Free State is that since it came into being the standard of education in the primary schools has dropped to a lower level than at any time within living memory. Other causes may be at work as well as the overloading of the programme with Irish, but popular opinion is convinced that the worst of the mischief is due to Irish and Irish alone.
Under an educational system where anything in the nature of popular control existed, I am satisfied this state of affairs could not have arisen. But in Southern Ireland the churches, Catholic and Protestant alike, are agreed that bureaucratic dictatorship is infinitely preferable, from their point of view, to even the shadow of democratic rule.
Even so mild a proposal as a local rate for the cleaning and heating of schools, which would still leave the churches in effective control of the teaching, was rejected lest it might prove the thin end of the wedge. Recently a body of elementary teachers declared that the country schools, all of which are under clerical management, were ‘a standing disgrace to a civilized community’ in their failure to provide in many cases even the most primitive form of sanitary arrangements for the wretched boys and girls, who were nevertheless expected to acquire habits of cleanliness and the moral virtues. Clerical dominance may have safeguarded faith, but in the light of the last ten years it does not seem to be equally successful in regard to morals, and I imagine no one will dispute that the general level of Irish education is disgracefully low.
V
Northern Ireland, unlike the Free State, has used its self-governing powers to set up local educational authorities, who are empowered to establish rates to supplement the contributions from the Central Government. It was laid down that teaching was to be undenominational, but the Protestant churches by a well-directed organization compelled the Northern Cabinet to provide for Bible teaching at the State’s expense, thus securing their full demand, while neatly dishing the Catholics, who have almost ceased to count for the time being as a factor in Ulster politics as a result of their folly in yielding to the clamor of their extremists to boycott the new Government.
Presbyterians have also scored heavily over the Church of Ireland, which is handicapped by the fact that, while the great majority of its hearers are inside the Six Counties, the Church is organized on a basis which allots two thirds of its bishops to dioceses in the Free State. The practical abolition of landlordism has also weakened its political as well as its social influence in the North, for the leaders of Belfast business, who have obtained control of the new governmental machine, are Presbyterians almost to a man, whereas even twenty years ago the Episcopalians had almost a monopoly of parliamentary representation.
There is no open friction between the denominations, nor, I think, is it likely to arise, unless the right of Presbyterianism to lead is disputed by other Protestant sections. The holders of this creed made it clear from the first that they were determined, not merely to be the power behind the throne, but to insist that ministers should yoke themselves openly to the chariot of the Church. They are now seeking to better their score over the Education Act by compelling Sir James Craig, in spite of his declaration that so long as he is Prime Minister he will not touch controversial temperance legislation, to introduce a local-option bill on the Scottish model, preliminary to a measure of prohibition as drastic as the Volstead Act.
Presbyterianism is the more determined to raise the Prohibition banner as its official leaders see in a movement of this kind—upon which, theoretically at least, all their sections are in agreement — the best hope of avoiding a bitter quarrel upon questions of doctrine. In principle Irish Presbyterians still look to Scotland as their spiritual home, but of late years American influences have colored in an increasing degree their outlook, and provided them with inspiration and driving force. The Prohibition crusade established new bonds between Ulster and the Middle West; and it was a foregone conclusion that Fundamentalism would make converts in the Six Counties, more especially as it was not a question of transplanting something new, but rather of applying the methods of large-scale production to a native article.
The first onslaught of the Ulster Fundamentalists was inspired by divinity students, who complained that some of their professors were introducing modernist heresies into their lectures. This was followed by a hail of leaflets issued by a body known as the Presbyterian Bible Standards League, under titles such as ‘S.O.S. to Irish Presbyterians,’ ‘Faith or Infidelity: Which Is It To Be?’ ‘The Assembly’s College a Seed Bed of Rationalism.’ The accusers refused to bring forward proof of their charges, which, according to a committee appointed to investigate them, were based on the assumption that ‘when a professor chooses a textbook he commits himself to every statement in it.’
The attack on individual professors, however, was only a preliminary to a concerted campaign against the recommendations of a committee appointed by the Assembly to revise the questions put at ordination and to alter the formula of subscription to the Confession of Faith. It is objected that the term ‘Word of God,’ in reference to the Scriptures, and also the doctrine of the Holy Trinity have been so whittled down that ‘any oldfashioned Unitarian could subscribe to the proposed questions.’ Another grievance is that the committee declined to make the Virgin Birth one of the tests at ordination, in spite of the fact that ‘the great Presbyterian Church of the United States . . . has added this question.’
When the issue came up for discussion at the General Assembly last June, the public galleries were packed with a mob which howled down members who had the temerity to speak in favor of revising the doctrinal constitution. After prolonged and passionate controversy, the Assembly shirked a decision by referring the matter to a reconstituted committee, which is to report next June. To judge by the ardor with which the Fundamentalists are mobilizing their resources, the prospects of a compromise are almost negligible. The spirit of faction, which in Catholic Ireland makes havoc of political combinations, finds in the Presbyterian North its most congenial expression in heresy hunts and theological battles. Once the spirit is properly roused, few things are more difficult than to restrain the fury of internal divisions from destroying the foundations of the Church. It is, I am convinced, in the hope of avoiding or at least of postponing domestic conflict that the temperance reform issue is being pressed with such vigor. Whatever damage may be done to the political fetish of Unionist solidarity is in the eyes of the shrewder Presbyterian leaders a small thing in comparison with pursuing to the bitter end a struggle that might endanger the Ark of the Covenant.
VI
A survey of the Irish churches in action does not provide much evidence in support of the view that, if the whole island had been included in a single political system, leaders of the various creeds would have speedily adjusted their differences, to the extent at least of ensuring the smooth working of the new state machinery. Everything, I fear, points to the conclusion that, instead of the agreement to differ which is now gradually taking shape, even minor political clashes would have been complicated by the introduction of sectarian bias and bitterness. Partition has certainly not eliminated this bias, but the controversies between Republicans and the Catholic bishops and Sir James Craig’s troubles with official Presbyterianism are opening the eyes of Irishmen to the fact — which ten years ago would have been regarded as the wildest paradox — that the political dominance of a creed creates difficulties for its adherents, which may be even more perplexing than the effects of this supremacy upon members of other communions. The prospects of Irish unity, as I see it, depend less upon the willingness to offer political concessions than upon the ability of the majority in the Free State and Northern Ireland to delimit the sphere of their respective churches in secular affairs, on lines that will make possible the fullest and freest coöperation of citizens of all creeds — and none — in the service of the nation.