The Irish Race in the Past and the Present | Page 6

to us. Yet, the smallest European nationality is, in truth, more
interesting and instructive than the vast Celestial Empire can ever
be--whose long annals are all compassed within a few hundred pages of
a frigid narrative, void of life, and altogether void of soul. But why do
we select, among so many others, the Irish nation, which is so little
known, of such little influence, whose history occupies only a few lines
in the general annals of the world, and whose very ownership has rested
in the hands of foreigners for centuries?
We select it, first, because it is and always has been thoroughly
Catholic, from the day when it first embraced Christianity; and this,
under the circumstances, we take to be the best proof, not only of
supreme good sense, but, moreover, of an elevated, even a sublime
character. In their martyrdom of three centuries, the Irish have
displayed the greatness of soul of a Polycarp, and the simplicity of an
Agnes. And the Catholicity which they have always professed has been,
from the beginning, of a thorough and uncompromising character. All
modern European nations, it is true, have had their birth in the bosom
of the Church. She had nursed them all, educated them all, made them
all what they were, when they began to think of emancipating
themselves from her; and the Catholic, that is, the Christian religion, in
its essence, is supernatural; the creed of the apostles, the sacramental
system; the very history of Christianity, transport man directly into a
region far beyond the earth.
Wherever the Christian religion has been preached, nations have
awakened to this new sense of faith in the supernatural, and it is there

they have tasted of that strong food which made and which makes them
still so superior to all other races of men. But, as we shall see, in no
country has this been the case so thoroughly as in Ireland. Whatever
may have been the cause, the Irish were at once, and have ever since
continued, thoroughly impregnated with supernatural ideas. For several
centuries after St. Patrick the island was "the Isle of Saints," a place
midway between heaven and earth, where angels and the saints of
heaven came to dwell with mere mortals. The Christian belief was
adopted by them to the letter; and, if Christianity is truth, ought it not to
be so? Such a nation, then, which received such a thorough Christian
education--an education never repudiated one iota during the ages
following its reception--deserves a thorough examination at our hands.
We select it, secondly, because the Irish have successfully refused ever
since to enter into the various currents of European opinion, although,
by position and still more by religion, they formed a part of Europe.
They have thus retained a character of their own, unlike that of any
other nation. To this day, they stand firm in their admirable
stubbornness; and thus, when Europe shall be shaken and tottering,
they will still stand firm. In the words of Moore, addressed to his own
country:
"The nations have fallen and thou still art young; Thy sun is just rising
when others are set; And though slavery's cloud o'er thy morning hath
hung, The full noon of freedom shall beam round thee yet."
That constant refusal of the Irish to fall in with the rapid torrent of
European thought and progress, as it is called, is the strangest
phenomenon in their history, and gives them at first an outlandish look,
which many have not hesitated to call barbarism. We hope thoroughly
to vindicate their character from such a foul aspersion, and to show this
phenomenon as the secret cause of their final success, which is now all
but secured; and this feature alone of their national life adds to their
character an interest which we find in no other Christian nation.
We select it, thirdly, because there is no doubt that the Irish is the most
ancient nationality of Western Europe; and although, as in the case of
the Chinese, the advantage of going up to the very cradle of mankind is
not sufficient to impart interest to frigid annals, when that prerogative
is united to a vivid life and an exuberant individuality, nothing
contributes more to render a nation worthy of study than hoariness of

age, and its derivation from a certain and definite primitive stock.
It is true that, in reading the first chapters of all the various histories of
Ireland, the foreign reader is struck and almost shocked by the
dogmatism of the writers, who invariably, and with a truly Irish
assurance, begin with one of the sons of Japhet, and, following the
Hebrew or Septuagint chronology, describe without flinching the
various colonizations of Erin, not omitting the synchronism of Assyrian,
Persian, Greek, and Roman history.