are our countrymen." He pointed down into the lower deck, where, lying prostrate in various degrees of intoxication, were four or five cattle dealers. They had sought out the warmth of the boiler during the night; and there they lay, unwashed and unkempt, in rather uninviting conditions. Their magnificent cattle, fed on Irish pastures, were going to feed the mouths of Ireland's masters, and tramped and lowed and moaned in hideous discord for food, and clashed their horns together as the vessel rolled on the waves.'

It will be seen that Father Sheehan does not blink facts. Luke's entry to London up the great sea avenue, which is also the great sewer of the nations, is described with the same mixture of hostility and admiration; and the visions of his first London days, when he sees the huge city that swelters round him hanging like a goitrous wen on the neck of Britannia, are reasonably enough set down to unaccustomed nerves and disordered digestion. Still, the working of this vast machinery where men go about solitary in multitudes depressed and distressed him.

'He only felt dimly that he was carried on, on, on in the whirl and tumult of some mighty mechanism; that the whir of revolving wheels, the vibration of belts, the thunder of engines, the hiss of steam, were everywhere. And that from all this tremendous energy were woven fair English tapestries-stately palaces and ancestral forests, trim villas and gardens like Eastern carpets-and that the huge machinery tossed aside also its refuse and slime-the hundreds and thousands that festered and perished in the squalor of the midright cities. For over all England, even in midsummer, hangs a blue haze, and over its cities the aer bruno, in which the eye of the poet saw floating the spirits of the lost.

'He stepped from the silences of God, and the roar of London was in his ears.'

Gradually, however, Luke began to identify himself with the machinery. He had success as a preacher and lecturer, and his parishioners made him welcome. The home-circles seemed to him dull, yet their kindliness penetrated his nature, and it began to seem to him that there was between the two races only a sheet of tissue-paper, but politicians ' and journalists have daubed it over with the visions of 'demoniacs.' Under the new influences he was drawn more to the platform, less to the pulpit; talked freely of the Zeitgeist; laid it down that the whole trend of human thought is to reconcile revelation with intellect, and out of the harmony to evolve a new and hopeful instauration ' of human blessedness '-in which renascence Catholicism must take its rightful place, and speak boldly, with large

6

'free interpretations of natural and supernatural revela'tions'-in short, must modify itself in accordance with the Anglo-Saxon and individualist ideals. In the meanwhile his bishop transferred him from London slums to a cathedral town, where he saw the beauty of England, and became part of an agreeable and highly cultured society of religious eclectics-Anglicans and Romans-who encouraged him to extend his sphere of thought and of reading. From these surroundings he was recalled home to his sister's wedding.

He went south from Dublin through a land of rich pastures, ruined abbeys and castles, and deserted cabins. The side-car that met him at the station looked old and shabby, the horse unclipped. He had returned home changed. The first thing that vexed him was to hear of a new curate who despised the Canon's methods of improving the country and put his whole faith in the League. Luke was now entirely of the Canon's way of thinking; and at his sister's wedding, when the house was filled, and a deal of whisky was being drunk among the fiddling and the piping and the dancing, he was shocked by the spectacle of many beggars who had congregated to the feast. At the house of his friend Father Martin he said so, and a discussion arose over the principles of political economy. Before it was done, Luke had enunciated the generally accepted principle that the true end of human action is the elevation and perfection of the race, with the corollary that it is England's destiny 'to bring all humanity, even the most degraded, into the happy circle of civilisation.' Father Martin's reply was the astounding proposition that whereas the Spaniards and the Portuguese might claim to have conserved, raised up, ' and illuminated fallen races,' England's mission was only to destroy and corrupt. One does not expect much, but surely Father Martin (or Father Sheehan) might be aware of what has been done where every Babu is a monument of British civilisation: surely he might have heard of the civilising work which another branch of the Anglo-Saxon race has been called upon to accomplish in the Philippines. Luke, feeling all this, gives up his compatriot in despair. But it must be said that if Luke champions England in Ireland, he is not slow to put the other aspect of the case in England. His ministrations were by no means limited to the rich; he had a flock of Irish and Italians who ignored 'the great pagan virtues of thrift and cleanliness.'

Father

Sheehan neatly sums up the racial antithesis in a couple of pregnant speeches :

'A family of Hirish peddlers, sa, and a family of Hitalian horgan grinders. They are very untidy, sa, in their 'abits.'

'Thim English, your reverence, they're haythens. They don't go to church, mass, or meeting. They think of nothing but what they ate and drink.'

Luke's sympathies were not those of the Charity Organisation Society; and when, as gaol visitor, he came in contact with the remorseless operation of English law, with its heavy punishment of offences against property, he cried out against it, only to be told by one of his cultivated mentors that his countrymen were curiously sympathetic with crime -a lawless race. He retorted, not without some show of truth, that Carlyle, not Christ, is the prophet of the English 'people.' Substantially, however, he came back to Ireland from his foreign mission a convert to the Anglo-Saxon ideal, and bent upon spreading the light. It cannot be said that the result was an entire success. The very poor parish to which he was sent as curate seemed to him Siberia; his superior, the devout, unprogressive, and extremely uncultivated old peasant priest, was unendurable, and the people offended him with their slovenly ways and their servile courtesy. Finally, in his zeal for reform he roused a hornet's nest. A gross neglect of punctuality, and a breach of the rules of the diocese which forbade the offering of drink at a funeral, gave him the chance to make an example he let the corpse go to the grave unattended. And in a month's time he was removed in promotion to a model parish-saddened, but still faithful to ideals of progress.

Here for the first time he secured a certain popularity by encouraging a revolt from the habit of servility. The Rossmore branch of the League, on Luke's motion, bound itself not to take off hats to any man in future except the priests. The result was an amusing piece of comedy, and a triumph for the diplomacy of the ould gineral's' daughter, ending in friendly relations between Luke and the 'ould gineral himself, the unpopular local magnate at whom the League's resolution had been aimed. And this only paved the way to worse trouble, for the ladies of the big house, at Luke's suggestion, began to civilise the poor, and endeavour to replace the shocking daubs representing patriots and saints by pleasantly coloured and well-drawn illustrations from the

London picture-papers. And Luke found himself accused of countenancing the 'souping' proselytiser.

However, this is in a manner accidental; the real incompatibility lies deeper. He preaches to his congregation of justice, temperance, punctuality, foresight-the great 'natural virtues which must be the foundation of the

'supernatural superstructure.' And the people are only puzzled.

'Begor, he must be very fond of the money. He's always talkin' about it. Post-offices and savings banks, an' intherest. Why doesn't he spake to us of the Sacred Heart, or our Holy Mother, or say somethin' to rise us and help us over the week?'

What completes the puzzle is his liberality. Why he should always be ready to give, and yet furious if an old woman comes to sit in his kitchen and lifts a handful of potatoes while dinner is getting ready, passes their comprehension. And poor Luke is driven to the conclusion that ' a man cannot do his duty in Ireland and remain popular.' The only priest who has succeeded in creating progress is Canon Murray; he has really raised the standard of living. But that phrase is a red rag to the Canon's new curate, Father Cussen. The standard of living! That appears to 'be the one idea of your modern progress-the worship of 'the body, called otherwise the religion of humanity.' Modern progress! But what is modern progress? Mammon worship, says Father Cussen. He has the courage of his convictions, and contrasts the Neapolitan lazzarone with the British miner, not to the advantage of the latter. Here is plainly an end of argument; but we may give the statement of the opposing views. Luke makes the natural answer that the Briton is a producer, a being to respect; and even if it can be argued that the idle Neapolitan, with his pleasures, his enthusiasms, and his religion may perhaps be the happier, yet the Briton is evidently the higher type, because he is serving humanity.

""Now look here, Delmege," said Father Cussen, "I don't want to hurt you, but that's all cant and rot, the cant and rubbish of those who are for ever dictating to the world what the Church of God alone can perform. You know as well as I that all this modern enthusiasm about humanity is simply a beggar's garb for the hideous idols of a godless world. You know there is no charity but in the Church of God. All the humanitarianism outside is simply political selfpreservation, with the interest of the atom lost in the interests of the State. And if you want a proof, go to your prisons, go to your workhouses, or go down to your ports of lading, and see paupers and

helpless maniacs dumped on your Irish shores, because, after giving their best years to build up the Temple of Mammon in England and America, their wretched support, half a crown a week, would lessen the majesty of the mighty god! There is the huge fiction of Protestantism-the godless abstraction-the State, humanity, the race, &c. Never a word about the majesty of the individual soul!"

"That's all fine rhetoric, Cussen," said Luke," and fine rhetoric is the bane of our race. But whilst all your theories are depopulating the villages and towns of Munster, Belfast is leaping with giant strides towards prosperity and affluence."

""One moment," said Father Cussen. "Our southern towns and villages are being depopulated. Why? Because the great god, Mammon, is sending his apostles and missionaries amongst us; because every letter from America is an appeal to the cupidity and lust for pleasure, which is displacing the Spartan simplicity and strength of our race. The gas-lit attractions of New York and Chicago are rivalling successfully the tender, chaste beauties of Irish life and Irish landscapes. It is because all the chaste simplicities of home life are despised for the meretricious splendours of city life that our people are fleeing from their motherland. But you spoke of Belfast?

"Yes," said Luke. "While all down here is a slough of despond and misery, there in the North you have a metropolis of splendour, and wealth, and progress."

""Progress, again. In heaven's name, man, are you a Christian and a Catholic?"i

Exactly. From the point of view of 'a Christian and a Catholic' London, Birmingham, New York, Chicago even, is not worth Lisnalee-or Bethlehem. It is a preposterous saying, and we cannot see how Father Sheehan's young priest returned to the darkness of superstition. Nevertheless, he returned, and learnt to believe that the poor in goods, in heart, and in knowledge were the superiors of himself.

'He wanted to lift them up, and lo! there they were on the summits of the eternal hills far above him. He desired to show them all the sweetness and light of life; and behold! they were already walking in the gardens of eternity! He was preaching the thrift of money to the misers of grace. Where was the use of talking about economising to a people whose daily fancies swept them abroad to regions where time was never counted? And the value of money to a race who, if parsimonious and frugal, became so through a contempt of physical comfort, and who regarded the death of a rich man as the culmination of all earthly misfortune?'

Some of the causes which completed his retrograde conversion may be noted. The first and chief was the disclosure of a young girl's strange act of self-devotion for a superstitious motive. As a sacrifice on behalf of her brother's