The-papacy-its-history-dogmas-genius-and-prospects-wylie

490 INFLUENCE OF POPERY ON NATIONS." Take up the map of the world," says Dr Hyan, RomanCatholic bishop of Limerick ;" trace from pole to pole, andfrom hemisphere to hemisphere ; and you will not meet sowretched a country as Ireland." But to what is this wretchednessowing ? There is no man who acknowledges the leastTorce in the principles we have demonstrated and the exampleswe have adduced, who can help seeing that the miseryof Ireland is owing to its Popery. On the other sideof St George's Channel it is still the dark ages. There mindis as stagnant as before the breaking out of the Reformation.Nor has Ireland shared in the great industrial revolutionof the sixteenth century, and vainly struggles to rivalinwealth and comfort a country like England, which possessesthe intelligence and wields the arts of the nineteenth.Her Popery has degraded and demoralized her ; and out ofher demoralization have sprung her sloth, her improvidence,her crime, and her misery. It is hard to say whether hervices or her priests now eat most into her bowels. Wherethe landlord cannot gather his rents, nor the tax-gatherer hisdues, the priest collects his.Popery can glean in the reareven of famine and death : she has neither a heart to pitynor an eye to weep, but only an iron hand to gather up thecrumbs on which the widow and the fatherless should feed.Compare Scotland with Ireland. How poor the one, despiteher immense natural advantages ; how rich the other, despiteher no less immense natural disadvantages. We seePopery, inthe one case, converting a garden into a wilderness,darkened by ignorance, swarming with mendicants,polluted with crime ; while the wail of its misery ringsceaselessly throughout the civilized world.In the other, wesee Protestantism converting a land of swamps and forestsinto a fruitful and flourishing realm, the home of the arts,and the dwelling of a people renowned throughout the worldfor their shrewdness, their industry, and their virtues.Or we may take another contrast. At the one extremityof the European continent stands Italy ; at the other isScotland ;—the centre of Roman Catholicism the one, the