generation of Irish priests, who, like the [Greek: lampadephoroi] of old
in the Athenian games, will take the torch of faith from our hands and
carry it to the Acropolis of Heaven,--clean-cut, small of stature,
keen-faced, bicycle-riding, coffee-drinking, encyclopaedic young fellows,
who will give a good account of themselves, I think, in the battles of
the near future. It is highly amusing to a disinterested spectator, like
myself, to watch the tolerant contempt with which the older generation
regards the younger. They have as much contempt for coffee as for
ceremonies, and I think their mistakes in the latter would form a
handsome volume of _errata_, or add another appendix to our valuable
compendiums. To ask one of these old men to pass a cup of coffee is
equivalent to asking a Hebrew of the strict observance to carve a ham,
or a Hindoo to eat from the same dish with a Christian. And many other
objects that the passing generation held in high esteem are "gods of the
Gentiles" to the younger. They laugh profanely at that aureole of
distinction that used hang around the heads of successful students,
declaring that a man's education only commences when he leaves college,
and that his academical training was but the sword exercise of the
gymnasium; and they speak dreadful things about evolution and modern
interpretation, and the new methods of hermeneutics, and polychrome
Bibles; and they laugh at the idea of the world's creation in six days;
and altogether, they disturb and disquiet the dreams of the staid and
stately veterans of the Famine years, and make them forecast a dismal
future for Ireland when German metaphysics and coffee will first impair,
and then destroy, the sacred traditions of Irish faith. And yet, these
young priests inherit the best elements of the grand inheritance that
has come down to them. Their passionate devotion to their faith is only
rivalled by their passionate devotion to the Motherland. Every one of
them belongs to that great world-wide organization of Priests Adorers,
which, cradled in the dying years of our century, will grow to a
gigantic stature in the next; for at last it has dawned upon the world
that around this sacred doctrine and devotion, as around an oriflamme,
the great battles of the twentieth century will rage. And they have as
tender and passionate a love for the solitary isle in the wintry western
seas as ever brought a film to the eyes of exile, or lighted the battle
fires in