perpetrated with cruelties which were so utterly uncalled-for, so
barbarously inhuman, that they might well have excited the burning
indignation of a heathen or a Turk.

These men were the priests of the old faith which the Irish had received
so many hundred years before, and which neither death nor torments could
induce them to forsake. I shall mention but two of these outrages,
premising that there were few places in Ireland where similar scenes had
not been enacted. In the year 1588 three Franciscan fathers were
martyred, who had devoted themselves for some years previously to the
spiritual necessities of the people. Many Catholic families from Carlow,
Wexford, and Wicklow had been obliged to fly into the mountainous
districts of Leinster, to escape further persecution. The three fathers,
John Molloy, Cornelius Dogherty, and Wilfred Ferral, were unwearied in
their ministrations. They spoke to these poor creatures of the true
Home, where all their sufferings should be rewarded with eternal joy--of
how wise it was to exchange the passing things of time for the enduring
goods of eternity; they visited the sick, they consoled the dying; above
all, they administered those life-giving sacraments so precious to the
Catholic Christian; and if, like the holy martyrs, persecuted by heathen
emperors, they were obliged to offer the adorable sacrifice on a rock or
in a poor hut, it was none the less acceptable to God, and none the less
efficacious to the worshippers. These shepherds of the flock were
specially obnoxious to the Government. They preached patience, but they
were accused of preaching rebellion; they confirmed their people in
their faith, but this was supposed to be equivalent to exciting them to
resist their oppressors. The three fathers were at last seized by a
party of cavalry, in a remote district of the Queen's county. They were
tied hand and foot, and conducted with every species of ignominy to the
garrison of Abbeyleix. Here they were first flogged, then racked, and
finally hanged[451], drawn, and quartered. The soldiers, brutalized as
man can be brutalized by familiarity with scenes of blood, scoffed at
the agonies they inflicted, and hardened themselves for fresh
barbarities. But there were men who stood by to weep and pray; and
though they were obliged to conceal their tears, and to breathe their
prayers softly into the eternal and ever-open ear of God, the lash which
mangled the bodies of the men they reve