rtain
nations, she depends on the aid of these nations. Religion alone cannot
civilise men, or secure its own conquest. It promotes civilisation where
it has power; but it has not power where its way is not prepared. Its
civilising influence is chiefly indirect, and acts by its needs and
wants as much as by the fulness of its ideas. So Christianity extends
itself by the aid of the secular power, relying, not on the victories of
Christian arms, but on the progress of institutions and ideas that
harmonise with ecclesiastical freedom. Hence, those who have most
actively served the interests of the Church are not always those who
have been most faithful to her doctrines. The work which the Goth and
the Frank had done on the continent of Europe the Normans came to do in
England, where it had been done before but had failed, and in Ireland,
where neither Roman nor German influences had entered.

Thus the theory of nationality, unknown to Catholic ages, is
inconsistent both with political reason and with Christianity, which
requires the dominion of race over race, and whose path was made
straight by two universal empires. The missionary may outstrip, in his
devoted zeal, the progress of trade or of arms; but the seed that he
plants will not take root, unprotected by those ideas of right and duty
which first came into the world with the tribes who destroyed the
civilisation of antiquity, and whose descendants are in our day carrying
those ideas to every quarter of the world. It was as impossible to
realise in Ireland the mediaeval notions of ecclesiastical liberty
without a great political reform, as to put an end to the dissolution of
society and the feuds of princes without the authority of a supreme
lord.

There is one institution of those days to which Mr. Goldwin Smith has
not done entire justice.

It is needless to say that the Eric, or pecuniary composition for
blood, in place of capital or other punishment, which the Brehon law
sanctioned, is the reproach of all primitive codes, and of none. It
is the first step from the license of savage revenge to the ordered
justice of a regular law (p. 41).

Pecuniary composition for blood belongs to an advanced period of defined
and regular criminal jurisprudence. In the lowest form of civil society,
when the State is not yet distinct from the family, the family is
compelled to defend itself; and the only protection of society is the
vendetta. It is the private