every possible exertion for the safety of Europe ... and
then you, and ten other such boobies as you, call out 'for
God's sake, do not think of raising cavalry and infantry in
Ireland....' They interpret the Epistle to Timothy in a
different manner from what we do!"

"'They eat a bit of wafer every Sunday, which they call their
God!' ... I wish to my soul they would eat you, and such
reasoners as you are!"

SYDNEY SMITH
(Peter Plymley's Letters).

CHAPTER VI.

HOME RULE DIFFICULTIES

Those who watch closely the exploitation of the religious cry against
Home Rule will have observed that its exploiters always endeavour to
make the best of both worlds. One world is expressed in the phrase,
"Home Rule means Rome Rule." The other by the watchword, "Priest-ridden
Ireland." Those who use the first of these cries are always trying to
persuade themselves that the gift of Home Rule will increase the power
of the Catholic Church in Ireland and produce a kind of religious
tyranny over the Protestant minority. How that could be done under a
measure so carefully safeguarded as, for instance, the Bill of
1912,[51] they never condescend to tell us. It is part of their policy
never to enter into details, but to produce a general atmosphere of
distrust and unreason.

But it is often these very same people who draw terrible pictures of
the power of the Roman Catholic Church already existing in Ireland at
the present moment. They do not explain how both of these propositions
can be true--how, if Ireland is already "priest-ridden"--a superlative
phrase--without Home Rule, there is any room for an increase of that
evil under Home Rule. They never seem to contemplate the possibility
that the proper and natural corrective to the power of the priest, if
it be excessive, is the creation of a strong rival civil power.

Is it, indeed, so certain that "Home Rule" would increase the power of
Rome in Ireland? I have even heard it said that the Home Rule cause
finds its headquarters at Rome, and that it is part of a gigantic
conspiracy of the Vatican to break up a Protestant Empire. Do those who
reason thus ever reflect how it is that the English Catholics are often
among the most formidable opponents of the Home Rule cause?

Why are the English Catholics so often opposed to Home Rule? The answer
was given by Cardinal Manning in the famous phrase quote