BODIES than to their SOULS? to their BRAINS rather than to
their HEARTS? Don't ye?"

"No, I do NOT," hotly answered the priest.

"Well, if ye DID," said the agitator, "if more priests did, it's a
different Ireland we'd be livin' in to-day--that we would. The
Christian's heaven seems so far away when he's livin' in hell. Try to
make EARTH more like a heaven and he'll be more apt to listen to
stories of the other one. Tache them to kape their hovels clean and
their hearts and lives will have a betther chance of health. Above all
broaden their minds. Give them education and the Divine tachin' will
find a surer restin' place. Ignorance and dirt fill the hospitals and
the asylums, and it is THAT so many of the priests are fosterin'."

"I'll not listen to another wurrd," cried Father Cahill, turning away.

O'Connell strode in front of him.

"Wait. There's another thing. I've heard more than one priest boast
that there was less sin in the villages of Ireland than in any other
country. And why? What is yer great cure for vice? MARRIAGE--isn't it?"

"What are ye sayin'?"

"I'm sayin' this, Father Cahill. If a boy looks at a girl twice, what
do ye do? Engage them to be married. To you marriage is the safeguard
against sin. And what ARE such marriages? Hunger marryin' thirst!
Poverty united to misery! Men and women ignorant and stunted in mind
and body, bound together by a sacrament, givin' them the right to bring
others, equally distorted, into the wurrld. And when they're born you
baptise them, and you have more souls entered on the great register for
the Holy Church. Bodies livin' in perpetual torment, with a heaven
wavin' at them all through their lives as a reward for their suffering
here. I tell ye ye're wrong! Ye're wrong! Ye're wrong! The misery of
such marriages will reach through all the generations to come. I'd
rather see vice--vice that burns out and leaves scar-white the lives it
scorches. There is more sin in the HEARTS and MINDS of these poor,
wretched, ill-mated people than in the sinks of Europe. There is some
hope for the vicious. Intelligence and common-sense will wean them from
it. But there is no hope for the people whose lives from the cradle to
the grave are drab and empty and sordid and wretched."

As O'Connell uttered this terrible arraignment of the old order of
protecting society by early and indiscriminate marriages, it seemed as
if the mantle of some modern prophet had fallen on him. He had str