“ The very ambition and desire for gain which impel England to extend her power and plant her colonies in the most distant countries of the globe, become the instruments for carrying also the undying faith of Ireland to the regions which England has conquered.
Saul went to seek Samuel, thinking only of finding his father's asses. God was sending him to be anointed king over his people. England sends her ships all over the world, thinking only of markets for the produce of her forges and her looms. God is sending her that she may spread everywhere the faith of the Irish people. ”

“ In this, and wherever else I speak of the Irish race, I do not, of course, confine myself to those born in Ireland. The work which a race is called to do is to be done by those who now live, and by their children and their children's children, wherever they happen to be born. Indeed, it would be a contradiction in terms to consider the father and son, wherever born, as belonging to different races. Be it for weal or for woe, be it unto honour or unto shame, the fathers cannot disown the children nor the children the fathers. ”

“ Yes, I do not only desire, and send up the prayer, but I candidly avow the hope, that the light of faith is yet destined to shine brightly here, even amongst those who now look on it with contempt or hostility. In this I am strengthened by the desire for a knowledge of truth, which, notwithstanding the bigotry of many, is so widely spread. I am strengthened by the growth of the Church itself, which bears the marks of a higher purpose on the part of God than the mere preservation of those who came Catholics to our shores. ”

“ The sufferings of Ireland at a time seemed without a purpose, or even the very contrary to what we might have expected for so faithful a people. But, who knows what might have been the result, if justice and humanity had marked the course of the English nation towards Ireland? Who knows but the temptation to the latter to be drawn into apostacy would have been too powerful? Had Apostate England dealt generously or justly with Catholic Ireland, who knows if, in the alliances that would have been formed, she would have been equally steadfast in her faith? ”

“ And even though we preserve our faith, will not this be rather to our shame, if we do not endeavour to practise the virtues which it teaches? When the salt has lost its savour, it is good for nothing any more but to be cast out, and to be trodden on by men. The higher the vocation of God, the lower will be the degradation of those who fail to correspond. They will be despised, and justly despised, by God and by men.
We can see in the fate of other nations the consequences of infidelity to a noble mission. ”

“ But what is most remarkable, and certainly not without some great purpose in the order of divine Providence, England has become in our day the great hive from which colonies go out to people islands and continents in distant parts of the world; lands which were before vast wastes, tenanted only by the wild beast, or by the savage scarcely less ferocious. Indeed, she is the only nation in our day that seems to have received such a mission. ”

“ This mission, however, has its duties as well as its dignity. What will it avail us to be the sons of martyred sires who sacrificed all for God, if we barter the faith for which they died, for some paltry bauble, or fail to transmit it to those under our charge? Will not the constancy and sufferings of our fathers be a reproach to us before God and man? Will they not pronounce judgment upon us if, while we honour their heroic deeds, we ourselves display nothing but pusillanimity? ”

“ The history of the Church in the middle ages has ever forced upon Protestant minds a difficulty which they have met by many various methods of solution. The middle age exhibits so much of precious side by side with so much of base, so much of the beauty of holiness in the midst of ungodliness, so much of what all Christians admit as truth with what Protestants call fatal error, that the character of the whole cannot readily be taken in at first sight from the Protestant point of view. ”

“ To learn the purposes of God in the development of human events, to trace his hand in the complicated movements of society, to see him overruling and directing all to his own great ends, is one of the most sublime objects to which the study of history can be applied. Frequently, indeed, we may be unable fully to comprehend the designs of his providence in the moral, as in the physical world. Fancy, or pride, may easily have a great part in suggesting our theories. ”

“ What we hope for this nation, we may hope with greater reason for the other nations yet reposing in their infancy, or growing in giant proportions under British rule. I say, with greater reason, because in most of these the foundations of Catholicity are laid even more deeply than they are here. While it would be a great thing for God's honour and glory, there is nothing to forbid the hope that these may one day be united in the true fold of the everlasting Church. The blood of Ireland and of England will mingle in their veins ”

“ I know and gratefully acknowledge the important services rendered to Catholicity in the United States by persons of other races. There was, first of all, the Maryland colony, with whose noble history that of few, if any, of the other colonies can compare. By their justice and humanity in treating with the native tribes, by similar justice and fair dealing with other colonists, of every religion and every race, by their domestic virtues and patriotic course, the men of that colony deserved and received a high place in the esteem of their countrymen and of the world. ”

“ If it depended on feeling or wishes, I, for one, would be very glad to dissolve connection with any one who insists that he owes nothing to the race that gave him a father or a mother. I would readily leave such a one to his proud claim of owning no paternity but the land on which he vegetates, and I only regret that he will scarcely bring to it much credit or advantage. He who is unwilling to acknowledge the father that begot him, or the mother that gave him suck, is not a prize worth contending for. ”

“ God's ways are not as our ways. It is not by the great or by the mighty that his truth is propagated. Flesh might otherwise glory in His sight, and men might say that, by their wisdom and their efforts was His kingdom established. So far from this being an objection, when other things inspire hope, the hope is strengthened by the humble form in which the Church presents itself. Our hope of its diffusion is better founded when we see it borne to our shores by humble labourers, than if it had come recommended exclusively by proud philosophers, cunning statesmen, or by men loaded with wealth. ”

“ Let us make sure, like them, whatever else we fail in, not to fail in transmitting the faith to those entrusted to our charge, never exposing it to danger for any advantage, much less for the trifling things that may be gained here by want of fidelity. Transmit, carefully, the faith, first of all, but with faith spare no effort that you yourselves, and those committed to your care, grow also in every other virtue. ”

“ England, with her long catalogue of saints, seems to be considered, not as an outcast, on whom the sentence of spiritual death has been executed, but rather as the prodigal, who in a moment of thoughtlessness demanded, what he called his own share, and wandered from his father's house. The father is looking out, expecting every day to see the wayward one return, and is ever ready to kill the fatted calf, and to call on his friends and neighbours to rejoice and be merry, for “he that was dead is come to life again, and he that was lost is found”. ”

“ England herself, from which the Catholic name was thought to have been almost blotted out, has been deeply affected by this exodus of Irish Catholics. In her cities, and towns, and hamlets, the Cross has been raised from the dust. At the side of the ancient monuments which remind England of her apostacy, humble spires rise in every part of the land, and tell that nation that the faith which they thought destroyed still lives, and is ready to admit them again to its wonted blessings. ”

“ Heavenly Spouse—that it will plead for this nation with the Divine Mercy, as the alms of Cornelius obtained for him the knowledge of Gospel truth and a share in its blessings? The grace of faith, with these blessings, is the greatest which God gives to man, nor is it the less valuable because it is not now appreciated or is even spurned. It is God's grace that gives a hunger for divine things, as it is by Him that the hungry are filled. ”

“ Yet neither confiscation of property, nor famine, nor disgrace, nor death in its most hideous forms, could make Ireland waver in that faith which our forefathers received from St. Patrick. There were, of course, from time to time, and there are, a few exceptions. Did not these occur, the Irish must have been more than men. But, as a general rule, the places that could not be procured or retained, except by apostacy, were resigned. The rich allowed their property to be torn from them, and they willingly became poor; the poor bore hunger and all other consequences of wretched poverty ”

“ Indeed, such names are usually called “Catholic names”. Whenever an exception is found, it is so rare an occurrence that the party is considered a renegade from his race as well as from his religion.
It would, however, be not only unfounded to flatter ourselves that this stability in the faith is the result of anything peculiar in the Irish nature, but it would be, I may say, a blasphemy to assert it. God alone can preserve any one in the paths of truth and virtue; how much more must we attribute to Him the fidelity of a whole race, under the trying circumstances here enumerated? ”

“ Is not this great result worth all the sufferings which Ireland has endured? The ways of God appear often circuitous. But in their circuitous course they are everywhere fraught with blessings. The children of Ireland suffered; yet, even in their sufferings they were blessed. He himself pronounced “blessed those who suffer persecution for justice's sake”; for in their trials they redeemed their own souls. ”

“ Several nations first learned Christianity under a heterodox form, and some of the most Catholic to-day are their descendants. Their errors were not their own faults, as nations, and God had pity upon them.
We may say the same thing of this, and of several other countries, where great and independent peoples will be found one day as they now are here. This nation has never apostatised from Catholic truth, simply because it never possessed it as a nation. At its birth it was already entangled in the meshes of heterodoxy, and it found the Catholic Church in its midst, with few adherents. ”

“ As Ireland owes the preservation of her faith to her being destined as the leaven of that mass, it is but assigning to God a purpose worthy of His goodness to say, that England owes her power to her mission to spread that leaven throughout so many vast regions. It will not, I presume, be considered rash to say that God, permitting her to acquire power, proposed to himself some higher object than that other nations should have cheap cotton or woollen fabrics, or that they should learn how to travel forty instead of four or ten miles an hour. ”

“ It is our duty to believe that to us, that to each generation which humbly and earnestly seeks, will be given that enlightening spirit, by whose aid it shall be enabled to read aright the past realizations of God's divine idea in the wise and historic Church of successive ages, and to distinguish the human imperfections, blemishes, and errors, from the divine truth which they obscured and overlaid, but which they could not destroy, being, one day, rather to be destroyed by it”. ”

“ Hemispheres, and flourishing Churches in Catholic unity established under its shade, where, but for the fidelity of our fathers, heterodoxy alone would have had sway, shall we not say that little indeed were their sufferings compared to the value of such an Apostolate of Empires?
What is any Earthly mission compared to this? What is even the spreading of civilization with its highest privileges, compared to the spreading of the saving institutions of the Gospel? Even in this world virtue is a thing infinitely superior to mere physical power. ”

“ Religion, in a word, instead of being a divine institution, would appear and be amongst them but a brilliant work or invention of man, and, therefore, in the supernatural order, but a brilliant delusion, not an institution which the mercy of God transplanted from Heaven, and made to stand, and to grow, and to bless, and produce fruit, in every age and in every form of society.
[pg 086] But, in preserving the faith of the Irish race, God has provided a leaven of truth for these masses. ”

“ We know of no instance of a whole nation once fully and deliberately apostatising from the faith ever again returning. The grace of faith, if lost by individuals by formal apostacy, is seldom recovered. It has never yet been recovered by any nation that once enjoyed its full light, and deliberately abandoned it. It is not for us, to be sure, to place bounds to the mercies of God. ”

“ When Earth, and all that is of Earth, shall have passed away, the proudest human achievements will be seen to have been as nothing, while those who shall have caused God's name to be glorified, shall shine as bright stars “unto perpetual eternities”. ”

“ But amidst all the miseries of those who yet dwell in the old land—in spite of the wiles of unscrupulous governments, and heartless and tyrannical landlords, and hypocritical proselytizers—in spite of open violence and covert bribes, their undying attachment to the faith remains unaltered, unshaken—a monument of national virtue more honourable than any which wealth or power could erect, or flattery devise. ”

“ They make us feel only more sensibly, and keep fresh in our memory, the loss of the sun that has set.
It is the Irish emigration that has chiefly supplied the multitudes who flock around English altars, that has made churches and schools spring up, that has finally called for the restoration of a numerous hierarchy; and, as if to mark this fact, and point out the great part that Ireland had in restoring Catholic life to England, God has so arranged it that the first head and brightest ornament of that new hierarchy should be the son of Irish emigrants ”

“ They fell, and in their humbled condition, mocked by the remains of ancient greatness, they teach all the important lesson, that the greater the high calling given by God, the greater the punishment of those who prove untrue.
Were we also to prove faithless to the mission which God has assigned us, we know not what punishment may await us, even in this world. The trials through which our race has passed, and is passing, may seem severe; but, they are trials permitted by a loving father. May we never deserve that he should scourge us in his great anger. ”

“ In names, which God has given, or permitted to be given, he has frequently foreshadowed the destinies of individuals and races. Would it be superstitious to suppose that in the Irish name of this American ecclesiastical metropolis—the only important city in this country that has an Irish name—Providence pointed, on the one hand, to its future position in the Christian hierarchy, and on the other to the character of the chief portion of the family of that house or church? ”

“ The Destiny Of The Irish Race.3 That God knows and governs all things—that whatever happens is either done or permitted by him, and that he proposes to himself wise and beneficent ends in all he does or permits—are truths which lie at the foundation of all religion. The wicked may refuse to obey his commands, but they cannot withdraw themselves from the reach of his power. ”