nor the ferocious proscriptions of the eighteenth century. The priest
said Mass, though his crime was punishable by death, and the people
heard Mass, though theirs also was a criminal offence; and the
schoolmaster, driven from the school, taught under a sheltering
hedge. The clerical student, denied education at home, crossed the
sea, to be educated at Louvain or Salamanca or Seville, and then,
perhaps loaded with academic honors, he returned home to face poverty
and persecution and even death. The Catholic masses, socially
ostracised, degraded, and impoverished, shut out from every avenue to
ambition or enterprise, deprived of every civil right, knowing
nothing of law except when it oppressed them and nothing of
government except when it struck them down, yet clung to the religion
in which they were born. And when, in the latter half of the
eighteenth century, the tide turned and the first dawn of toleration
appeared on the horizon, it was found that the vast majority of the
people were unchanged, and that, after two centuries of the most
relentless persecution since the days of Diocletian, Ireland was, in
faith and practice, a strongly Catholic nation still.

On a soil constantly wet with the blood and tears of its children, it
would be vain to expect that scholarship could flourish. And yet the
period had its distinguished Irish scholars both at home and abroad.
At Louvain, in the sixteenth century, were Lombard and Creagh, who
both became Archbishops of Armagh, and O'Hurley who became Archbishop
of Cashel. An even greater scholar than these was Luke Wadding, the
eminent Franciscan who founded the convent of St. Isidore at Rome. At
Louvain was John Colgan, a Franciscan like Wadding, a man who did
much for Irish ecclesiastical history. And at home in Ireland, as
parish priest of Tybrid in Tipperary, was the celebrated Dr. Geoffrey
Keating the historian, once a student at Salamanca. John Lynch, the