Part 15 (1/2)

It was about thirteen years before At that tih the latter consisted only of those chastening experiences which daily confront adventurers of iment and scanty resources, on new selections The local storekeeper, however, was keeping me supplied with the luxuries of life--such as flour, spuds, tea, sugar, tobacco--whilst turkeys and ducks were to be had for the shooting, and kangaroos for the chasing The storekeeper had also taken charge of my land license, for safety, and occasionally presented docu me feel like some conscious criminal, happily let off for the present with a caution

One sufelloho, I flattered e in every way, he was footsore and weary, as well as hoe of tears In one hand he carried a carpet bag, and in the other a large bundle, tied up in a coloured handkerchief In his conversation he eh accent with such slavish fidelity as to arded any other fornorance or offensive affectation His naged hospitalities ofthat his feet showed startling traces of the hundred-and-twenty-mile walk from Melbourne, I constrained him to rest for a few days But the poor fellow had a painfully outspoken scruple against eating the daet his boots on without supplication for Divine support, he started to help me with my work

Soon our acquaintance ripened to inti of his history Like the majority of us, he was the scion of an ancient fa at latest advices (praise God) Seven of these had swarlory be); two remained in their native hive, with full and plenty (Amen); whilst he and his brother Larry had staked their future on the prosperity of Australia (God help us)

His father must have been a man of wealth and position, as he apparently spent his whole ti salentlemen But just before Rory left home, his father and mother had withdrawn from society And here the narrator's sudden reticence warned me not to inquire into the details of the old couple's retire Victoria and Riverina for five or six years, with h unspecific, results Anyway, he had franked Rory to Port Melbourne pier by passage warrant; but seemed to havewalked the streets of Melbourne for thole days without finding any trace of Larry, had concluded that he must be in Riverina, and that it would be a brave notion to slip over, and take the defaulter by surprise Hence his present pilgriness, was naturally aith the splitters' tools, nor did he kno to harness a horse

All this, he explained to me, was a penalty adherent to people who, by reason of their social-economic position, are e pour of su condition, I noticed that he could handle the spade with a strength and dexterity rarely equalled within my observation

”You're a Catholic--are n't you, Rory?” I speculated, one evening, struck by the simple piety of some asinine remark he had made

A startled look of remonstrance and deprecation was his only reply

However, as it has always been my rule to seek information at first hand, I tried, in a friendly and confidential way, to draw hies and tenets, which I knew to be garbled and falsified by Protestant bigotry But it was evident that throughout every fibre of his moral nature there ran a conviction that the atory or Transubstantiation would be fatal to our friendshi+p And he, at all events, would be no party to the unulf which hereditarily divided us

[It o any farther, to inquire into the nature and origin of this gulf--not merely for the sake of information, but because it is a question which affects the moral health of our community

When Australia was first colonised, any sensible ht have foreboded sorrel, cockspur, Scotch thistle, &c, as unwelcome, but unavoidable, adjuncts of settleht have predicted that soe the country with a legacy of foxes, rabbits, sparrows, &c But a second and clearer-sighted Jeremiah could never have prophesied the deliberate introduction of hydrophobia for dogs, glanders for horses, or Orangeism for men Yet the latter enterprise has been carried out-- whether by John Sor, it enial virus half-way round the globe, and tainted a young nation

It is no question of doctrine There is a greater difference between the Presbyterian and Episcopalian creeds than between the latter and the Catholic But in tracing sectarian animosities back to their source, you ainst Vested Interests For instance, the great Fact of the English Reformation was the confiscation of Church property Afterward, a Protestant England submitted peaceably to the Inquisition; but when Mary proposed restitution of the abbey tenures-- whoop! to your tents, O Israel! The noble army of prospective martyrs could n't conform to that heresy; and the stubborn Tudor had to back down

Again, Wesleyanism tapped the offertory of Episcopalianish in point of doctrine, the two are practically identical But the prejudice of the Irish Protestant against the Irish Catholic has the basest origin of all

The English and Scotch colonists drafted into Ulster by Elizabeth, James I, Cromwell, and William III, always evinced a tendency to becoeneration The reason is plain Devil-worshi+p-- the cult of Fear--was the territorial religion of Ireland; and, in this bitter fellowshi+p, native Catholic and acclimatised Protestant sank their shty and eternal Landlord, of course, was the Poho had to be placated by tribute and incense, approached on all fours, and glorified in the highest

We don't knowthe 18th century, and indeed there is notsolely of landlords and their noislated as men do when the personal equation is allowed to pass unchecked

Meanwhile the agent collected such rents as he could get, with an occasional charge of slugs thrown in gratis: and the finest peasantry in the world slaved, starved, lied, stole, attended the ave in e whenever that three-bottle divinity deigned an avatar, and hoarded up its pennies for the annual confiscation

Broadly speaking, it rendered unto Caesar the things that were Caesar's, and unto God the things that were God's--social-econoed that Caesar's title covered everything except an insignificant by-product of atrophied souls

However, we are concerned only with Ulster, where the native element of population, oblivious to Thrift, and instinctively loyal to anything in the shape of supreredient derived from the most contumacious brood at that tirne in Western Europe, nalo-Saxon--a people unpleasantly apt in drawing a liression on its pocket, and by no means likely to content itself with an appeal to the Saints or the Muses But was there no sectarian line of cleavage?--was there no party spirit abroad, seeing that, for the alleged safety of the Protestant population, the Catholics lived under severe penal laws? Well----

'We hold the right of private judgion to be equally sacred in others as in ourselves; and, as men, as Christians, and as Protestants, we rejoice in the relaxation of the penal laws against our Roman Catholic fellow-subjects; and we believe the ht with the happiest consequences to the union and prosperity of Ireland'

That is part of a resolution carried with only two dissentient voices in a ates of 143 corps of Ulster Volunteers, nuannon, Tyrone, in 1782

The Volunteers were tenants who, in 1778, had spontaneously enrolled then invasion; all Protestants, of course, inasmuch as the possession of arms, except by special license, was prohibited to Catholics;--though at this ti of the Irish Protestant was strongly revolutionary, while the Irish Catholic, true to his fatal instinct of illogical veneration, was distinctly loyalist Otherwise, the bond of a coement; and never before or since has Ireland seen a period when the professors of those hostile creeds got drunk together in such amity This is a historical fact which cannot be too often repeated

'Probably at no period since the days of Constantine,' says the accomplished and trustworthy Lecky, 'was Catholicis the Pontificates of Benedict XIV and his three successors' This covers a period extending from 1740 to 1775; and we know that cycles of ecclesiastical polity never close abruptly

The Catholic was first to perceive that 'when lenity and cruelty play for a kingdoamester is the soonest winner'

But the Volunteers--aranised without the invitation or concurrence of Governan to propose reforislation, a relaxation of trade restrictions, &c So it was time for the

Divide and govern! A good ideal though not a new one! And, providentially, here was the latent spark of religious dissent, ready to respond to the foulest breath ever blown from the lips of Greed In 1785 the spark was first fanned into fla of the experie was forh, in 1795--exactly 105 years after the dethronement and expulsion of Jae