II. The Northmen and Normans in England and Ireland
[Rambler, May and July 1859.]
The collection, under the author’s revision, in one handsome volume, of the sermons, lectures, and speeches, delivered by the Cardinal Archbishop in the course of his late tour in Ireland, accompanied as it is with a connecting and illustrative narrative, is one of the most remarkable publications which has for some time issued from the press. It is the record of a visit which has a double claim upon our attention, both in its relation to the generous people who acted the part of hosts upon the occasion, and the distinguished personage who presented himself as their guest.
The facts of the case are these: the Cardinal, complying with the invitation of an Irish Prelate, who requested his presence at the opening of a new church, went at the appointed time, without expectation of any call upon him for more than such ordinary exertion of mind and body as the ostensible purpose involved; but, to his great astonishment, he found that his coming had struck a chord in the heart of a Catholic people, whose ecclesiastical sentiments are the more keen and delicate, because they are seldom brought into play. A Cardinal of Holy Church was to them the representative of the Vicar of Christ, and nothing else; his coming was all but the advent of the Holy Father; and he suddenly found that he must respond, mostly out of his own extemporized resources, to the enthusiastic feelings and the acts of homage of the millions who were welcoming him. But he was equal to the occasion: meeting the run made upon him with a spirit and fertility of thought, which no other public man in England could have displayed. He was carried about, at the will of others, from one part of the island to another; he found himself surrounded in turn by high and low, educated and illiterate; by boys at school, or by the youth of towns; by religious communities, or by official and dignified persons. He was called to address each class or description of men in matter and manner suitable to its own standard of taste and thought; he had to appear in pulpits, in lecture-rooms, at dinner-tables, on railroad-stations, and always to say something new, apposite, and effective. How he met these unexpected and multifarious calls on him, the volume, to which we have referred, is, we repeat, the record; and, though nothing else remained of Cardinal Wiseman for the admiration of posterity, of the many things which he has spoken and written, there is enough here to justify the estimation in which his contemporaries have held the talents and the attainments of the first Archbishop of Westminster.
Insufficient record it certainly would be, after all, of the actual resources of one who can speak with readiness and point in half-a-dozen languages, without being detected at once for a foreigner in any of them; and who, at ten minutes’ warning, can address a congregation from a French pulpit, or the select audience of an Italian Academy. Insufficient also for another reason, because it might be objected that the enthusiasm of a multitude is catching, and that, when a visitor is the stimulating cause of such transports and the object of such open-hearted greeting, on the part of a vast population, his whole heart responds to the call made upon its affections, and his intellect, as if spontaneously grateful, expands and revels in the enjoyment of those festive scenes and high celebrations by which it is successively solicited.
1.
It is not every guest who is invested with such pleasant associations, and elicits such joyous emotions in the Irish mind. It is not every stranger who is able to bask in the reverberation of those beams of light, which his own presence sheds over the Irish landscape. There is a visitor who rouses memories as dark, as the look and voice of a Cardinal are inspiring and consolatory. That visitor is the Saxon; and, if the Saxon happens to be a Catholic, he has in consequence a trial to sustain of his own, of which the continental tourist has no experience from Austrian police, or Russian douane, or Turkish quarantine. He has turned his eyes to a country bound to him by the ties of a common faith; and, when he lands at Cork or Kingstown, he breathes more freely from the thought that he has left a Protestant people behind him and is among his co-religionists. He has but this one imagination before his mind, that he is in the midst of those who will not despise him for his faith’s sake, who name the same sacred names, and utter the same prayers, and use the same devotions, as he does himself; whose churches are the houses of his God, and whose numerous clergy are the physicians of his soul. He penetrates into the heart of the country; and he recognises an innocence in the young face, and a piety and patience in the aged voice, which strikingly and sadly contrast with the habits of his own rural population. Scattered over these masses of peasantry, and peasants themselves, he hears of a number of lay persons who have dedicated themselves to a religious celibate, and who, by their superior knowledge as well as sanctity, are the natural and ready guides of their humble brethren. He finds the population as munificent as it is pious, and doing greater works for God out of their poverty, than the rich and noble elsewhere accomplish in their abundance. He finds them characterised by a love of kindred so tender and faithful, as to lead them, on their compulsory expatriation, to send back from their first earnings in another hemisphere incredible sums, with the purpose of bringing over to it those dear ones whom they have left in the old country. And he finds himself received with that warmth of hospitality which ever has been Ireland’s boast; and, as far as he is personally concerned, his blood is forgotten in his baptism. How shall he not, under such circumstances, exult in his new friends, and feel words deficient to express both his deep reverence for their virtues, and his strong sympathy in their heavy trials?