to promote the fruitful contact of North and South, and the concentration of both on the welfare of their common country.  In the case of those of us, of whatever religious belief, who look to a future for our country commensurate with the promise of her undeveloped resources both of intellect and soil, it is of the essence of our hope that the qualities which are in great measure accountable for the actual economic and educational backwardness of so many of our fellow-countrymen, and for the intolerance of too many who are not backward in either respect, are not purely racial or sectarian, but are the transitory growth of days and deeds which we must all try to forget if our work for Ireland is to endure.

FOOTNOTES: 

[16] The reproach which is brought upon Irish Christianity mainly by the extravagances of a section of my co-religionists, to which I have been obliged to refer, came home to me not long ago in a very forcible way.  I happened to remark to a friend that it was a disgrace to Christianity that Mussulman soldiery were employed at the Holy Sepulchre to keep the peace between the Latin and Greek Christians.  He reminded me that the prosperous and progressive municipality of Belfast, with a population eminently industrious, and predominantly Protestant, has to be policed by an Imperial force in order to restrain two sections of Irish Christians from assaulting each other in the name of religion.

[17] ‘Pro salute animae meae’ was, I am reminded, the consideration usually expressed in the old charters of manumission.

[18] One of the unfortunate effects of this passion for building costly churches is the importation of quantities of foreign art-work in the shape of woodcarvings, stained glass, mosaics, and metal work.  To good foreign art, indeed, one could not, within certain limits, object.  It might prove a valuable example and stimulus.  But the articles which have actually been imported, in the impulse to get everything finished as soon as possible, generally consist of the stock pieces produced in a spirit of mere commercialism in the workshops of Continental firms which make it their business to cater for a public who do not know the difference between good art and bad.  Much of the decoration of ecclesiastical buildings, whether Roman Catholic or Protestant, might fittingly be postponed until religion in Ireland has got into closer relation with the native artistic sense and industrial spirit now beginning to seek creative expression.

[19] The following extract from a statement of the Most Rev. Dr. O’Dea, the newly elected Bishop of Clonfert, is pertinent:—­’There is another cause also—­i.e. in addition to the absence of university education for Roman Catholic laymen—­which has hindered the employment of the laity in the past.  Till very recently, the secondary Catholic schools received no assistance whatever from the State, and their endowment from private