Page:Annalsoffaminein00nich.djvu/302

296 The government could not control that, any more than a crazy inebriate can help doing what he is tempted to do; but the inebriate, when he is sober, should keep so, and not put himself in the power of an enemy that can injure him so much; and if the experience of two or three centuries in Ireland have not proved that carnal weapons are not needed in a church, and that Christ, who should be the head of it, has no occasion for them, surely they must be dull learners.

The Christian may despair of conquest when kindness and love have no effect, and in the famine, when these were exercised, they were felt and acknowledged. Let airy stranger, in the year 1850, go into every parish in that country, and make investigation of the true state of feeling, as it would naturally flow out without any design; and if that stranger made no party allusions that should awaken jealousy, he would hear lavish blessings bestowed on dissenters of every grade, where these dissenters had manifested a kindly feeling. "And there's the rector that would do the heart good,"—"There's the blessed minister, that's worth the day's walk to hear his discourse,"—"And would ye see the lady that's the blessin' to the poor?" &c. Do you say this is selfishness?—it is a just appreciation of right and wrong; and where right is not exercised why should it be acknowledged? What gospel requires that a man should say of an unjust neighbor that he walks uprightly, lest some evil-eyed partisan should judge him by his own narrow spirit? And blinded as the world is by sin, and perverted as education maybe,