Page:Sermons in Irish-Gaelic - O'Gallagher.djvu/15



Up to the present no Memoir of the life of the Most Rev. James O'Gallagher, Lord Bishop of Raphoe, has been written. He lived in times of great trial and tribulation for all who then professed the Catholic faith in this country. The term of his years on earth, from the close of the seventeenth century to a little beyond the middle of the eighteenth, fell in, precisely, with the most trying portion of the Penal period. His life, if viewed at all, must accordingly be presented as it in reality was spent, amid the clouds and storms, and deepest gloom, that ever had, in the fiercest political and social crisis, spread over the ill-fated land of Inisfail.

The rueful state of Ireland in the last century, and in the beginning of the present, accounts for the fact that very few records of so courageous and distinguished a dignitary of the Catholic Church, in Ulster, have been handed down to those who live at the present day. Catholic Irishmen at home had little leisure then for