The Home as a Spiritual Center

by Michal Semin

One of the main reasons the totalitarian forces of the modern era virulently attack the family is because the home was, is, and God willing, will remain, a place of the most fundamental religious and spiritual life. The modern agnostic state wishes to step between the parents that might still cling to some outdated prejudices of the "opium of masses" and the children, thus securing the transfer of the children’s loyalty from their parents to the alien tutors coming from outside the home. This process can be tracked well before our time. In earlier centuries, the family and the home were the natural place for wholesale formation, both secular and religious. The Church always had a role in supervising the parents in both their daily theoretical and practical catechesis, but it was always the orbit of home that provided the setting for learning, praying, and growing in virtue.

With the advent of modern democracy, the primary place of formation changed. Compulsory schooling was erected, work became driven out of home, and with the rise of the doctrine of the rights of the individual, the family slowly but steadily was dissolving into a group of individuals all pursuing their own visions of life and career. The society became more and more leveled to one common denominator–the primacy of the individual–and the family little by little became subjected to the state by indoctrinating the children in the false sciences and philosophies of modern man. In the words of Solange Hertz, "where everyone is equal and one size fits all, democratic absurdities have free play." Mother and father became equal–read "same"–and the family was soon changed from ecclesiola headed by the father to a democraciola headed by no one.

A little bit of Catholic theology: Tampering with the family and its place in the created order bounds with sacrilege, for the home is a figure on earth of the Godhead in heaven. God is one, but He is not one Person. God is a FAMILY of three Persons, which are the source of all that is. Fashioned after the Trinitarian model, the human family generates because the Godhead generates. "Shall not I that make others to bring forth, myself bring forth, saith the Lord? Shall I, that give generation to others, be barren?" (Isa. 66:9). In their order of being, the human trinity of father, mother, and child represents the three divine Persons who dwell as one in the Most Blessed Trinity as Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. A particular reason why Satan, the fallen angel of the highest order, persecutes and wants to destroy the family is because the human family reflects the Divine Family. Also, Lucifer’s ambition "to be like God" was unrealizable by the very nature of his angelic constitution. We never speak of families of angels, but only of "choirs," for there is no other affiliation between them. Each was created as if he were a species in himself, whereas every man since Adam, patterned on the Sacred Humanity of Christ, comes into being as part of a family. In other words, God’s image is found not only in man as an individual person, but it is also reflected in his family relations.

Here we find a special reason why Christ has elevated human marriage to the level of a sacrament. The family is not only the building block of society, that is a fundamental unit in the natural order, but also the building block of the supranatural order, that is the Church. In the words of Pope Pius XI in his encyclical on Christian marriage Casti Connubii: "But Christian parents must also understand that they are destined not only to propagate and preserve the human race on earth, indeed not only to educate any kind of worshippers of the true God, but children who are to become members of the Church of Christ, to raise up fellow-citizens of the Saints, and members of God’s household, that the worshippers of God and Our Savior may daily increase." The family is, therefore, not only the source of the State, but the source of the Church as well, whose Mother is the Virgin Mary and whose Paterfamilias is her husband St. Joseph. Their divine Son is the Mystical Body in all its members.

Now comes the last theological note: the union of husband and wife is the extension of the union of Christ and His Church; the household becomes what tradition calls ecclesia domestica, the domestic church. With husbands loving their wives as Christ loves the Church with wives subject to their husbands as the Church is subject to Christ, both are charged with implementing in their common life their daily petition to the Father: "Thy Kingdom come!"

From this theological reflection we can more easily understand not only the natural benefits of healthy and stable family life, but especially its religious character.

The wholesale secularization of modern life with all its social evils goes hand in hand with the secularization of family. The family disconnected from God finds itself in a spiritual vacuum. For this is not something that she can bear for a long time; she either finds the resources for an authentic revival or falls apart generating chaos of monstrous proportions.

What practical steps has the Catholic family to consider in order to become again a source of hope for our future? I propose the following three (though I am fully aware that much more can be added to these):

1. Sanctification of Sunday.

2. Fathers regaining the role of heads of the family and leaders of the family’s religious life.

3. Regular celebrations of religious feasts.

1) Christian Sunday (Dies Dominica, Kyri·kÈ) is threatened more and more both from without and from within–from without through the systematic efforts of the enemies of Christianity and from within through the mediocrity and superficiality of the Christians themselves who are making of Sunday merely a day of rest, relaxing from work only by seeking entertainment. Let us remind ourselves with the words of the prophet Osee: "I shall cause all her joy to cease, her feast days and her Sabbath, and all her solemn feasts." The words of Pope Pius XII in his encyclical Mediator Dei sound a similar warning: "How will those Christians not fear spiritual death, whose rest on Sundays and feast days is not devoted to religion and piety, but given over to the allurements of the world! Sundays and holidays (holy days!) must be made holy by divine worship which gives homage to God and heavenly food to the soul....Our soul is filled with the greatest grief when we see how the Christian people profane the afternoon of feast days...."

Sunday must become again the day of the Lord, the day of adoration, of prayer, of rest, of recollection and of reflection, of happy reunion in the intimate circle of the family. Sunday encompasses two main things: first, the fatherhood of God. God is obviously the center of this day. That is why we are obliged to go to Mass, to the Holy Sacrifice, and we are to desist from servile labor, put it aside in order to be freed up to that which is more sublime and spiritual, to liberate mind and soul. The denial of sanctifying Sunday comes to be a denial of Resurrection because Christian Sunday is a continuance of the apostles’ meeting on the day of the Resurrection, which is the keystone of our Faith. Sunday is the day which conquers death.

Second: it is a day to be together as family of God’s children. A little reflection for dads: to desist from labor does not mean to sleep on the couch, obviously. Sometimes it is enormously difficult, after a week of intense work, we naturally seek, at least most of us, privacy, seclusion, tranquility. Here, however, is our family waiting for us, the wife andthe children want to be with us. If we evade that, we are going to lose our family, we are going to lose our children. It is all very simple. It is a question of investment of time. At the end of the 20th century there is nothing in the society which is going to help us to do this well. They are going to make us work 70 hours a week, and when we come home on Sunday, the only day we may have some freedom, we are just too tired. This is the absolute must, even if it is only on sheer will power and we force ourselves on our last lag of energy, we must invest our time with this family we have been given.

2) A fatherless Western society is one of our most urgent social problems. Over the past 200 years, fathers have moved from the center to the fringe of family life. The industrial revolution and the modern economy have taken men out of their families, and the vacuum has been filled by a steady feminization of the home. Increasingly, says Fr. Kenneth Novak in the foreword to an excellent book Fatherhood and Family, men have looked outside the home for the meaning of their maleness. Masculinity has become less domesticated, defined less by effective fatherhood and more by individual ambition and achievement. The role of fatherhood, continues Fr. Novak, has been diminished in three ways. First, it has become smaller. Fewer things are defined as a father’s distinctive work. Secondly, fatherhood has been devalued. Third, and most important, fatherhood has been decultured–stripped of any authoritative social content or definition. It castrates fathers from being the builders and preservers of Catholic culture.

How is this related to the religious life of the family? Too often it becomes a fact of family life that the one who leads the prayers is the mother and not father. The reasons for that are obvious. Mom spends most of the time with the children and during the day she prays with them and teaches them faith and good manners. It becomes a problem, however, when this evolves in excluding father from taking a decisive part in the religious life of the family. St. Augustin has a whole sermon on this, that the role of the father in a family is analogous to the role of the bishop in the diocese or the parish priest in his parish. This all derives from the notion of parenthood invested with authority over the entrusted flock. This authority, obviously, is rooted in Christian love which prepares one to lose his own life for the salvation of souls of those given to him. It is a sad but interesting fact, which proves my point here, that along with the crisis in fatherhood in the family, there is a serious crisis of priesthood in the Church. Eliminative celibacy, ordaining women to the priesthood, and lay involvement in liturgy all has very much to do with the blurring of the identity of fatherhood.

It is crucial that men and women realize the importance of father’s role in the family, including its religious aspect. Father is to be again the magister in his household. As the master he is invested with authority to teach, he has a teaching office; he should read the catechism, he should kneel down and pray with his children. To this I want to add one important note on family prayer: Pray together! Too many parents send their children into bed and tell them "don’t forget your night prayers." What develops is that "prayers are for children" and when children think they are grown up at 13 or 14, they are not going to pray anymore, because mom and dad don’t pray.

French Cardinal Pie, inspiration to the saintly Pope Pius X, says in his Christmas Homily in 1871 the following words:

Is not ours an age of mislived lives, of unmanned men? Why?...Because Jesus Christ has disappeared. Wherever the people are true Christians, there are men to be found in large numbers, but everywhere and always, if Christianity wilts, the men wilt. Look closely, they are no longer men but shadows of men. Thus what do you hear on all sides today. The world is dwindling away, for lack of men; the nations are perishing for scarcity of men, for the rareness of men...I do believe: there are no men where there is no character; there is no character where there are no principles, doctrines, stands taken; there are no stands taken, no doctrines, no principles, where there is no religious faith and consequently no religion of society. Do what you will: only from God you will get men.

3) In addition to nourishing themselves with prayers and the sacraments, families need to erect defenses. Especially in the early stages of a child’s development, it is necessary to shelter them from the world’s most undesirable influences. A child can be compared to a tomato plant, which must be sheltered from the elements until it grows to a larger size. We could spend days talking about the dangers of T.V., bad music and ugly (false) "art" and the importance of the encounter with beauty in good music and true art. Fortunately, the Catholic Faith provides a rich treasure chest of devotions, traditions, feast days, literature and so on. This treasure chest provides families with an alternative to the world’s false attractions. It has many of the resources a family needs for spiritual sustenance. The primary means for using the goods of the treasure chest is to live one’s life around the Church calendar. Medieval European life included a rich tapestry of feasts, holy days, processions and pilgrimages. Although traces of this great civilization remain, most of its glorious heritage has been forgotten. The importance of living one’s life as much as possible around the Church calendar cannot be exaggerated. It feeds the souls, vanquishes any tendency for day-to-day life to become monotonous, adds joy and fun to family life. The Church calendar can be observed on two levels. At the general or macro level, a theme can be observed for each month of the liturgical year. At a more detailed or micro level, Catholics are blessed with an abundance of saints days and other feasts such as the the Feast of Christ the King. With so many available feast days, a family should not attempt to be too ambitious, but should select perhaps three or four feasts each month to celebrate. When celebrating feast days, it is necessary to balance serious and more light-hearted activities. Both build a child’s love of the Faith.

Also, it is very instructive and helpful to have religious articles in your home. They can be a great help in your daily battles. They may reflect the liturgical year and upcoming feasts and lead the whole family to live a life integrated and deeply rooted in Faith. What we believe has to be practiced and presented to our senses. That is the way God created us, so we use the material, tangible things to remind us about matters spiritual and eternal.

And don’t forget about the importance of family meals. Eating and drinking is not merely an act of nutrition, but symbolizes a spiritual truth, a symbol of the heavenly banquet for which we strive in our daily lives. It is very important that the family has common dinners as much as they can. A typical example of the distracted and fragmented life we live today is the loss of common meals; each member of the family is eating on his own, at a time he finds appropriate, and just to fill his stomach with anything that can serve this purpose.

Michal Semin is co-founder and president of The Civic Institute of The Czech Republic, which promotes the traditional virtues of a free and ordered society. He is also founder of the Czech Society for Home Education and chairman of Una Voceóthe Society of Catholic Tradition.

Read more...

The Family and The Feud

There was an old joke of my childhood, to the effect that men might be grouped together with reference to their Christian names. I have forgotten the cases then under consideration; but contemporary examples would be sufficiently suggestive to-day. A ceremonial brotherhood-in-arms between Father Bernard Vaughan and Mr. Bernard Shaw seems full of possibilities. I am faintly pleased with the fancy of Mr. Arnold Bennett endeavouring to extract the larger humanities of fiction from the political differences of Mr. Arnold White and Mr. Arnold Lupton. I should pass my own days in the exclusive society of Professor Gilbert Murray and Sir Gilbert Parker; whom I can conceive as differing on some points from each other, and on some points from me. Now there is one odd thing to notice about this old joke; that it might have been taken in a more serious spirit, though in a saner style, in a yet older period. This fantasy of the Victorian Age might easily have been a fact of the Middle Ages. There would have been nothing abnormal in the moral atmosphere of mediaevalism in some feast or pageant celebrating the fellowship of men who had the same patron saint. It seems mad and meaningless now, because the meaning of Christian names has been lost. They have fallen into a kind of chaos and oblivion which is highly typical of our time. I mean that there are still fashions in them, but no longer reasons for them. For a fashion is a custom without a cause. A fashion is a custom to which men cannot get accustomed; simply because it is without a cause. That is why our industrial societies, touching every topic from the cosmos to the coat-collars, are merely swept by a succession of modes which are merely moods. They are customs that fail to be customary. And so, amid all our fashions in Christian names, we have forgotten all that was meant by the custom of Christian names. We have forgotten all the original facts about a Christian name; but, above all, the fact that it was Christian.

Now if we note this process going on in the world of London or Liverpool, we shall see that it has already gone even farther and fared even worse. The surname also is losing its root and therefore its reason. The surname has become as solitary as a nickname. For it might be argued that the first name is meant to be an individual and even isolated thing; but the last name is certainly meant, by all logic and history, to link a man with his human origins, habits, or habitation. Historically, it was a word taken from the town he lived in or the trade guild to which he belonged; legally it is still the word on which all questions of legitimacy, succession, and testamentary arrangements turn. It is meant to be the corporate name; in that sense it is meant to be the impersonal name, as the other is meant to be the personal name. Yet in the modern mode of industrialism, it is more and more taken in a manner at once lonely and light. Any corporate social system built upon it would seem as much of a joke as the joke about Christian names with which I began. If it would seem odd to require a Thomas to make friends with any other Thomas, it would appear almost as perplexing to insist that any Thompson must love any other Thompson. It may be that Sir Edward Henry, late of the Police Force, does not wish to be confined to the society of Mr. Edward Clodd. But would Sir Edward Henry necessarily have sought the society of Mr. O. Henry, entertaining as that society would have been? Sir John Barker, founder of the great Kensington emporium, need not specially seek out and embrace Mr. John Masefield; but need he, any more swiftly, precipitate himself into the arms of Mr. Granville Barker? This vista of varieties would lead us far; but it is enough to notice, nonsense apart, that the most ordinary English surnames have become unique in their social significance; they stand for the man rather than the race or the origins. Even when they are most common they are not communal. What we call the family name is not now primarily the name of the family. The family itself, as a corporate conception, has already faded into the background, and is in danger of fading from the background. In short, our Christian names are not the only Christian things that we may lose.

Now the second solid fact which struck me in Ireland (after the success of small property and the _failure_ of large organisation)was the fact that the family was in a flatly contrary position. All I have said above, in current language, about the whole trend of the modern world, is directly opposite to the whole trend of the modern Irish world. Not only is the Christian name a Christian name; but (what seems still more paradoxical and even pantomimic) the family name is really a family name. Touching the first of the two, it would be easy to trace out some very interesting truths about it, if they did not divert us from the main truth of this chapter: the second great truth about Ireland. People contrasting the "education" of the two countries, or seeking to extend to the one the thing which is called education in the other, might indeed do worse than study the simple problem of the meaning of Christian names. It might dawn at last, even on educationists, that there is a value in the content as well as the extent of culture; or (in other words), that knowing nine hundred words is not always more important than knowing what some of them mean. It is strictly and soberly true that any peasant, in a mud cabin in County Clare, when he names his child Michael, may really have a sense of the presence that smote down Satan, the arms and plumage of the paladin of Paradise. I doubt whether it is so overwhelmingly probable that any clerk in any villa on Clapham Common, when he names his son John, has a vision of the holy eagle of the Apocalypse, or even of the mystical cup of the disciple whom Jesus loved. In the face of that simple fact, I have no doubt about which is the more educated man; and even a knowledge of the Daily Mail does not redress the balance. It is often said, and possibly truly, that the peasant named Michael cannot write his own name. But it is quite equally true that the clerk named John cannot read his own name. He cannot read it because it is in a foreign language, and he has never been made to realise what it stands for. He does not know that John means John, as the other man does know that Michael means Michael. In that rigidly realistic sense, the pupil of industrial intellectualism does not even know his own name.

But this is a parenthesis; because the point here is that the man in the street (as distinct from the man in the field) has been separated not only from his private but from his more public description. He has not only forgotten his name, but forgotten his address. In my own view, he is like one of those unfortunate people who wake up with their minds a blank, and therefore cannot find their way home. But whether or no we take this view of the state of things in an industrial society like the English, we must realise firmly that a totally opposite state of things exists in an agricultural society like the Irish. We may put it, if we like, in the form of an unfamiliar and even unfriendly fancy. We may say that the house is greater than the man; that the house is an amiable ogre that runs after and recaptures the man. But the fact is there, familiar or unfamiliar, friendly or unfriendly; and the fact is the family. The family pride is prodigious; though it generally goes along with glowing masses of individual humility. And this family sentiment does attach itself to the family name; so that the very language in which men think is made up of family names. In this the atmosphere is singularly unlike that of England though much more like that of Scotland. Indeed, it will illustrate the impartial recognition of this, apart from any partisan deductions, that it is equally apparent in the place where Ireland and Scotland are supposed to meet. It is equally apparent in Ulster, and even in the Protestant corner of Ulster.

In all the Ulster propaganda I came across, I think the thing that struck me most sharply was one phrase in one Unionist leading article. It was something that might fairly be called Scottish; something which was really even more Irish; but something which could not in the wildest mood be called English, and therefore could not with any rational meaning be called Unionist. Yet it was part of a passionately sincere, and indeed truly human and historic outburst of the politics of the northeast corner, against the politics of the rest of Ireland. Most of us remember that Sir Edward Carson put into the Government a legal friend of his named Campbell; it was at the beginning of the war, and few of us thought anything of the matter except that it was stupid to give posts to Carsonites at the most delicate crisis of the cause in Ireland. Since then, as we also know, the same Campbell has shown himself a sensible man, which I should translate as a practical Home Ruler; but which is anyhow something more than what is generally meant by a Carsonite. I entertain myself, a profound suspicion that Carson also would very much like to be something more than a Carsonite. But however this may be, his legal friend of whom I speak made an excellent speech, containing some concession to Irish popular sentiment. As might have been expected, there were furious denunciations of him in the press of the Orange party; but not more furious than might have been found in the Morning Post or the Saturday Review. Nevertheless, there was one phrase that I certainly never saw in the Morning Post or the Saturday Review; one phrase I should never expect to see in any English paper, though I might very probably see it in a Scotch paper. It was this sentence, that was read to me from the leading article of a paper in Belfast: "There never was treason yet but a Campbell was at the bottom of it."

Let anybody imagine an Englishman saying, about some business quarrel, "How like an Atkins!" or "What could you expect of a Wilkinson?" A moment's reflection will show that it would be even more impossible touching public men in public quarrels. No English Liberal ever connected the earlier exploits of the present Lord Birkenhead with atavistic influences, or the totem of the wide and wandering tribe of Smith. No English patriot traced back the family tree of any English pacifist; or said there was never treason yet but a Pringle was at the bottom of it. It is the indefinite article that is here the definite distinction. It is the expression "a Campbell" which suddenly transforms the scene, and covers the robes of one lawyer with the ten thousand tartans of a whole clan. Now that phrase is the phrase that meets the traveller everywhere in Ireland. Perhaps the next most arresting thing I remember, after the agrarian revolution, was the way in which one poor Irishman happened to speak to me about Sir Roger Casement. He did not praise him as a deliverer of Ireland; he did not abuse him as a disgrace to Ireland; he did not say anything of the twenty things one might expect him to say. He merely referred to the rumour that Casement meant to become a Catholic just before his execution, and expressed a sort of distant interest in it. He added: "He's always been a Black Protestant. All the Casements are Black Protestants." I confess that, at the moment of that morbid story, there seemed to me to be something unearthly about the very idea of there being other Casements. If ever a man seemed solitary, if ever a man seemed unique to the point of being unnatural, it was that man on the two or three occasions when I have seen his sombre handsome face and his wild eyes; a tall, dark figure walking already in the shadow of a dreadful doom. I do not know if he was a Black Protestant; but he was a black something; in the sad if not the bad sense of the symbol. I fancy, in truth, he stood rather for the third of Browning's famous triad of rhyming monosyllables. A distinguished Nationalist Member, who happened to have had a medical training, said to me, "I was quite certain when I first clapped eyes on him; the man was mad." Anyhow the man was so unusual, that it would never have occurred to me or any of my countrymen to talk as if there were a class or clan of such men. I could almost have imagined he had been born without father or mother. But for the Irish, his father and mother were really more important than he was. There is said to be a historical mystery about whether Parnell made a pun, when he said that the name of Kettle was a household word in Ireland. Few symbols could now be more contrary than the name of Kettle and the name of Casement (save for the courage they had in common); for the younger Kettle, who died so gloriously in France, was a Nationalist as broad as the other was cramped, and as sane as the other was crazy. But if the fancy of a punster, following his own delightful vein of nonsense, should see something quaint in the image of a hundred such Kettles singing as he sang by a hundred hearths, a more bitter jester, reading that black and obscure story of the capture on the coast, might utter a similar flippancy about other Casements, opening on the foam of such very perilous seas, in a land so truly forlorn. But even if we were not annoyed at the pun, we should be surprised at the plural. And our surprise would be the measure of the deepest difference between England and Ireland. To express it in the same idle imagery it would be the fact that even a casement is a part of a house, as a kettle is a part of a household. Every word in Irish is a household word.

The English would no more have thought of a plural for the word Gladstone than for the word God. They would never have imagined Disraeli compassed about with a great cloud of Disraelis; it would have seemed to them altogether too Apocalyptic, and exaggeration of being on the side of the angels. To this day in England, as I have reason to know, it is regarded as a rabid and insane form of religious persecution to suggest that a Jew very probably comes of a Jewish family. In short, the modern English, while their rulers are willing to give due consideration to Eugenics as a reasonable opportunity for various forms of polygamy and infanticide, are drifting farther and farther from the only consideration of Eugenics that could possibly be fit for Christian men, the consideration of it as an accomplished fact. I have spoken of infanticide; but indeed the ethic involved is rather that of parricide and matricide. To my own taste, the present tendency of social reform would seem to consist of destroying all traces of the parents, in order to study the heredity of the children. But I do not here ask the reader to accept my own tastes or even opinions about these things; I only bear witness to an objective fact about a foreign country. It can be summed up by saying that Parnell is the Parnell for the English; but a Parnell for the Irish.

This is what I mean when I say that English Home Rulers do not know what the Irish mean by home. And this is also what I mean when I say that the society does not fit into any of our social classifications, liberal or conservative. To many Radicals this sense of lineage will appear rank reactionary aristocracy. And it is aristocratic, if we mean by this a pride of pedigree; but it is not aristocratic in the practical and political sense. Strange as it may sound, its practical effect is democratic. It is not aristocratic in the sense of creating an aristocracy. On the contrary, it is perhaps the one force that permanently prevents the creation of an aristocracy, in the manner of the English squirearchy. The reason of this apparent paradox can be put plainly enough in one sentence. If you are _really_ concerned about your relations, you have to be concerned about your poor relations. You soon discover that a considerable number of your second cousins exhibit a strong social tendency to be chimney-sweeps and tinkers. You soon learn the lesson of human equality if you try honestly and consistently to learn any other lesson, even the lesson of heraldry and genealogy. For good or evil, a real working aristocracy has to forget about three-quarters of its aristocrats. It has to discard the poor who have the genteel blood, and welcome the rich who can live the genteel life. If a man is interesting because he is a McCarthy, it is, so far, as he is interesting because he is a man; that is, he is interesting whether he is a duke or a dustman. But if he is interesting because he is Lord FitzArthur and lives at FitzArthur House, then he is interesting when he has merely bought the house, or when he has merely bought the title. To maintain a squirearchy, it is necessary to admire the new squire; and therefore to forget the old squire. The sense of family is like a dog and follows the family; the sense of oligarchy is like a cat and continues to haunt the house. I am not arguing against aristocracy if the English choose to preserve it in England; I am only making clear the terms on which they hold it, and warning them that a people with a strong family sense will not hold it on any terms. Aristocracy, as it has flourished in England since the Reformation, with not a little national glory and commercial success, is in its very nature built up of broken and desecrated homes. It has to destroy a hundred poor relations to keep up a family. It has to destroy a hundred families to keep up a class.

But if this family spirit is incompatible with what we mean by aristocracy, it is quite as incompatible with three-quarters of what many men praise and preach as democracy. The whole trend of what has been regarded as liberal legislation in England, necessary or unnecessary, defensible and indefensible, has for good or evil been at the expense of the independence of the family, especially of the poor family. From the first most reasonable restraints of the Factory Acts to the last most maniacal antics of interference with other people's nursery games or Christmas dinners, the whole process has turned sometimes on the pivot of the state, more often on the pivot of the employer, but never on the pivot of the home. All this may be an emancipation; I only point out that Ireland really asked for Home Rule chiefly to be emancipated from this emancipation. But indeed the English politicians, to do them justice, show their consciousness of this by the increasing number of cases in which the other nation is exempted. We may have harried this unhappy people with our persecutions; but at least we spare them our reforms. We have smitten them with plagues; but at least we dare not scourge them with our remedies. The real case against the Union is not merely a case against the Unionists; it is a far stronger case against the Universalists. It is this strange and ironic truth; that a man stands up holding a charter of charity and peace for all mankind; that he lays down a law of enlightened justice for all the nations of the earth, that he claims to behold man from the beginnings of his evolution equal, without any difference between the most distant creeds and colours; that he stands as the orator of the human race whose statute only declares all humanity to be human; and then slightly drops his voice and says, "This Act shall not apply to Ireland."

Read more...