the obedience of its adherents, and it has always enforced that
obedience whenever it has had the power by methods which, in Protestant
opinion, are extremely objectionable. In theory the claim may be limited
to affairs concerned with faith and morals; but the definition of such
affairs is a very elastic one. Cardinal Logue not many years ago said:
"When political action trenches upon faith or morals or affects
religion, the Vicar of Christ, as the supreme teacher and guardian of
faith and morals, and as the custodian of the immunities of religion,
has, by Divine Right, authority to interfere and to enforce his
decisions." How far this principle is in practice carried beyond the
limits so denned was proved in the famous Meath election petition in
1892, in which the Judge who tried it, himself a devout Catholic,
declared: "The Church became converted for the time being into a vast
political agency, a great moral machine moving with resistless
influence, united action, and a single will. Every priest who was
examined was a canvasser; the canvas was everywhere--on the altar, in
the vestry, on the roads, in the houses." And while an election was in
progress in County Tyrone in 1911 a parish priest announced that any
Catholic who should vote for the Unionist candidate "would be held
responsible at the Day of Judgment." A still more notorious example of
clericalism in secular affairs, within the recollection of Englishmen,
was the veto on the Military Service Act proclaimed from the altars of
the Catholic Churches, which, during the Great War, defeated the
application to Ireland of the compulsory service which England,
Scotland, and Wales accepted as the only alternative to national defeat
and humiliation.

But these were only conspicuous examples of what the Irish Protestant
sees around him every day of his life. The promulgation in 1908 of the
Vatican decree, _Nec Temere_, a papal reassertion of the canonical