_religious_ man." These bewildering corruptions of sense and sanity
overwhelm you at every turn. Ask your neighbour offhand at a dinner in
Dublin: "What is so-and-so, by the way?" He will reply that so-and-so is
a doctor, or a government official, or a stockbroker, as it may happen.
Ask him the same question at a dinner in Belfast, and he will
automatically tell you that so-and-so is a Protestant or a "Papist."

The plain truth is that it would be difficult to find anywhere a more
shameful exploitation, intellectual and economic, than that which has
been practised on the Ulster Orangeman by his feudal masters. Were I to
retort the abuse, with which my own creed is daily bespattered, I should
describe him further as the only victim of clerical obscurantism to be
found in Ireland. Herded behind the unbridged waters of the Boyne, he
has been forced to live in a very Tibet of intellectual isolation.
Whenever he moved in his thoughts a little towards that Ireland to
which, for all his separatism, he so inseparably belongs, the ring of
blockhouses, called Orange Lodges, was drawn tighter to strangle his
wanderings. Mr Robert Lynd in his "Home Life in Ireland," a book which
ought to have been mentioned earlier in these pages, relates the case
of a young man who was refused ordination in the Presbyterian Church
because he had permitted himself to doubt whether the Pope was in fact
anti-Christ. And he writes with melancholy truth:

"If the Presbyterian clergy had loved Ireland as much as they have
hated Rome they could have made Ulster a home of intellectual
energy and spiritual buoyancy long ago. They have preferred to keep
Ulster dead to fine ideas rather than risk the appearance of a few
unsettling ideas among the rest."

It has not been, one likes to think, a death, consummated and final, but