MARY
M'DONNELL's FUNERAL.
I DO not defend the strong and harsh language which
many injudicious Protestants have sometimes used in writing on the Roman
Catholic controversy, or in dealing with Roman Catholics themselves. Yet
in one, who for thirty years has had the best opportunities of knowing
thoroughly the practical working of Romanism among the peasantry
of Ireland, and the depth of ignorance, and gross, miserable
superstition by which a warm-hearted and most lovable people have been
enslaved, it is not easy to keep without the limits of that wrath which
assuredly worketh not the righteousness of God. The fact is, the people
of England and Scotland know little of the real spirit of Romanism as it
manifests itself in the more remote parts of Ireland, which for
centuries have been wholly given up to the influence of the priesthood.
They know less of Ireland than of most countries on the continent of
Europe. What many know of Romanism is only from books written for
sentimental and ignorant Protestants. And thus the language used by the
most truthful and devoted missionaries, who have literally hazarded
their lives to deliver their countrymen from the bondage which once
crushed themselves, has been considered by good and just men on the
other side of the channel as exaggerated, and the mere outbreak of
fanaticism and sectarian bigotry, rather than the righteous expression
of those who mourn over the loss of the true and right when
contemplating the false and the wrong, and who, loving their neighbours
as themselves, mourn over the poor travellers, wounded and left
half-dead. And thus a sympathy is often expressed towards Roman Catholic
priests and their violent adherents, as if they were ill-used
men, while it is withheld from those who, amidst overwhelming
difficulties, have dared, in this land of Christian liberty, to read
God's Word, to exercise their personal responsibility as men, to become
acquainted with their Father and Saviour, and to enjoy peace and
spiritual freedom from seeing and knowing the truth with their own
spirits, disciplined by the living Spirit of God. It is my intention to
give a series of sketches in Good Words, from pages in my old
notebook, illustrative of Irish missionary labour; and I can assure my
readers that not one fact will be stated which is not accurately
correct, and characteristic of Irish life, and which, if necessary, I am
not willing to defend against any who may call in question my statements
in their most minute particulars.
As illustrative of the treatment which some converts
may receive from their bigoted countrymen, let me now tell you the story
of Mary M'Donnell's Funeral.
Among the many efforts for the spiritual benefit of
my Romish countrymen, there is a society, called the Islands and Coasts
Society, labouring very unobtrusively for many years. Its objects are
the most uncivilised and benighted portions of the population, situated
on the remote islands, and along the coasts; and I can bear personal
testimony that God has blessed it, not only in introducing civilisation,
improved habits, and education into many a desolate place, neglected by
all others, but also in bringing many of the population to the light of
life.
John M'Donnell was an intelligent young man, who
taught a Roman Catholic school on one of these wild western islands, and
who, by intercourse with one of this society's Scripture-readers, was
brought to the knowledge of the truth; and he again was instrumental in
teaching it to his wife and family, who became true Christians. They
suffered very much from persecution, and the privations consequent upon
immediate loss of employment, so that, with his young family, he had to
leave his native home; but having been well tried and proved, and being
found duly qualified, he was subsequently employed as Protestant
schoolmaster in a distant post. After four years, his wife, the
companion of his toil and troubles, the joint-partaker of his precious
faith, was taken very ill, and, through the kindness of a Christian
lady, removed to Dublin, where a physician pronounced her in the last
stage of consumption, from which he could hold out no hope of recovery.
On discovering this, she expressed the greatest wish to return to her
native island; she would be laid in the grave of her fathers, and mingle
with the dust of her kindred. This is a feeling very strong in the
breast of the Irish peasantry; and, whatever philosophy may have to say
about it, I believe it is a good nurse of kindly affections. I so
thoroughly sympathise with it, that I once paid the hire of an ass, when
the parish vestry refused to do it, to take the body of a deceased
pauper, at the request of his pauper wife, thirty miles across the
country, to lay his bones beside the bones of his own people. Mary
M'Donnell anxiously desired to be buried in the old churchyard, not only
from love to her kindred, but also to testify, on her dying bed, to her
bright hope in the gospel, and the sincerity of her profession of the
Protestant faith, so oft denied by her friends and neighbours, and whose
opinions she could not disregard, though removed from their reach for
evermore. The strength of this desire to die vindicated from unjust
reproach, on the part of persecuted converts, can only be estimated by
those who know their feelings by having shared them. Their friends and
neighbours try to persuade themselves and others that they are
hypocrites, and that at the hour of death they will call for the priest
to anoint them; for they hold the maxim true, that, however men may
live, no man is willing to die a hypocrite. There is nothing a sincere
convert more anxiously looks for at the hour of death, than the
opportunity to witness to the truth in which he lived, and to wipe out
from his memory the odium attached to hypocrisy. This feeling is right.
But a serious difficulty here presented itself. She was very near her
end, very feeble, and one hundred and seventy miles from home; but she
undertook it, and her husband conducted her by canal and car. When she
arrived within thirty miles of her journey's end, her strength was
exhausted, and the time of her departure was evidently at hand. Her
neighbours heard of her landing, and of the state of her health, and
very many went, with a zeal worthy of a better cause, to meet her. They
entreated her, up to the last moment, they intimidated her, to have the
priest sent for before she died. She told them in feeble accents, but
unshaken faith, of her great High Priest over the house of God—that He
died for her iniquity, that His blood cleanses from all sin, that
through Him she could come boldly to the throne of grace, that He is
able to save to the uttermost, that she needed and would have no other,
and above all things, had sought, and thanked God for having found the
opportunity of proving that this was the conviction in which she had
lived, and was prepared to die. There was no doubt, then, of her
sincerity, but it gave more deadly offence than her supposed hypocrisy.
She had despised priestly absolution, oil, tow, candle-light, holy
water, and the rest of it. The harbour was above a mile from the next
friendly house; her neighbours and relatives refused her admission; the
husband, after some time, found three honest Protestant men, and the
four formed a sad procession, bearing the dying woman on their shoulders
to the house of one of them, and, sad to tell, followed by a large crowd
of men, women, and children shouting and execrating them the whole way.
Her relatives had, however, free access to her, and visited her several
times, hoping to work upon her fears and her weakness; but God sustained
her, and she was firm and faithful. She yielded up her soul to Jesus
very early the following Sabbath morning. On that very day, at the mass,
the priest spoke in awful terms of her death, and of her intention to be
buried in the graveyard which was esteemed holy, and where thousands of
red rags tied on the bushes bear testimony to the multitudes of pilgrims
who flock from all parts to "the saints' bed" for the cure of diseases,
the removal of spells, for penances, and for pardons. I am ashamed to
repeat the language used that day, reported to me by one of the
congregation. Most of the congregation proceeded from the chapel direct,
surrounded the house where the body lay, and spent the rest of the day
in shouting, so that nothing could well be heard in the uproar. The
Roman Catholic magistrate, himself present in the mass-house, sent a
messenger to say he would attend the funeral next day with a police
force, but that it could not take place in the burial-ground named
without danger of bloodshed; so it was agreed to bury her in another
graveyard, less sacred in their estimation, seven miles distant from her
fathers' grave, for which she had travelled so far; thither she was
borne on the shoulders of the few Protestants who dared to perform this
last service, and escorted by the magistrate and police in front, and by
the coast-guard officer and his men in the rear, to protect the living
and the dead from the crowds of excited people; and she was buried at
the point of the bayonet, amid shouting and yelling, in a little quiet
sandy place near the harbour at which she had landed a few days before.
Her body was not allowed to rest there till the morning of the
resurrection. On that very night it was torn up from the grave, and,
with its coffin, rolled on the sand beyond the precincts of what was
considered the consecrated ground. I have it from the lips of one of the
most faithful I ever knew of God's people—Captain Forbes, since removed
to his rest—that the priest, on being questioned afterwards, in his
presence, as to his part in the transaction, avowed it before several,
with expressions which I must not name. This fact—an aggravated,
grievous, and I rejoice to add, in its enormity, an unusual one—exhibits
the nature of the ordeal through which converts have to pass, and of
which I shall have to give many other illustrations. It is not too much
to ask that Christian men who read this statement will lift up their
hearts in prayer to God that He would raise my countrymen from this low
estate of cruel superstition.
(To be continued.)