It may, however, to some extent, be regarded as an extreme re-action from the penal times, when the hunted _soggarth_ had to celebrate the Mass in cabins and caves on the mountain side--a re-action the converse of which was witnessed in Protestant England when Puritanism rose up against Anglicanism in the seventeenth century.

This expenditure, however, has been incurred; and, no one, I take it, would advocate the demolition of existing religious edifices on the ground that their erection had been unduly costly! The moral is for the present and the future, and applies not merely to economy in new buildings, but also in the decoration of existing churches.[18] But it is not alone extravagant church building which in a country so backward as Ireland, shocks the economic sense.

The multiplication--in inverse ratio to a declining population--of costly and elaborate monastic and conventual institutions, involving what in the aggregate must be an enormous annual expenditure for maintenance, is difficult to reconcile with the known conditions of the country.

Most of these institutions, it is true, carry on educational work, often, as in the case of the Christian Brothers and some colleges and convents, of an excellent kind.

Many of them render great services to the poor, and especially to the sick poor.