Certainly not. Jamie was never any ways a
_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.
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