“Yet I must say I liked the Irish part of my parishioners. They received me always with the utmost cordiality, and very often attended my household ministrations, although Catholics” (Works 16:243).
This and the following are selections from Thomas Chalmers on his attitude and outlook on reaching the poor Irish “papists” of his day, both domestically through aggressive, Protestant territorial missions, as well as on the Emerald Isle itself. Much here that is relevant, especially when so many Western nations have swarms of un-Christianized immigrants on our very doorstep.
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Chalmers here refutes the notion that the Protestant establishment in Ireland ought to respect parochial bounds of Romanists. No! Parish lines are only relevant for the sake of the Gospel, and ought valiantly to be transgressed when the strong man’s house must be plundered: “We do not say that the maxim has been universally acted on, but it has been greatly too general, that to attempt the conversion of a Papist was to enter another man’s field; and that, in kind at least, if not in degree, there was somewhat of the same sort of irregularity or even of delinquency in this, as in making invasion on another man’s property. In virtue of this false principle, or false delicacy, the cause of truth suffered, even in the hands of conscientious ministers; and when to this we add the number of ministers corrupt, or incompetent, or utterly negligent of their charges, we need not wonder at the stationary Protestantism, or the yet almost entire and unbroken Popery of Ireland. We now inherit the consequences of the misgovernment and the profligacy of former generations. They may be traced to the want of principle and public virtue in the men of a bygone age. Those reckless statesmen who made the patronage of the Irish Church a mere instrument of subservience to the low game of politics—those regardless clergymen who held the parishes as sinecures, and lived in lordly indifference to the state and interests of the people—these are the parties who, even after making full allowance for the share which belongs to the demagogues and agitators of the day, are still the most deeply responsible for the miseries and the crimes of that unhappy land (Chalmers T 1838m; Works 17:304).
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West Port Experiment 