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| INTERIOR SACRED HEART CHURCH, LIMERICK.- This view shows the interior of the Catholic Church of the Sacred Heart in Limerick city. It is a comparatively modern structure but is very handsomely designed and elaborately finished. The frescoing is particularly artistic, and many of the sacred pictures show traces of the Latin master hands. It is doubtful if even Spain has been, or is, more devoted to church building than Ireland. From the earliest ages the Island of Saints has held her own in the matter of erecting splendid temples for divine worship. Even in the black pagan times, when only the beacons of the Fire worshippers made visible the darkness of her spiritual understanding, Ireland, by forest, rock and river, erected her cromleachs, or Druid alters, under the blue canopy of the sky, for her rites and her sacrifices. It needed only the magical voice of St. Patrick to change this pagan fatuity to Christian devotion, and now, for fourteen centruies, Ireland has been a land of churches. When the cruel penal laws deprived Catholics of the hold edifices erected by their pious forefathers, they rushed to the mountain summit, or descended into the ocean cave, attended by their faithful clergy, to assist at the sacrifice of the mass. This, too, in defiance of death and danger, for often, inthose bloody days, priest and people perished beneath the sabres of the foreign soldiery. Because the English stole many of their old churches, the Irish have been obliged to build new ones. |
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