Once a Week (magazine)/Series 1/Volume 10/"An apostle indeed"
“AN APOSTLE INDEED.”
Early in December, 1836, the news went far and wide through the South of Ireland, that the “Apostle of Temperance,” Father Mathew, had paid the last debt of nature. He died, as he had lived, devoted to the good cause of reclaiming his volatile countrymen from their arch—enemy, the whiskey-bottle; and his name ought to stand, in Ireland at least, written in the brightest and most indelible colours among the roll of her philanthropists and patriots.
Theobald Mathew’s life, from first to last, was in full keeping and harmony with his profession as a priest of the church in which his lot was cast. We have been, of late years, by far too much familiarized with such warlike spirits as Dr. Cahill and John McHale, as types of the Irish Roman Catholic clergy, to fancy that one so meek, so gentle, so humble, so self-denying as “Father Mathew,” could have submitted to the ecclesiastical tonsure in the sister island, and worn the monastic cowl. Yet so it was: Father Mathew was not only a Roman Catholic, but a Roman Catholic priest; nor only a priest but a monk—a humble Capuchin. But under the Capuchin’s coarse dress he concealed the heart of a Christian and a gentleman. No doubt, some portion of those qualities he owed to the fact that gentle blood flowed in his veins; and that, instead of being taken (as most Irish priests are) from the plough-tail to the altar, via Maynooth, he was brought up in the refined society of his kinsman, the late Earl of Llandaff, and of his sister, Lady Elizabeth Mathew; and that, in the family-circle of Thomastown House, and amongst its guests, as a boy, he rubbed off some of that rust, and most of those angles, which, somehow or other, seem to mark for life the man who has once passed the gates of Page:010 Once a week Volume X Dec 1863 to Jun 64.pdf/424 Page:010 Once a week Volume X Dec 1863 to Jun 64.pdf/425 Page:010 Once a week Volume X Dec 1863 to Jun 64.pdf/426