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cal French Jacobins. This appeal to Christian unity was not likely to suc–
ceed, since Burke himself argued that religion was not a motivating factor
in the increasing distrust between the Protestant Ascendancy and the
Catholics (many Protestant Dissenters
in
Ireland also disliked the
Ascendancy). "The name 'Protestant'," Burke says, "becomes nothing
more or better than the name of a persecuting faction, with a relation of
some sort of theological hostility to others, but without any sort of ascer–
tained tenets of its own, upon the ground of which it persecutes other
men...." Because the Protestant ruling class was not driven by religious
sentiment, it was likely to be more vicious than the "old [religious] perse–
cutors," who in theory at least welcomed converts.
The distrust and hatred that divided Ireland, Burke says, were stoked
less by religion than by historical memories.
In
RifLections
he warns that
history can be perverted into a savage god. "In history a great volume is
unrolled for our instruction, drawing the materials of future wisdom from
the past errors and infirmities of mankind.
It
may, in the perversion, serve
for a magazine, furnishing offensive and defensive weapons for parties
in
church and state, and supplying the means of keeping alive, or reviving dis–
sensions and animosities and adding fuel to civil fury."
If
history is used to fuel civil discord, is progress possible? Burke
hoped for progress, but he worried that the new secular passions might
destroy Ireland. He was right to be gloomy about Ireland: a year after he
died these secular passons resulted in a ghastly civil war, and these secular
passions still drive many people in Northern Ireland today. Burke would
probably not be surprised to learn that every year a Catholic priest of
republican sympathies says mass at the grave of Wolfe Tone-the Irish
nationalist who committed suicide when he was captured by the British
in 1798-even though the Protestant-born Tone was a Jacobin enthusiast
who despised Catholicism.
In
this priest's case, religion takes a back seat to
nationalism.
Burke, then, was a Cassandra who warned that a new era of European
disorder was coming into existence, an era in which "men are infinitely
more disposed to heat themselves with political than religious controver–
sies." Burke, it has to be said, to some degree abetted these dark passions
because anti-Semitism crops up in his writings of the 1790s.
In
RifLections
he says that "Jew brokers" in France were making major financial gains,
especially through the sale of expropriated church property, and he warns
that "Jew brokers" were ready to do the same thing in England.
Undoubtedly some of the financiers were Jews, but it was nonsense to say
that only Jews profited from the financial upheaval caused by the
Revolution. This paranoid anti-Semitic rhetoric influenced European
ultraconservatives, especially the French Catholic Right, which argued that
