A DREADFUL CASTIGATION.

Lake Wakatip Mail, Issue 1844, 6 November 1891, Page 3

A DREADFUL CASTIGATION.

TO THE EDITOR, LAKE WAKATIP MAIL. Sir, —The editor of the Arrow Press refuses to insert the enclosed letter in the coming issue of his paper, though it is a reply to an editorial two columns long in his last issue. Trusting in your kindness and usual spirit of fair play, I therefore ask yon to publish it iu the Mail. I am, Ac. James Lynch, C.C. Arrowtown, November 4.

[enclosure] (to the editor of the Lake Countg Press ) Sir,—After two or three weeks' incubation you have brought out another achievement on " Holy Coats." You refer to a multitude of newspapers. You begin with the European Mail of August 28th. The MaiVs " young man " is not much of an improvement on the Cable Agency boy. Anyone who carefully reads the extracts quoted by you, can see that he has been around for his information to the backyard of some Treves Israelitic public-house, and has had a word with " boots" on master's prospects this season. He seems, moreover, to have overheard the grumbling of some old-woman hawkers of the Ronge persuasion. Then he rehashes and serves up in the columns of the Mail the information thus acquired with the gusto of one who has been among the moral sewers and malodorous gutters of Treves, and picked up just what he wanted. You, sir, comment upon this superb congenial information quite learnedly and characteristically. Then you go on to tell us, not of the arguments and facts alleged by several other newspapers, but of the "jokes "of "Civis" in the Witness, of the "hammeringaway " of the St James' Gazette, of the " ridicule " of the Otago Workman, of the "something to say " of the Canterbury Press, of the "exhaustive article" of the Age—an article, which, by-the-bye, is designated by another Melbourne newspaper, (the Advocate) a silly sneer. Why did you not reproduce some, at least, of the facts and arguments fiut forward in this catalogue of newspapers pubished so "widely apart"? I was expecting, as I read through your long list, to hear, that jocose journalists far away in the Moon—writers in the Lunar Blazer or Moon free-thinking Liberal Enlightener—had utterly swept away the " Holy Coat," the Bishop of Treves, and the 2,000,000 pilgrims in torrents of printer's ink, and that, contemplating the havoc they had made, they were singing a ditty with the refrain :—"Never more ! Oh ! never more ! if ever ! " Your rambling, hobbling eulogies of New Zealand intellectual brilliancy, and implicitly, of your own coruscating lustre—being a leader in our colonial resplendent galaxy—reminds me forcibly of a maudlin character in Dickens—"Major Joseph Bagstock." Flourishing his stick, rolling his lobster-eyes round and round, and apostrophising the fragrant air, Joe went on mumbling and chuckling:—"Joey B. knows a move or two, Ma'am. Joey B. is worth a dozen of you. He's tough, Ma'am. Tough and de-vilish sly ! Bagstock is alive, sir. Joe hss his weather-eye open, sir. You'll find him tough, Ma'am. Tough, sir, is Joseph I Tough and de-vilish sly ! Sly sir,—Sly sir,—de-vil-ish sly !" If anyone should substitute " is progressive " for " knows a move or two," "is enlightened" for "has his weather-eye open," "up to the spirit of the age " for " sly, sir, de-vil-ish sly," the points of comparison will be obvious to him. Now sir, I do not intend to traverse the details of your dissertation; discussing nonsense is profitless. But you desire me to tell you (1) Why I consider the pilgrimage to Treves, reasonable and praiseworthy (2) to supply " the positive evidence" for the authenticity of the Holy Coat; and (3) to explain how miraculous cures may be wrought in connection with the Treves relic." I shall attend to this request with all brevity consistent with clearness. First, then, as to the reasonableness and praiseworthiness of a pilgrimage to the shrine of this holy relic. " It is a feeling natural to man," says the learned Balmes, one of the greatest political and philosophical writer of this century, " to extend his love or veneration to the objects which were nearest the person beloved or venerated. We preserve with care the articles which belonged to the person who possessed our affection ; and it often happens that things, in themselves insignificant, acquire an immense value when measured by the feelings of the heart Every people has respected the sepulchre and placed it under the shield of Religion. The body of an illustrious man has been considered a treasure of great value and worthy of being disputed for by nations who regarded the fortune of possessing it with happiness and pride. This veneration extends to everything that belongs to him. His dwelling is cautiously preserved from the injuries of time, that future generations may visit it; his dress, his articles of furniture, his most insignificant things are held as a treasure and have an estimation above all price. Sanctify that feeling of the human race; purify it, and raise it to the supernatural order in its object and end, and you have a philosophical explanation of the veneration of relics ; and free yourself from the necessity of condemning simple and other people who do that through religious motives, which is done by the whole human race ; even in things profane. You now see that, where you thought you had discovered ignorance and superstition in our religious practices, you find the most tender and sublime feelings of the human soul puiified, elevated and directed by our Religion. I find that Leibuitz, the illustrious Protestant philosophical and theological writer, also inculcates the same doctrine in his profound 6yxtenia Theol. Omitting for the present, the scriptural arguments for the veneration of relics and sacred objects I say that, when we see the intense respect shown by people of intelligence and high, refined tastes, to even insignificant things which belonged to their deceased friends or to great men; when, for example, we see pious Lutherans paying 58,000 florins for the arm-chair of Gustavus Vasa; admirers of Charles XII, paying £22,000 for a coat of his; a votary of science exchanging £730 for a trinket which had belonged to Newton ; when, I repeat, we see thousands of examples of a like cult paid to the relics of famous men, and of journeys made to the homes and tombs of great poets, philosophers and statesmen, is it not praiseworthy and reasonable on the part of Christians, desirous to awaken holy memories in their minds, vivid visions of the great tragedy of calvary, and to manifest their piety and faith, if they go on a pilgrimage to Treves to see and touch and reverently kiss that venerable garment which the Redeemer of mankind moistened with His sweat, in His journeys of mercy up and down through Palestine, and wetted with His blood, when going with the cross on His shoulder, to accomplish that great Sacrifice which has transformed the World ? Judging by your previous efforts, I fancy, I can anticipate the character of your enlightened reply "The Canterbury Press had something ! to say on the subjectone newspaper " young man " has "had his joke," another "young man" has snickered, and another has ventured on the sLmifiprophecy "not likely to be seen again for years to —if ever our corrtspondent is not up to the times —he is an obscurantist; he is unacquainted

with the advanced literature of our age ; evidently he has not read the latest edition of Brudder Bones' Standard Yankee Jests; he is in blank ignorance of that supreme production of the close of the nineteenth century, Cole's Fun Doctor, published at Melbourne in 1890 !

Secondly, wherein consists the positive evidence for theauthenticityof the Holy Coat of Treves? In its prescriptive title of undisputed possession, supported by a tradition, public, widespread, uninterrupted, of witnesses, respectable, numerous, intelligent, a tradition which no one, capable of critical intelligent ippreciation of human testimony, could prudently reject—a tradition whose rejection would lead to all the absurdities of historical Pyrrhonism; in the Diploma to the Bishop of Treves, of St. Sylvester, who was Pope from A.D. 314-355; in the confirmatory narrative of St. Helena's journey to the Holy Land for the Cross and other relics of the Passion, given in the Chronicon of Eusebius, of Csesarea, the biographer and contemporary of Helena's son, Constantine the Great; in the writings of Bishop Valasian, who occupied the see of Treves during the early part of the sth century ; in a very old life of St. Agritius (Bp., A.D. 312); in the frequent references to the existence of the Holy Coat in the Cathedral of Treves, as to a fact as well known as the daylight, contained in th# Gesta Trevirorium, compiled about the year 1100 from the old municipal and ecclesiastical archives of that city ; in the honesty and trustworthiness of the bishops and archbishop-electors of Treves, men who, like \ alerius and Maternus, Egbert and Poppo, Eberhard and Bruno, have left names bright by learning and virtue in the annals of Church history ; in the moral impossibility that a long catena of »uch men should be so heedless of the Chnrch's decrees, requiring the greatest care in the authentication of relics, and so negligent of their own honor and the reputation of their Cathedral as to permit a silly deception and to partake themselves, in an easily discoverable imposition ; in the folk-lore (clustering about the Holy Coat) of the people of Treves—of Treves which, in the old Roman days was next to Rome, the most magnificent city of the west—the place of residence of several of the emperors, amongst them, of Constantius Chlorus, the husband of Helena, and which continued during the middle ages to be a centre of splendour and learning, being the see of the archbishop-electors and the home of the episcopal schools, and of four Benedictine Monasteries ; in the Sagen of Treves, one of which, the Orondellied (in which are references to the Holy Coat), is called byH. Vilenar, a distinguished historian of German literature, '' the oldest Heldensage of our literature in the large ivory carving preserved in the Cathedral of Treves and representing, say, the savants, the presentation of the relics by Helena to the Cathedral, and their translation thither by Agritius—a carving examined by the members of the Arch»ological Society of Frankfort in 1846, and reported by them to have been executed so early as the end of the fourth or beginning of the fifth century ; in the exact correspondence of the Holy Coat in material and pattern with the tunicce worn in Palestine in the days of our Lord ; in the very wrappings in which the Holy Coat is preserved, which themselves, by antiquarians are referred, as to material, to the East only and, as to date, to the first centuries of our era; in that scrupulous and microscopical accuracy in investigation always exercised by those committees of learned historians and antiquarians who are entrusted with the authentication of relics before bishops are permitted to expose those relics for veneration. From the oral, historical and monumental evidence connected with the Holy Coat the late Cardinal Newman concluded that he could "see no reason why the Holy Coat should not be what it is said to be." But you, Sir, tell us that your " belief" is the contrary to the learned Cardinal's and your reasons for your " belief," as far as I can discover them, are, that this is the year 1891 ! that " New Zealand " is a place where people have such opportunities of knowing better! that it is a paradise of light (of light, by-the-way suffused with tints so pitchy that every nincompoop may therein publish without shame —nay, even with self-congratulating satisfaction—any drivelling nonsense that passes through his murky brain) ; that " Arrowtown especially " is a focus of iniellectualism endowed with an old edition of Chambers' Encyclopedia, and " two English dictionaries in the Arrow Public Library intended to be for reference !" Ycu assure us that the pilgrims to Treves "were, to say the least, unenlightened," that their minds " are not free " and that they have " failed to catch the spirit of the age !" How much you know about them I The truth is, the Catholics of the southwestern provinces of the German Empire (see Belliugham's&oci'nMspec/sforampleproof), whohave formed the great majority of the pilgrims, are the most enlightened people in the most enlightened country in the world ; they have in their midst those great radiating centres of European mental activity—the Universities of Bonn, Heidelberg, Strasburg, Freiburg, Tubingen, Wurtzburg, Erlangen and Munich ; they have systems of primary and secondary education unequalled outside Germany. But what are their systems of education, their Universities, possessed of faculties of theology, philosophy, arts, jurisprudence and medicine, compared—as educational advantages—with the Arrow Reading Room, littered with the Cromwell Argus, and Arrow Press, and crowned with an old Chambers and two English dictionaries? What, iu acuteness of mind, extent of information, ai d depth of research are those great Catholic professors and writers of Germany—Moehler and Jansens, Hergenroether, and Bellesheim and Gorres (Gorres, who has been called " the foremost mind in Germany," has, by-the-way, written a book in defence of the Holy Coat); what are these I repeat, when compared with some persons who go about the Arrow with their heads in a fancied aureola of light, burnished into a more dazzling brilliancy by that fantastic sprite, " the spirit of the age?" Go and read the Lake County Press for a reply ! Though I have compressed my matter into the smallest space possible I find my letter is running into an almost unpardonable length. Before concluding I must, in the fewest words, refer to your third question, viz., "How the miraculous cures have been wrought ?" By the power of God ; by the suspension of the laws of Nature ; by an act of newcreation ; by a supernatural intensification and combination of Nature's forces, easy to the Omniscience and Omnipotence of Him whose " the earth is and the fulness thereof—the world and they that dwell therein." God can work miracles now as he worked them at the touch of the cloak of Elias (2 Kings, ii., 13); of the relics of Eleseus (ib, xiii., 21); of the garment of Jesus Christ iMatthew.ix., 21); by the word and passing shadow of St. Peter (Acts v., 15); and the handkerchiefs applied to the body of St. Paul (Acts xix., 12). According to the promise of her Divine Founder (Matthew xvii., 20; Mark, xi., 23), miracles occur in the Church and are testified to by witnesses, numerous and critical; and reported by historians, judicious and respectab e ; men whose testimony we cannot reject without shaking—to use Professor Hunter's words—all Certitude, historical and moral. The evidence, in favor of miraculous events in our own day—v.g., the miracles of Lourdes —has convinced hundreds like Mr Kegan Paul, who, whilst yet an infidel, found it, on examination, to be "overwhelming." Herr Jansens, an eminent doctor of the Rhein-Provinz, and a committee of physicians, investigated the miraculous cures wh'ch occuired at Treves in 1814. Dr Jansens gave the result of the investigations in his work, "Report and Official Documents relative to the Miraculous Cures wrought duiing the exhibition of the Holy Coat iu 1844." In this work are set down the details of eighteen cures of diseases, nowise connected with the nervous system, hysteria or paralysis, or curable by mental excitement or like influences, but of diseases really and visibly organic, whose sudden removal can only be accounted for by supernatural interposition. But, of course, I expect to be told "this is the nineteenth century I" Ploughs, harrows and wheelbarrows have been inuch improved during the past "dozen years" —men's religious beliefs should be improved in the same way. Your comparison, from the point of view of innate progressiveness between farmers' "methods" and similar " branches of industry " and the truths of a revealed Religion like Christianity, betrays dullness of understanding, cloddish, bucolic and abysmal ignorance of the first elements of philosophy and theology. James Lynch, C.C. P.S.—With your permission I shall refer, in a future leter, to your astounding statement re num. ber of followers of the degraded Ronge ; your un.

truthful, slanderous assertion re the motives f r exhibiting the Holy ("oat ; your "belter tecord" re. the Argenteuil garment and a few matters], more. Your scurvy search—an extraordinary climb down from dissertating on the philosophy of religion—for undotted " i's," omitted "o's," and like negligence of penmanship in my letter, deserves no further notice.—J. L.