NOTES AND COMMENTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LX, Issue 18325, 15 February 1923, Page 6

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

; "DEBACLE OF MANNIXISM." An Australian' Roman Catholic" writes in 'the National Review on "The Debacle of .Mannixism in Australia." Mannixism, he says, waa a bold and defiant bid on the part of the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne to assume the actual (though not the ostensible) leadership ol a political party, and through that party to influence or ultimately confuse or dominate the policy of the Commonwealth of Australia. The movement received neither countenance nor support from tht> general body of "the Roman Catholic Australian hierarchy. Mannixism could not materially afreet the status of the Church qua Church, but ib did very materially affect politics, and was the moat powerhu instrument in causing a Labour debacle. The peculiar trait in Mannixism, says the writer, is it» hatred of England and the Empire. Dr. Mannix, in consequence, waa doomed "to blunder. His position on Irish affairs is reviewed. Concerning the Irish Republican Brotherhood the writer fays : —" Secret societies of that kind" are under the special and unequivocal ban of the Church. Yet Mannixism. 11 not hand and glove with them, was supping with "them with a very short spoon.'' In his concluding paragraph, "An Australian Roman Catholio" writts :— In many places in Australia one can see how often a young 'priest from Ireland has in a day undone the good work of years. Such a priest often prefers the limelight of ; adulation from fanatics. ... He does no'c and will not see that he is living and moving and must have his being in a community which is more British than is Britain itself at times. . . The incessant lamentations, the sprinkling of ashes, the rending of garments over a dead and irrevocable past—often a studied, artificial, and profitable pose, when not part of an organised hypocrisyis unintelligible when not a subject of derision to the Australian, and as frequently to the youth of Irish descent also. Neither the Trißh priest nor hierarch can understand or assimilate these things unless and until ho studies our national temperament and history diligently, impartially, and charit. ably."

A LEAGUE OF YOUTH.

Thero -was a silence just before 10 o'clock in the Guildhall on December 15— a silence few will ever forget, says the Daily Express. The Prince of Wales, dressed in flannel trousers and a blue blazer with the arms of Ypres on the pocket—the uniform worn by members of Toe H— just lit 50 Lamps of Main-' tenance held before him by 50 delegates from branches of Toe H all over the country and from Canada. The Guildhall was packed with young men— who go up to the city every day, men from every walk of life— as the silence fell they thought of that little house in Poperinghe where Toe H, as the Army signals called it, was born only eight years ago. Talbot House was the one bright spot on the Ypres salient. It was the place where officers and men, trudging back to billets, along those muddy, shell-torn Flanders roads, went to remember that good, beautiful, clean things still lived in the world. . . . And now the Prince, who came to Toe H as a young staff officer in Li/, was presiding over a gathering of young men .who are to carry on those principles of goodwill, brotherhood and Christian fellowship which sprang up within the sound and sign of the German guns in 1915. On the dais the yellow flames of the 50 Toe H lamps flickered on the faces of the young men who held them, and cast gigantic shadows out over the great crowd which stood with bowed heads in the darkness thinking of those others, the first lamp-bearers of Talbot House. "I am wondering if in all its long history the 'ever-hospitable Guildhall has looked or felt quite as it does this evening." said the Prince of Wales. "It has- witnessed thousands of important gather* ings. but never perhaps quite such a family party as this is to-night. And yet we are standing to-night only at the outset of 'Toe H.' To-niight is a great step in the early life of a great society, a society which wip, we hope, remain young, when the youngest of us here has grown old. Toe H' is, in fact, just such a League of Youth as Sir James Barrie spoke of at St. Andrews."

COALMINE DANGERS. The need of another great scientific invention, long felt, is poignantly pressed home, says an American -writer, by the recent series of most distressing tragedies in . mines, every one of which has been due to the presence of poisonous or suffocating gases. Davy more than a century ago devised a means of safety from fire damp, but no successor to him has yet done a like service against the even more lethal choke damp. In the last eight years science has made marvellous advances in the manufacture of gases for destroying human .life, and has also done much for the protection of human life against lethal gases on the field of battle. There is a bitterly reproachful suggestion that it has done nothing for the abatement of noxious gases or the protection of men against them in some of the most important fields of peaceful industry. Thousands of lives have been lost in our time through the prevalence of gas in mines. Must the gruesome sacrifice continue forever? It is simply not for a moment to be conceded that a remedy for it is impossible.

MISSIONARY ENTERPRISE. " The whole atmosphere of missionary enterprise to-day is completely changed," said Dr. W. E. Orchard, preaching at the King's Weigh House. This enterprise, like all others for an idealistic purpose, must have suffered enormously by the cutting off of young idealists and the collapse and discredit of idealism which the war has brought upon us, with that consequent apathy from which it is so tremendously difficult for many ot us older people to shake ourselves free. Ihe attempt to pay the debt of the war is going to make this luxury of foreign evangelism very difficult indeed. 1 call it a luxury because we spend on foreign missions precisely what we spend on tobacco, or upon golf. Moreover, the treaty arrangements have, among other iniquities, wiped out entirely all German missionaries in the Allied areas of the ; world, which practically puts an and to the whole of German missionary enterprise. One of the worst effects of the war has been the criticism which has been awakened in the minds of native peoples by the spectacle of Christendom a"c war. From Africa .and China and India comes the constant complaint of missionaries that they are having difficulties in explaining it. These simple! souls were often unable to discriminate between one side and the other. The question arose: Had Christians no other way of settling their disputes than by wholesale slaughter? Again, the awakening of consciousness of the backward peoples of the world is turning their thoughts to subjects which have a way of blotting out religious concerns. It is difficult for Christians of a conquering race to preach the Gospel equally if they represent a Government which is resisting in any form, no matter how wisely, the demand for autonomy' or political liberty. Again, the emergence of an economic consciousness not ; only makes these backward people suspect that the West has designs for their exploitation, but they' feel that there is a danger lest Western civilisation should come along behind Christianity and overwhelm what in their simplicity they regard as a superior form of civilisation." -....., '■.•■