AIDS TO DEVOTION.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXIII, Issue XXV, 16 December 1899, Page 1120

AIDS TO DEVOTION.

OUR FOREFATHERS’ CONCEITS.

(By

J. F. C. Frost.)

It seems difficult for mankind to worship without some aids to devotion not supplied by simple faith. Mun is but a poor thing after all, and requires many props and prods to keep him up to the high-water line of his moral standard. Even in the aet of devotion the spirit is clogged by the flesh and all its ills, fancied and real, and requires aiding and stimulating.

There are orthodox aids to devotion such as music, ritual, and the cunning of art. These have received the seal of custom. The unorthodox are probably as efficacious to the individual, aud would form a-curious collection were they brought to light from the recesses of individual experience. In our fashionable churches the scent-bottle is in requisition to brace nerves jaded by a life at high pressure, and perhaps also to subdue the demon inquisitorial with its perpetual tugging towards the realms of hats and bonnets. The fan, with its symbolical double movement, in cooling the fevered brow—alas! —also hypnotises the eyes of many victims. However, it would be heresy to doubt its efficacy. The schoolboy, temporarily arrested iu church in his striving after perpetual motion, brings out from the depths of his long-suffering pockets strange objects to aid his devotions: frogs, bits of string, lollipops, and the sly pin, whose capabilities he tests on his neighbours, probing their powers of endurance. There are the dried flowers laid between the leaves of the Bible, or Prayer Book, whose fragrance brings back many sweet memories. These and other aids were not scorned even by the austere Calvinists of the village of Drumtochty as they took their seats on Sacrament Sunday in the kirk. lan Maclaren describes them: “The women had their tokens wrapt in snowy handkerchiefs, and in their Bibles “they had sprigs of apple-ringy and mint, and other sweet, scented plants. By-and-by there would be a faint fragrance of peppermint in the kirk—the only religious •and edifying sweet which flourishes wherever sound doctrine is preached, and disappears before new views, and is therefore Confined to the highlands of Wales and Scotland.” In certain dark stone churches on the Continent it is not an uncommon sight to see women walk in with their chafferettes —little boxes with perforated lids lined with metal and filled with glowing charcoal—which they use as footwarmers, and whose influence is delightfully soothing and soporific. The Buddhist has his prayer-wheel, round which is pasted a formula of which multiplicity is, according to his belief, the surest road to efficacy. He accordingly directs his energies to the wheel, and in a few revolutions counts his prayers by the fifties, hundreds, thousands. The Brahmin's chief aid to devotion is diet —abstention from any food calculated to heat the blood and hinder spirituality; here comparison may seek to obtrude itself—but comparisons are odious.

There is nothing novel iu aids to devotion; our forefathers used them, only in stranger form than is considered necessary nowadays—perhaps because of the longer services. Among the most common were illustrated devotional books, one of which I saw in the British Museum. On one page there is a dandy canine with his smart, red and green cap, his gloves tucked into his belt—which, by the way, seems uncomfortably tight—in the act of dropping his bone.

We turn over, and a tragic drama calls forth sympathy. Puss, attacked by rats, has taken refuge in the topmost turret of her castle, where she rings her alarm bell with might and main as the enemy clambers higher and higher. But Fate is inexorable, and the rodents are conquerors; they tumble poor Puss over the ramjiarts—one somersault in mid-air. and. still grasping the bell, she lies lifeless under the walls of her castle, while a feline defender, distracted by grief, shoots his arrows at random.

The fallacy of priding ourselves that the sandwich man is a growth of the nineteenth century is here destroyed at one blow on* a page at this “Book of Hours,” whei-e ..we find his prototype. ~

TO MAKE A CAT .RESPECT A HI HD. Very few people who keep birds we to have a cat in the house, lest some day Miss Pussy do some mischief. There is a very simple and effective means of teaching a cat to keep away from the bird’s cage, and young people who are fond of pets will be interested, perhaps, in the experience of the writer. He had a pretty little canary bird which he kept in his own room. One day he entered the apartment just lit time to see the family cat crouching before the cage. He decided that something should be done to teach the cat a lesson. He got a long hatpin and heated it red-hot; then he dipped it in water, which took the red glow out of it, after which the pin was placed on the bottom of the bird cage, one end protruding a little bit. Picking up the cat, he pressed one of its paws down on the hot wire, and the cat squealed with pain and bolted from the room. Never afterwards would that four-footed pet go anywhere near a bird cage, it having reasoned with itself that if one portion of the cage hurt, any part of it might lie expected to give pain.