SUFFERINGS AND TRIUMPHS.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume IV, Issue 192, 1 December 1876, Page 13

SUFFERINGS AND TRIUMPHS.

While we must acknowledge the justice of your remarks in your article " A Glance at the "World," we must allow that it is good for us to be afflicted, and that we deserve chastisement to bring us to a proper mind. If the world did nob hate us we should not be the friends of God. The Church, Ido not speak of individual Catholics, but the Church is reviled and persecuted because she lovea justice and hates iniquity. How should we have an opportunity of forgiving and loving our enemies and praying for them, if such men as Victor Emmanuel, the Emperor of Russia, Bismarck, and the Editors of the Dunedin dailies did not exist ? Does not God m>ermit ignorant, or prejudiced, or ill-disposed men to try the Patience of the good ? A certain writer, Addison, I think, remarks that the prevalence of injustice in the world is one of the strongest arguments in favor of a future life and a judgment to come. While, therefore, we condemn and oppose the unjust conduct of the enemies of the clergy and the Church, let us thank God for the opportunities they give ub to practice the hardest but most necessary duty of our religion— the forgiveness of injuries. The modes in which men try to injure the Church and her children are as various as their various situations and dispositions. There never was a time when the Chuich. did not suffer wrong at the hauds of her powerful and cunning assailants, and there never was a time in which she did cot conquer. The Church in our day is both suffering and triumphing, but triumphing far more than she is suffering We are reminded on this day that we have many friends a Dove who shared both in her sufferings and in her triumphs, and who are ready if we ask them to aid us with their prayers to conquer our own evils dispositions, the most masterful and worst of all our enemies. Apropos to this subject it appears that the Dunedin dailies have noble no less than ignoble coadjutors in the work of detracting and worrying the Roman Catholic clergy. Many of your readers may not have seen the fracas with Lord Nelson as it appeared in the London • Times.' A son of Lord Nelson's, it seems, a young gentleman of about twenty years of age, was preparing to go to Oxford or Cambridge to study for the Church — to become a Church of England parson, when lo and behold he, one morning ere he could set off, was admitted into the Roman Catholic Church by Father Bowden ! Lord Nelson, his father, on hearing this was furious. A conspiracy! a conspiracy! and immediately he wrote to the 'Times' telling his grievance. He accused Father Bowden of many things, and poured out the vial of his rage upon him and a young lady who had sometime before entered the Catholic Church and become a nun. It was Father Bowden and the young nun ■who had done all the mischief, and entrapped the unfortunate victim into entering the Church by Eoman tactics, that is by improper influence in defiance of parental authority. They ought to be held up to public detestation, gibetted, in fact, before the Protestant public. Father Bowden, of course, answered the noble lord in the ' Times,' and it turned out that there was about as much real truth in his Lordship's story as in the charitable fables which the Dunedin dailies are wont to publish about "Popish priests" and nuns. It appeared that the Hon. Mr. Nelson had been studying the Eoman Catholic religion carefully and had made himself well acquainted with it ; that he had been in the habit of using books of Catholic devotion and attending the Roman Catholic services for three years. The idea of a well-educated young gentleman of twenty years of age under such circumstances being cajoled or entrapped into the Roman Catholic Church is surely preposterous. But such charges as these show to what lengths the enemies of the Church in the blindness of their rage and prejudice will go to damage the reputation of priests and nuns. Lord Nelson himself is a " Romanist" and fancies he is a Catholic. The probability is that he will one day follow his pious son into " the one fold " and then wonder why his eyes were not soonor opened to knoAV the truth. The suddenness with which the Hon. Mr. Nelson at last took his resolution to enter the Church is certainly striking. But the operations of Divine grace are mysterious. Auckland, Feast of All Saints'. J, W

P.S. — One curious part of Lord Nelson's letter is that in which he complains that so many persons in " his rank of life " should now be victims to Eoman tactics. Poor man ! He has not the noble soul of his great predecessor, the hero of Trafalgar, who, in spite of all his faults, was a generous friend to the Holy See.