A RARE DISCOVERY.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume VI, Issue 272, 19 July 1878, Page 5

A RARE DISCOVERY.

Now and then some wholesome truth, to which we Catholics are no strangers, is brought to the knowledge of our Protestant brethren, and by them hailed as a new discovery. Just at present it is the fact that Catholics are acquainted with the Ten Commandments. There was a time when we were supposed to be ignorant of the Decalogue ; our spiritual advisers gave us, according to some, only nine commandments. Bo general was this belief among Protestants that a newspaper writer of Baltimore showed his ignorance by an open letter to Chief Justice Taney decrying the iniquity of this mutilation of the moral law.

But now, forsooth, The Congregat'wnalist has discovered that not four per cent, of Protestant public school children can repeat the Commandments at all. It has further opened its eyes to the fact that those who can say them are Catholics. Thus the ignorant Papists have put to shame the descendants of the Puritans on their own ground, namely, knowledge of the word of God in its most essential parts.

To us, as we have said, this is no surprise. It is but a conspicuous example of the blindness of those who view the Church from a sectarian standpoint. They can never see her as she is, but must always lay to her charge the effects of their own distorted vision.

Given a community with such knowledge of their religion as the Catholic Church desires to give, and they will be found orderly, obedient to recognized authority, human and divine. Without such knowledge the most thorough secular education will result only in that state, well described in Holy Writ, where every man did what was right in his own eyes. — Pilot.