A FAILURE IN THE MAINSTAY.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume VII, Issue 379, 23 July 1880, Page 9

A FAILURE IN THE MAINSTAY.

It is admitted on all sides that the Catholic Church alone holds its own amid the warring of theories and clash of hypotheses. Every month since the death of Pius IX. have his words been confirmed ; his prophecies regarding Ihe destruction which the nations would bring upon themselves have come true to the letter. Germany can see no safety, except in the Church. France is convulsed by the schemes of those liberal Catholics whom Pius IX. so often condemned ; the secret societies have plunged Russia into a reign of terror, and Italy is tossed like a ship without a pilot. Infidelity can pull down ; but it cannot build. It can make chaos ; but it cannot create a new world. When modern denial has brought the world to helplessness and despair, then it will turn to the Church. In the United States, evidences of the spread of unbelief are everywhere. The sects are gradually melting into a broad stream of unbelief. The Sun, which, strange to say, teems to have " got religion " lately, complains that women are deserting the sects. " Is the Church losing its hold on the women ?" demands the Sun, "if 60, it is in greater darger than it ever was in before. An observant Englishwoman is satisfied that there is no room for doubt as to the fact ; that the peril is real and imminent. She aeserts that among the most intelligent women in England unbelief is spreading year by year, and at a rapid rate. The educated countrywomen of Harriet Martineau and Francis Power Cobb are not poring over the Bible and prayer-book as their mothers did. They are reading Darwin and Spencer, Huxley and Tyndall. Is this true to any appreciable extent of the educated women of the United States 1 We know it was not true even so recently as Margaret Fuller's time. Unbelieving or doubting women were as rare here then as white blackbirds. But since then there has been a notable increase in the number and improvement in the quality of girls' schools ; well equipped colleges for young women have sprung up ; colleges heretofore jjpired to the education of the young male of the human species have their doors to his sisters ; even conservative Harvard has somewhat tardily and grudgingly shown a disposition to adjust itself to the changed conditions. The American girl of twenty-three who has "had advantages," to borrow a New Englandism, is a very different young person from that other American girl whom her father courted, loving her all the better perhaps for her simplicity, sweet ignorance, and undoubting piety. This modern girl has studied more or less thoroughly, the higher mathematics and the natural science ; she has read or skimmed the books of the day ; she has heard some of the lecturers ; she keeps the run of the magazines; she haß her reading club, possibly a social literary club as well ; very likely she is writing a novel, or getting ready to do so by assiduous

magazine practice ; she has her head full and her hands full. Certainly the Church does not fill the same place in her thoughts or in Her life that it did in her mother's at her age. Btill it remains to be proved that she is ceasing to be a Christian and becoming an unbeliever. If she is, the outlook for the Church is disquieting. Ever since it was written, the preachers have been fond of quoting a versa setting forth that woman was " Last at His cross and earliest at His grave." From time immemorial the clergy and the women have been close allies. The day that saw this alliance broken would be a cloudy day for the former. What would they do for hearers 7 In very many of the churches of this city, anywhere from two-thirds to nine-tenths of the weekly congregation are women. Moreover, of the comparatively small number of men who are habitual or casual church-goers, how many would be in the pews if they had not been attracted, coaxed, or gently coerced thither by women ?" KeMgion. as taught by Protestantism, cannot staud any teet. It is neither for life, nor for death ; and no man or woman can think even superficially without discovering that a creed which claims the right to teach without pretending to authority or infallibility is an anomaly. The '• higher " education of which the Sun speaks with a certain pride is the most incongruous collection of odds and ends that 1 ever stifled the light in human minds. The mental dyspepsia it produces is shown in the wild " isms " in creed and morality which crop out every day among the " cultured." It produced Joseph Cook. — Catholic Review.