M. LITTRE.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume IX, Issue 434, 5 August 1881, Page 9

M. LITTRE.

The Daily News is more than disturbed by the intelligence that M. Littre on his death-bed sought the blessing of that Church against which during a long life, he had blasphemed, and submitted to that faith of which he had spoken all manner of evil. It is quite natural for the Daily Netvs and the atheists of Paris to feel great annoyance at the contempt which such an act, on the part of one whom they reckoned a leader, casts upon them and the whole sect of " Sans Dieu ; " and they realise more than ever the truth of the assertion of Saiuthibal. that infidels are " no credit to their party ■when on their death-beds." It is painfully amusing to observe how anxious are the freethinkers that the world should believe that M. Littre received the rites of the Catholic Church (and thus in the strongest manner possible gave the He to all his former folly and wickedness) for any motive rather than that of saving his soul. One suggests that he declared his belief and asked for and received baptism to please his •wife and children ; a second, that it was done out of gratitude to the nuns who attended him ; a third, that a well-known priest, to whom he was greatly attached, persuaded him snto the Catholic faith. Any reason will do with these extraordinary gentry except one that includes prayer, and grace, and whatever is supernatural. The " Sans Dieu," as Jean Grange has so happily named them, have exhibited on this occasion of the conversion of one of the most notorious of their number more than their average hardihood and rascality. They admit that, when ill on a former occasion, M. Littr6 was watched by a regularly appointed guard of infidels, for the simple purpose of preventing him from the use of his liberty, had he desired to receive the consolations of religion ; and at his interment the other day they were gross and coarse enough to express openly, and in the hearing of the members of the family, their regret at having failed this time in keeping the priest by force from the death-bed of the dying sinner. Such is liberty as understood by your civilised athiesl and Liberal of the nineteenth century. Liberty for himself and his party for the accomplishment of every atrocity, and the most savage tyranny over all the rest. Face to face with this school of profligate barbarism, the Catholic Church has only one thing to do which she perfectly understands. She has to pray and to endure. There is no arguing with a demoniac. But with real noble and fair science it is her delight to reason as it is part of her work to guide. She hears with calm compassion the vulgar calumny of those selfstyled professors whose audience is the mob ; she listens while in accents of malicious rage (which is eloquence to the communa-rd and the sans-eulottes, they denounce her as the enemy of progress and science. But her justification 6he seeks elsewhere :in her own work against mankind, in her tender care for the human soul in the first place, in her unmasking of all mis-called knowledge which would

lead the rational creatures oE God to self-worship instead of to that of their Creator ; in her leading her children safely to the heights and depths of all science by proving that Biblical revelation can have nothing to fear from true scientific theory. We suppose that whenever the school of infidels gets the chance, it will prove the Church to be the enemy of science. We wait for that. We remain perfectly unmoved by the shouts of the unreasoning crowd shrieking out that Bhe is this already, for we remember (had we nothing else to keep us firm in our position) certain admissions which, in an evil hour for the credit of their own consistency, have escaped from such men as Tame, Benan, Darwin. Vacherot, and Littre. If, even when arguing against the teaching of faith, the leaders and worshippers of mere physical science contradict themselves and justify the Chuich, and seem compelled by a resistless power to do this, surely our position is strong indeed 1 — Universe.