Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, Volume IX, Issue 463, 24 February 1882, Page 1

Current Topics

AT HOME AND ABROAD.

It is somewhat curious to find that the report of A formidable the Pope' s imminent departure from Borne has inmovement, duced the usurping Government to double the guards in the neighbourhood of the Vatican. Does this point to any probability of an intention on the part oi King Humbert to prevent the Holy Father from going away ahould he decide upon doing so ? That the step would be one most dangerous to tht King appears to be allowed. The Constitutionnel, for example, says that the blows now aimed at the Pope, in the event of his leaving Borne, would fall directly on King Humbert. It adds that in consideration of the way in which Italy, taking advantage of the embarrassment of France, became possessed of Borne, were the Revolutionists to seize on the city, Europe would be justified in compelling them to release their prey, and thus restore to the Pope the means necessary to the independent exercise of his spiritual powers. Mean* time the London Times, scared and angry at the indignant protest which the long series of insults and outrages directed against the Holy See has called forth from the Pope, draws an insulting comparison between His Eoliness and the Snltan, accusing both of a desire to add to the " inflammable*and chaotic elements " already abundant in Europe. The article, however, in which tbe comparison is made, contains also its refutation, for its admissions as to the real power of the Pope, and the wild aspirations of the Sultan, show how far-fetched the comparison has been. That the Sultan should claim of Egypt to " come into a partnership of goods and fortunes with a country like Turkey " is a wholly different matter from a complaint of the Pope as to the restrictions he labours under in exercising the spiritual power he possesses, and on whose exercise the welfare of the world depends. '.This the Times itself admits " The Pope," it says, "is no pretender when he challenges sympathy and appeals to the authority he declares to have been outraged. He wields a tremendous empire of ascendency over the hearts and souls of millions." While the master of so great a power, then, is in distress, and openly insulted and outraged " inflammable and chaotic elements " must needs abound, and any complaint by means of which his deliverance might be brought nearer would tend rather to reduce than to add to them. When the Times accuses Leo XIII. in company with his cardinals of making a feint of an intention to quit Borne for the purpose of " exciting strife and contention on their behalf among nations and especially against Italy," and of making a false pretence that " Prince Bismark and the enormous influence he wields " are on their side, the insult he offers to the Pope is at once avenged by the contemptible light in which he exhibits, bis own judgment, and seme of propriety.

In connection with the statements that have been the lately made in Dunedin as to the antiquity of man ANTIQUITY we have already given an argument taken from the OF MAN. Dublin Review. From the same publication, and indeed, the self -same article, we take also the following :—": — " Whether the period in which man has inhabited the earth be assumed to be short or long, it is but a brief interval of time compared to the ages during which the earth has brought forth the green herb, . . . and the fruit tree yielding fruit after its kind . . . the living cieature in its kind, cattle and creeping things and beasts of the earth according to their kinds. If the silent records of the works have proved anything they have proved this. Now geologists have assigned to this life-period of the earth such pei iods as two or three hundred million years. Lyell gives 200,000,000 years as the period which must have elapsed since the deposition of tba secondary strata. At this rate 300,000,000 of years must fall below the corresponding estimate for the period of all life on earth ; and 200,000 years, the approximate life period assigned to man, is therefore taken as considerably less than one-thousandth part of the life period of the earth. Let us suppose that this approximately repreeents the probable proportion between the two periods. This ia tbe

first step gained. But physical science, with the help of mathematics, tells us how long it has been possible for the earth to have been inhabited by life such as we see it at present,— life such as we trace it in the f ossiliferous strata. The modern doctrine of energy and force applied to this question, gives us a ready and a certain answer. The subject was taken up by Sir William Thomson within the last few years. ... He divides his argument into three branches. (1) That based on the internal heat of tbe earth ; (2) based on the tidal retardation of the earth's rotation ; (3) based on the sun's temperature. The general nature of the proof will be understood when we say that in the first branch he takes what we know of the internal heat of the earth and the known laws of the cooling of heated bodies, and from what we know of the heat of the earth at present and the rate at which it is cooling, calculates back to the time when its surface first solidified, and when it became fit for animal and vegetable life. Ten million years is thus found to be the limit during which life has been possible on earth, To sum the matter up in Professor Tait's words : — ' we can say at once to geologists that, granting this premise — that physical laws have remained as they are now, and that we know of all the physical laws which have been operating during that time, we cannot give more time for their speculations than about ten or (say at most) fifteen million years. But I dare say many of you are acquainted with the speculalions of Lyell and others, especially of Darwin, who tells us that even for a comparatively brief portion of recent geological history three hundred million years will not suffice. We say so much the worse for geology as at present understood by its chief authorities, for, as you will presently see, physical considerations from various independent points of view, render it utterly impossible that more than ten or fifteen million years nan be granted.' . . . We have here the result, a result not yet accepted by geologists, for there is a scientific prejudice which is quite as powerful as the theological prejudice of which we hear so much ; but this result they must accept sooner or later, for it is a case of close mathematical reasoning against loose speculation. Its acceptance will revolutionise geology, for it will afford no time for the exaggerated uniformitarianisia of the school of Lyell, a school which has never been popular among Continental geologists. It will deal a severe blow to Darwinism, for 10,000,000 years is but a narrow interval for the operations of natural selection and evolution. But we have not to deal with these considerations here. We return to the argument. We have seen that while life has existed on earth for ageß, the life period of the human race is allowed by geologists themselves to be a short interval compared to what we have called the life-period of the earth ; and, tailing estimates actually given by geologists, we find that the less period is not equal to as much as one thousandth part of the greater. This proportion must hold good whether man has been a short time or a long time on earth, whether life has existed on our planet for 300 or 400 million years, or for no more than 10,000,000. But me now know that life ; has not existed on earth for more than 15,000,000 years, and that probably it has existed for less than 10,000,000 years. It follows, then, that man has not been on earth for 15,000 years, and that probably the life-period of man is, as we have said, considerably lest than 10,000 years, This all but demonstrated. As for man having been 200,000 years on earth ; i: so he has been on. earth not for one-thousandth, but for one-seventy-fifth of the whole life-period of the earth, a proportion which every known fact of geology condemns. We might have elaborated the argument at greater length but this is sufficient."

There is nothing that throws more light on the compensation nature of the cry for compensation tban the revelafor tions made by the Land Courts. We can hardly IRISH understand, indeed, how even the most prejudiced LANDLORDS, partisans of landlordism can in face of them set up a defence of the system in question, or retrain from acknowledging that it has been a system of plunder as disgraceful as any that has ever existßd. The very doings of the Greek or Italian brigands themselves, who every now and then carry away some man whom they believe to be wealthy, and place a heavy ransom upon his life, may be compared without much disadvantage if any, with those that gentlemen esteemed as worthy members of

society and honourable as well as loyal subjects of the Queen have been in the habit of carrying on unrebuked in Ireland. The Dublin Natiin, for example, furnishes us with the following details. "In 1835 the rent on one holding was £3 6s Bd, and the valuation £3 10s. The tenant improved his farm and built a house at a cost of £75. The result was that his rent was raised four times in 40 years, until in 1877 it stood at ten shillings more than double the Government valuation. The valuation of another holding was £16 10s ; the tenant reclaimed the land from a state of nature ; he was rewarded by being charged a rent of £36 4s 4d. Another holding was valued at £15 5s Bd. It was ' wild, stony land, without any surface,' when the tenant got it ; to render it of any agricultural value the rocks in it had to be blasted, and thousands of barrels of lime and eand bad to be deposited on it. At lr.st it was reclaimed by the tenant, whose improvements, however, were then confiscated by the imposition of a rent of £36, or more than double th« Government valuation ! Another tenant's valuation was £29 ss, and his rent, based on his improvements, was £46 15s ; to pay that rent he had been obliged to borrow money for five years in succession, and to deny himßelf and his family all butchei 'a meat for the same period, ' satisfied if he could get his fill i.f potatoes.' No valuation was put upon another holding in conseqnc cc of 'the original worthlessness of the land,'" but it was reclaimer] l>y the tenant, and then a rent of £55 a year was exacted for it : r. f ter which we learn without astonishment that the unfortunate mnn dccl ired up^n his oath that * for two years he did not sleep soundly any night in consequence of thinking of the rent In had to pa.v.'" The compensation deserved by the gentlemen who own the holdings in question is very evident ; it is akin to that deserved by tbe " King of the Mountains," whom also they resemble in the confidence they show as to the reasonableness of their metier where they are personally concerned, when the ruse of the American captain forced him to give up his captives without ranEom. But the worst of t\c matter is that although the Land Act may have the effect of preventing such grievous extortion in future, it does nothing whatever towards recompensing the tenants so plundered in the paßt and not only this, but it allows all tenants who have fallen into arrears of tho rent so extorted to be turned out of the farms their industry has created and the houses erected by their own efforts. It would, meantime, be quite consistent with the goad will of the legislators who passed such an Act, to pass also an amendment on it by which compensation should be granted to the gentlemen robbed of their plundering privileges. The landlords need not despair of obtaining their demand from Parliament.

The following tribute paid to the worth of Mr. W, A E. Grace, Mayor of New York by our able contemDISTINGUISHED porary the Boston Pilot deserves a prominent place irishman. in our columns, not only because the subject of it is an Irishman of whom his fellow-countrymen everywhere may be proud, but also, because he is the brother of our much esteemed fellow-colonist the Hon. Dr. Grace of Wellington, as indeed we had already mentioned in former issues of the Tablet :— 14 Probably • the oldest inhabitant ' of New York could not relcal a Mayor of that city who was not a target fcr abuse from all quarters before bo bad been six months in officr. It is certain that New Yoik never had a Major who poifunnsd his duties with more safsf.ictiou to tlu people or more credit to himself than the present chief officer of the city. Wm. R. Grace. At the time of his election, fourteen months ago, a desperate ell >rt was made to defeat Mr. Grace, for no other reason than that he was a Catholic. Charges of the most libellous kind, without a single fact to sustain them, were made against hiru. Thousands of bigoted members of his own party voted for Iho opposition candidate because they wanted to keep down the C.itholies. They failed to defeat him, but his escape was a narrow one. A notable change has taken place tince Mr. Grace's election. Journa's which abused him are his strongest supporters now. Almost the entire press commends his adminibtration. The citizens who are not politicians praise it without stiut. From every quarter, except that of the old politic'ans, his efforts on behalf of honesty and good government receive re cognition and the warmest approval. The politicians, who thought they could use him, but find they cannot, abuse him as hotly as he is praised by the citizens. They call him foul names and seek every possible means to disparge him. One of them, a noisy democratic ' leader,' began an assault on him, the other day, by stigmatising him as ' a carpet-bagger from Galway.' Praise from the press and the people and abuse from the politicians are pretty good proof that Mr. Grace is the right man in the right place. When he became Mayor of New Y>rk he put aside all considerations but one— that he was to serve the people. He was not to serve as a Catholic, or as an Irishman, but as an American citizen.His religion and his nativity had nothing to do with his office Nevertheless, it is no small credit to Ireland that it has given New York the best Mayor the city ever had, one who has the respect of every respectable citizen, the endorsement of almost the entire press, and the enmity only of a set of shabby office-jobbing politicians." -$'

Of how the rising generation in Victoria has pro* A nice state fited by nine years of secular education, iiPße^nnd OF affaibs. compulsory, we obtain some farther particnlan from the Melbourne correspondent of the Sydney Morning Herald, who supplies bis newspaper with a list of Certain festivities celebrated by some members of the class in question during the Christmas and New Year's holidays. He writes as follows : — " A band of enterprising young gentlemen ranged themselves at the entrance doors of St. Patrick's Cathedral, and besmirched thjo.^ worshippers as they came out from their devotions. Anpther Band treated themselves to a ride upon the Richmond* railway; and hustled and generally terrified some helpless young women who were in the same carriage as themselves. Several other chivalrous youths broke ,. into the cottage of a lone woman, and after committing nameless crimes, flung her into the street, and kicked her until she was insensible. A well-organised company of high spirited young men took possession of the Eastern Market on Boxing Night, and, having provided themselves with thistles and the stems of artichokes, scratched the arms and faces of women and children with these weapons, and appeared to be greatly diverted with the pain they occasioned and the blood they drew. Chinamen have furnished excellent sport to these light-hearted boys, several Chinamen having been punched, kicked, aad rolled in the gutter." — And these are the millennial proceedings as they turn out to be in fact, of which we heard so much boasted in theory when the secular system was inaugurated. — The secular system has acted the part of the pedagogue in leading in the rising generation beneath the lash — which is now looked to as the only means of protecting society from continual outrage and insult at the hands of the generation educated secularly, for nothing, and by compulsion. The correspondent in question also gives a list of crimes of violence. " Among the miscellaneous incidents indicative of an active condition of mind during the holiday week just passed," he adds, " have been infanticide, child-dropping f incendiarism, commercial defaulting, and female swindling." And all this also at least implies a people very badly educated and influenced. From another source we take the following case, in which it will be seen again that a knowledge of the arts of reading and writing had produced no salutary moral effect — perhaps, however, an acquaintanceship with the third "R " may have been wanting, and that, it may be, will be held as a satisfactory explanation of the failure of the other two. Had the unfortunate boy only been well versed in arithmetic also his fate might have proved very different : — " A magisterial inquiry was held at Serpentine, on Satur* day, by D. Courts, J.P., on the body of George Watson, a boy thirteen years of age. From the evidence taken it appears that on Tuesday last his mother had occasion to reprimand him. Some time after he met another boy, with whom he had a quarrel, which ended in Watson being pulled off a horse he was riding and thrashed. He (Watson) threatened to shoot the other boy, or, if he had a knife, he would have stabbed him. On Wednesday his body was found in * paddock about a quarter of a mile from his mother's residence. A rifle was found close by. The body had a gunshot wound in it just above the navel. In a pocket-book found on him was a letter, cvi- , dently addressed to his mother, but the b'ood had obliterated a great part of the writing. The following words could, however, be distinctly read :— ' I mean to «hoot myself with Cronon's rifle,' and 1 Oh, if I could but see your face once more.' An open verdict was relumed."

There is ft new school of philosophy founded in A new Canterbury. It has broken out among the Wesleyan philosophy, body, and naturally has caused to them a fair share of surprise *nd dismay. John Wesley they say n^vcr heard of the like in all his life, and it is rumoured about that there are even some who think it would make John Wesley turn in his grave to hear it now. It certainly was not for the like of this he set up a ministry of the Word, after mucb prayer and wrestling with tbe Lord — '' Non hos queesitum munns in usus." The Socrates of the situation resides in Kaiapoi whence he lately journeyed to Christchurch to deliver at the Wesleyan Conference a lecture which, by special commission, be had, it would seem, taken a whole year to prepare. We do not know whether the length of the delivery was in any degree proportionate to that of the time given for composition, but then Wesleyan s can sit out a good deal in the way of talk, and on this occasion there was the novelty for them of feeling shocked all the time. However, as the lecturer tells us, he went through all that the Scriptures and science have to tell us concerning the nature and destiny of man, and that he criticised besides the leading theories of the day, with a trifle or two added to the end of it all, it is evident he had a tolerably long task of it. His conclusions are as follows :— " 1. That all creature life is divine force conditioned by the form and character of the organism through which it is manifested. 2. That every plant and animal is a complex organism, having a physical and a spiritual part. 3. That, in the case of man, the spiritual part is j capable of surviving the shock of physical death, and of continuing i the functions of mind. 4. That permanent immortality is secured by

redemption, understanding by redemption, not an arbitrary transaction, but the entire process by which the diseases of the boul are healed and its functions brought into harmony with law." " Divine force," then, we learn, perishes when the plant or lower animal dies ; it survives only in the case of man, and in his case, that it may be immortal, requires to undergo a process of redemption. — To err no longer is human but divine. But, again, we gather that we must regard all the plants and lower animals in the world as being in a state of reprobation. The lily can no longer be accepted as the emblem of purity, and innocence can have no more improper representative than the dove, they are the worst of sinners all of them, and perdition, such as it is, awaits them all. For them there is no redemption, but the spiritual part of every one of them shares the punishment of "human souls become hopelessly wicked, 11 that is " extinction." No child can henceforth pluck a daisy without sending a spiritual part to perdition. The 'laity, we are told, meantime, are delighted at this. They do not care a pin about the extinction of divine force, and the eternal disgrace of the birds and the flowers ; to long as they are persuaded that the old-fashioned hell is a myth that is all they are anxious about. Of course, however, we must remember that every one of them is only relieved to think that no one else has been or will henceforth be lost in the old-fashioned way ; for himself he deserves and intends to deserve nothing but Heaven, and does not at all look forward to extinction — or so much as dream of kicking a loose leg in the full persuasion that nothing worse will overtake him. This',school of philosophy in Canterbury will, no doubt, prove soothing to many people, unselfishly so, of course. But still it ■eems strange why folk do not go over to freethought openly at once, without a stupid attempt to hold on to the Christian religion, and drag a distorted portion of it with them.

Obangeism and the Irish Church missions are the outeb kicking all alive in Melbourne. The foundation darkness FOB stone of a new Protestant Hall was laid there the catholics, other day under the invocation of good Queen Bess, Oliver Cromwell, and King William of Orange, and it was declared by one of the Bey. gentlemen present that the institution was intended to bind the various sections of the Protestant Church together, for purposes of " defensive or aggressive action," — but the especial knot chosen to tie them, together tight in a bundle was that true lovers' one, the hatred of " Popery." Meantime, " aggressive action" we suspect will prove their chief employment, for there is nothing for them to defend themselves against. The Pope hardly knows that there are such people in the world, and, unless it may be in the matter of rescuing a kidnapped child here and there, as it has occasionally happened among their brethren in Ireland, or admonishing some unfortunate nominal Catholic bribed, in distress, to profess reformation, we doubt if the Church will ever, voluntarily, come into contact with them. The Rev. Dr. Gilchrist, however, who congratulated that Protestant association in Ireland which he asserted to be preventing the spread of " disloyalty and sedition" there, should know that all Protestants are not on its aide. The President of the Chicago Convention the other day, for example, was an Episcopal clergyman, and many Protestants, not only in Ireland but in England and America, are heartily in concord with the Irish agitators. — Many Catholics, on the other hand, are opposed to them. And again we have good reason to believe that of the very Orange Association itself to which this Bey. Doctor alluded numerous members very warmly approve of the movement he condemns. Here the Bey. Doctor inaugurates the " aggressive action" of this institution by leading a charge on Protestants themselves. The rest of his address is merely the claptrap of the bigots to which he belongs, and such as their sucking babes can put out amongst their drivel. The Bey. H. B. Macartney, a worthy son of the famous dean, however, made a notable remark or two. He is afraid of his life of " Popery," and, on his own showing, very reasonably 60. It is, he says, backed up— God forgive us the quotation—" by all the subtleties of Satan, and all the energies of hell." How can the lath and plaster of a Protestant Hall be expected to stand against all that we should like to know, or the soul of a parson, most suitable to the composition of the hall, fail to quake at the thought of it ? The Rev. Mr. Macartney does not think that even the Government of Victoria — Mr. Berry pitted against Lucifer 1 — is able to meet the " subtleties and energies" in question. Rome, he Bays, "is in this colony being forced to educate her children — and ehe is educating them well, but at the same time she is infusing the poison of her system into the children." But the Protestant Hall is to try its hand at knocking over the poisoned. The evil is all to be counteracted by " decreasing the number of Catholics." Where arc the police 7 Is even a parson to be allowed to stand up in the broad daylight and propose like this to decimate, the population of the countiy 1 Or do we, as is natural in these days of dynamite, nervously suspect a blood-thirsty proj 'ct that does not exist ? Are softer explosives to be substituted for dynamite 1 Are Catholics to be killed off merely by the force of soup kitchens, flannel petticoats, and comforts of the kind, such as we have been accustomed to see vainly em-

ployed for a like purpose in Ireland, for— we avoi 1 blasphemy— it is to such a complexion that all the professions of spiritual means are, in fact, at last reduced. But the worst it to come— we Catholics are shut away into the outer darkness,— the Bey, speaker has, in short, promised that the Hall is to become a " centre of light for Catholics." O mille murder !— in these days of a thousand illuminations— of the bright electric light, all our means of vision are to be derived from wasted farthing dips. — We are of all men most wretched.

Among the points which have been raised, we A baseless perceive, by the scientific discussions that have absebtion. taken place in Dunedin within the last week ox two is that with regard to the condition of the lower animals before the fall of man ; it being asserted that before geology had afforded proof to the contrary it was the established doctrine that the beasts also had been created immortal. Our Dunedin objectors had, however, been forestalled in this assertion ; it had previously been advanced, and, notably, Mr. Lecky had, in his '* Rationalism in Europe," put forward such a statement very ttrongly. Geology, he said, " has proved that countless ages before man trod this earth death raged and revelled among its occupants, that it so entered into the original constitution of things that the agony and infirmity it implies were known as at present when the mastodon and dinotherium were the rulers of the world. To deny this is now impossible : to admit it is to abandon one of the ryotdoctrines of the past." We have, nevertheless, good grounds for a denial that by admitting the fact that death prevailed among the world of brute beasts, any abandonment whatsoever is made of a " root-doctrine of the past." But on the contrary, without attempting to deal with theology on our own account, we have at hand a passage that seems to us conclusive as to its being otherwise, and which we have taken from an article contributed by a learned Jesuit Father to a French periodical :— " On the one hand (says the writer) it is certain that the soul, the form of the body, gives this not only its life, but also its substantial existence ; on the other hand, it is equally certain, that inaccessible to the attempts of death, the soul hag nothing in itself which could hinder it from making this matter which is substantially united to it, live and exist with it always! Whence then comes death? In fact, answers St. Thomas, death comes from sin, since God had created man immortal. But as this immortality was a gratuitous gift, sin, in taking it from us, has only put us back into our natural condition. Death, in fact, is natural to us ; but how ? Because it results from the essential condition of our body. The soul, it is true, is immortal and incorruptible in its nature ; and of itself it would tend to render equally incorruptible the matter to which it is united ; but this bears in itself a principle of corruption from which the soul cannot naturally deliver it." — The principle of corruption being further on explained as arising from the contrariety existing between the qualities of the body, and which necessarily produces corruptibility. Death, then, according to the teaching contained here, was natural from the first to the lower animals also, and they, having no soul by which they could be super* naturally delivered from it, must evidently have died from the first.

Another passage which we find in the article of AN the Jesuit Father from which we have alreadj explanation quoted, although it has no direct bearing upon the OF life. point to which we have alluded, still strikes us at most worthy of repetition ; it runs as follows :— " If," says the writer, " for the ancient notions of the four elements and their qualities, we substitute the more precise notions of modern science concerning physical forces, we shall find in the words of St. Thomas, not only the explanation of death, but that of life. Life will appear to us such as it is in reality, an unceasing straggle between the superior forces of the vital principle and the inferior forces of matter. These last are of two kinds : mechanical forces and chemical forces. Both of them are in opposition to the vital forces. Whilst gravity draws towards the earth all the parts of our body, and all the liquids which circulate in its vessels, vital energy holds us erect and makes our blood mount up again from the lower extremities towards the heart, and from the heart towards the head. Whilst the outer agents, heat, electricity, &c, work without ceasing to dissolve the chemical combinations which form the different tissues of our organs, the vital principle neutralises these corrupting influences, and alone defends the little world whose king it is, against the coalition of the forces which the material universe obeys. As long as, in this struggle, the vital principle remain 3 the strongest, life increases, or at least maintains itself upon its territory ; but, like everything that is created, the vital energy has its limits. The moment comes in which it only sustains the combat feebly ; little by little tne inferior forces gain the upper hand, the body leans toward* the earth, the circulation of fluids becomes slow, the organs are more and more materialised ; at last life is completely conquered, and the material forces finding no more resistance have only to exercise themselves upon the corpse, as they do on every other body, to make

it fall away into rottenness. Jn this point (continues the writer), as in all the rest, the physical and natural order is the symbol of the moral and supernatural order. There again life shows itself to us as the result of the struggle between the higher forces which bear us towards God and the b »ser forces which tend to lower us towards the earth ; and we see the soul, all immortal at it is by its nature, Buffer the most shameful of all deaths when it permits the tendencies which impel it towards matter to prerail over spiritual and divine interests."