General News.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume IX, Issue 464, 3 March 1882, Page 7

General News.

How to recruit the English army is becoming a serious question. An English paper says that the " Irish and Scotch peasants, who hitherto formed the healthiest and best portion of the service, are no longer to be had as heretofore," and most of the English recruits now available are of rather poor physical quality. There is some talk, therefore, about instituting compulsory military duty, as in the continental nations. Fortunately, the fearful scourge of smallpox bas, by a merciful dispensation of Providence, been checked in its passage over our city, but, like the slumbering volcanoes, it may awake and revisit us. St. Roch wards off the evil spirits of scarlet fever and typhus and smallpox. There is a strange story of the saint who, catching the plague from nursing the sick, went off into the deseit to isolate himself from his companions, and would have starved had not his kind dog found him out, and brought him in his mouth some bread to eat every day. — Catholic Telegraph. Melancthon, the pet pupil of the apostate monk, Martin Luther, writes the venerable and accomplished editor of the Catholic Telegraph prevailed upon his poor mother to forsake the Church of her baptism and follow him into heresy. On her death-bed she solemnly appealed to him to tell her the truth. "My son," said the distracted woman, " by thy urgency I have abandoned the Catholic. Church, and followed the new religion. lam about to appear before my God and I abjure thee by that living God. tell me, and keep not the truth from me, in what faith must I die ?" '1 he wivtched son bowed his head, in a deadly struggle between piide, prejudice and principle, be raised it to answer :" Mother ! the Protestant doctrine is the easiest, but the Catholic is the surest." (Audin. " Life of Luther." vol. iii, p. 268.) During the recent residence of the Court at Windsor the Queen paid two visits to the royal vault. It had been intended to decorate the sepulchre with frescoes, but the project was abandoned, and only the walls under and around the recess at the end ("in which lie the coffins of George 111. and Queen Charlotte) have been ornamented ; but, seeing that the place is never entered except by th« officials when there is a funeral, it seems a foolish and absurd waste of money to make any alterations whatever. It is a large vault, and is lighted by two oil lamps. Most of the coffins lie on the shelves, but those of George IV. and his successor and of the Duke of Kent are on a stone table in the centie; and on another table near the gate by which the vault is enteied, is the last coffin placed there — that of King George of Hanover. The Queen has ordered that oak coffins are in future to be used for the royal family, and all the crimson and gilt coffins in the vault have recently been placed in oak cases. The London Universe says that we have not yet Been the last of the persecution of Jesuits in France. Only last week a new case arose which showed that members of religious orders in general, ani Jesuits in particular, will be hunted down in France until there is not one vt them left in the country. Abbe Labrosse is the principal of a flourishing school at Tours, to which the best families of that city are in the babit of sending their children. When the Jesuit schools were suppressed and the Jesuits turned out of their homes, Abbe Labrosse received several of them under his roof, and employed them as assistants in his school. For thus acting the part of a good Samaritan he was indicted in the disciplinary Court of the Academical Council of Poitiers, and last week judgment was rendered against him, wheieby he is deprived for six months of the right of superintending a school. Yet, it should be known that there exists no law in France to prevent Jesuits from acting as teachers, for the notorious 7th clause nf M. Jules Ferry's University Education law, which was to have prescribed the Jesuits, was rejected by the French Senate last spring twelve-month.