ANOTHER SPECIMEN OF IT.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XII, Issue 6, 30 May 1884, Page 3

ANOTHER SPECIMEN OF IT.

(Bombay Catholic Examiner.)

A Major Freeman writes to the Lahore Church Gazette* thrilling story called " A Forgotten Persecution." Like all similar stories the time and scene of its enactment are both remote, the one being about the year 1845, and the Other the Madeira Islands. • Somehow or other we never hear of Protestant triumphs or martyrdoms except in distant countries about" iwhichr nobody knows very much. Here we are told bow the work of. evangelisation is making astonishing progress in Mexico ; and probably the good people there are told every now and then that the population of India is becoming completely Methodist. But let us return to Major Freeman's story of a persecution which has long ago apparently vanished into mythology and become forgotten before it was known. In 1838, one Dx. Robert Kalley arrived in Madeira. He was a medical missionary. . Finding the people of Madeira grossly ignorant, for the Bible was a sealed book to most of them, he set about trying to convert them. He ordered out a cargo of bibles apparently and scatlered them broadcast over the land. The effect was wonderful. It is really strange how natural it is for people to become Protestants after reading the Bible! But the process of Protestantising Catholics does not everywhere succeed equally well. In countries that we can get to know anything about, tons upon tons of bibles and tracts are imported without producing any other effect than affording an bonest livelihood to a score or two of missionaries and a swarm of evangelistic small-fry. However, in little out-of-the-way places that are n«ver noticed in the newspapers, Protestant missionaries have only to import the Bible and give it to the people to study. In Major Freeman's eyes a man <>i,lv requires a few " half-hours with the Bible " to cease absolutely to be a Catholic. This was the case, it seems, in Madeira where the Bible was so flagrantly hostile to the clergy that they declared war against it. " One priest declared it to be a • book from hell,' and the bishops, in a pastoral issued in 1843 and published in all the churches, excommunicated ipso facto all who read it." After reading this preposterous statement we cannot help ordering the witness out of court and refusing to accept his sensational accounts of iS A Forgotten Persecution."