Current Topics AT HOME AND ABROAD.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XIII, Issue 24, 9 October 1885, Page 1

Current Topics AT HOME AND ABROAD.

In turning over some back numbers of the FortPRIMEVAL nightly Review we have come across an article on

science OK Judaism which contains very much that is of revelation 1 interest. With the conclusions, nevertheless, of

the writer, Mr. Lucien Wolf, we completely disagree, and we hold that his argument contains many points at variance with the material nature of his views, while some of his statements as to facts are false. It is not true, for example, that the preservation of the Jews is contradictory of the belief of Christians — but, on the contrary, their continued existence in the position they occupy is more than consistent with that belief, and is a proof of its truth. Nor is it true that the Church has ever encouraged the persecution of the Jews, who had in certain of the Popee, and in notable saints of the Catholic world, their best friends and protectors. The writer's claim, moreover, that the fulfilment of the promise made to Abraham, that all the nations of the earth should be blessed in his seed, was to be found in the effects produced on those nations by the temporal influences of the Jewish people certainly cannot be allowed with respect to the past, and if in the future a partial adoption of the Jewish " legalism " ameliorates the condition of mankind, it will be due, not to the influence or example of the Chosen People, but because the advance of science brings with it to the world generally practices that have proved beneficial in the case of one particular people, and in anticipation of the teaching of science. And herein consists the point which we have found of chief interest in this article we speak of ; that is, the explanation given by the writer of the virtue of certain enactments of the Mosaic law. He explains the measures taken so that Jewish children may be born healthy ; the reasons why particular kinds of food were forbidden by the law) and the effects of certain ablutions commanded, — quoting from Dr. Carpenter's addiess delivered before the Sanitary Congress at Biighton in ]882, as follows :—": — " Obedience to the sanitary laws laid down by Moses is a necessary condition to perfect health, and to a state which shall give us power to stamp out zymotic diseases. If these laws were observed by all classes, the zymotic death-rate would not be an appreciable quantity in our mortality list.." The particulars, however, as to the dietary laws especially deserve attention. The carnivorous animals forbidden as food, for instance, were those known, says Mr. Wolf, " to be perfect foci of trichinae and other parasites," and whose use as articles of food cannot be too fully condemned when viewed by the light of modern science. Mollusca and crustacea, again, were also prohibited, and many of them are proved to be unwholesome and poisonous — even including, at certain seasons, some that are in general use — while others are foul feeders, and of indigestible flesh. The scientific explanation given recently of the prohibition of scaleless fish, such as th' 3 eel, is this :—": — " Mr. lleade, having bred some esls in a pood which had accidentally become polluted by sewage water, found the flesh so strongly tainted in consequence as to bu quite uneatable. Struck by this fact, he turned some eels into a stream into which the refuse of gas-works flowed, with the result that the eels had a decided flavour of gas. Further experiment demonstrated that owing to the absence of scales, the eel becomes a positive absorbent of noxious gases, more particularly of the noxious effluvia of decomposing and therefore, poisonous matters."' The hare also, we are told, eats many vegetable poisons, such as the bark of the mezereon. Again, as to the prohibition to use blood for food. "There is" says Mr. Wolf, "as has been pointed out by a writer in the Journal of Science, the more conclusive fact that the blood in its normal condition almost invariably contains noxious elements." But as the knowledge of all this certainly preceded the discoveries and explanations of modern science, we are driven to two alternatives. Either it was the result of a science possessed by the earlier world, and we may absign to it a place like that assigned by the Civilta Cattollca, from which we lately quoted , to the astronomical knowledge of the ancients, and [in which case it also contradicts the theory of progress from theimpeifect to the perfect. Or else we must attribute it to dnect revelation to the Hebrew lawgiver, and this is the alternative that seems to us most reasonable,

since all these enactments were directed to a particular end. "It is too little known, " says Mr. Wolf," that the Jews are as a race really superior physically, mentally, and morally to the people among whom they dwell." And their superiority he attributes to the legal enactments of which we have spoken. Is it too much, then, to claim that in these enactments we see the means used to promote the temporal conditions necessary or becoming to the predominance of a people who, had they been faithful to the promises of God, must have obtained, not only the salvation of their souls, but the mastery of the world ? — As for the Christian Church, since the promises made to it included nothing of worldly supremacy or happiness, we may understand how regulations designed for fitting men to enjoy these things in an exceptional manner were done away with in its regard. Mr. Wolf sneers at the notion of that Kingdom which is not of this world. But for all that, it may still form the object of the Christians hope, and thus he may be able to appreciate at its true value that superiority as it now exists, that would have made the Jew fit for the place on earth that God had destined for him but which in his wickedness he refused. As it actually is, his superiority is evidently necessary to preserve his race until the designs of God, and the expectations of the Christian world, in their behalf have been fulfilled.

Db. Mooeehouse, in defending the Anglican THE NATIONAL Church in the colonies from certain charges brought CHURCH. against it, has given us some details concerning

that Church at Home that we find very instructive. The Bishop defends his Church by asserting that the evils objected to had their origin, not in the colonies, but in England. " What," he says, " is the present religious condition of the working classes in England, as depicted by well-informed speakers and societies? Canon Money, of Deptford, said at the Plymouth Church Congress that ' barely 5 per cent, of the working classes attended public worship.' It appears from a report of the London City Mission that 'in a group of seven poor Ease London parishes, containing 60,000 souls, the total average attendance on Sunday at all places of worship is only 3000 persons, or one in twenty ' ; and, again, ' from a house to house inquiry in another poor part,' it has been found that ' not one in a hundred attend any place of worship.' Nor can it be doubted that this abstinence from worship means in London, as it m°ans everywhere, godlessness and moral deterioration. The late Thomas Hugo said : ■ He knew the mobs of London and Lancashire will, and there was no difference between them and the heathen St. Paul pourtrayed . . . they weie simply heathen.' " But is this, indeed, the result that has followed on the work for more than thiee centuries of the national church ? The great body of the people are still pagan — nay, more, have been reduced to paganism, for in Catholic times they were certainly Christian. This, surely, is a fearful record for a Church to own, and may well bring into doubt its claims to an authoritative commission. The heathen people of whom St. Paul spoke as a blot upon the face of the earth live again in London and Lancashire, and, if there, in many other places— but yet the Church which, as national, claims to reckon them among her children, not only sends her missions abroad among the heathen, hoping to make the stranger and foreigner better than she has been able to make the children of her own household, but even does all in her power to establish Churches characterised by a like nationality in Catholic couu tries where the people still remain Christian. For it is true, as Leo Taxil also asserts, that the party of irreligion iR in a small minority, and we need not be misled by the nofse they make and the deeds they are able to do when we remember how M. Tame has shown that it was a small minority who carried out the great Revolution. But how can the Church of a country whose masses remain heathen bear the marks of nationality more truly than those of apostolicity or Catholicity ? Verily, if the authorities quoted by Dr. Moorehouse speak the truth, as there is no reason to doubt, the Church of England in England is hardly less an impostor than it was in Ireland. As in Ireland it was the Church of the ascendency, so in England is it the Chuich of the better classes. We need no longer, again, wonder at the dismay with which worthy members of a non-conformist body follow the designs of an Anglican bishop on his ciuise — for. unless the newly converted barbarians have attained to a social condition superior to that of the English working classes, their fate aB members of the Church of England, reasoning from

analogy, "the very guide of life,'" bids fair to be a melancholy one, and the last state of those lapsed savages might prove worse than the first. The islanders of the South Seas were hardly, even in their primitive condition, as vile as the heathen described by St. Paul, and who now live again in the mobs of Lancashire and London— members of the national Church — Whatever the national Church may be that is set up finally at Tonga, let the natives beware of the Anglican Church. Nor do we know that Dr. Moorehouse has hit upon a trae plan for making his Church more of a communion suited to the requirements of the workingmen than it has hitherto proved itself to be, even if his plan were feasible. And it is not a feasible plan. It is in the very blood of the Anglican Church that its ministers must be conscious of their " professional dignity." The idea may be " suffocating," as Dr. Moorehouse says but it remains and cannot be got rid of. Social superiority is a note of the Anglican clergyman — and even forms one of the chief features of ihis Church, and when it fails his Church becomes vulgarised and loses its hold upon the higher classes in which its strength now consists, and ever must consist. Whatever the democratic cant of the day may be, the gentleman cannot and will not even temporarily quit his standing place and identify himself with the working man. Even Dr. Moorehouse himself who once declared that had his father been a shoemaker he should not hesitate to acknowledge the humiliating fact by the implied condescension confirmed our statement. But the closest identification of the clergyman with the woikingman would not establish his spiritual condition on any firm basis ; the mere personal influence of a man can accomplish little that is lasting, and they who depend upon it must sooner or later find that they lean on a broken reed. The system that depends upon such a prop has nothing to recommend it and is faulty in itself. Again, the sense of his professional dignity is always strong in the Catholic priest, and in the members of his flock. It commonly raises the priest above the level of the working men from among whom he has risen, and of whose blood he is. It does not hinder his usefulness, however, but rather increases aid is indispensable to it, because he is the minister of a system that is powerful in itself, as it is venerable, and above all worship. If the Church of England, then, has failed among the masses, as according to the testimony quoted by Dr. Moorehouse there can be no doubt she has, she has failed not because of the weakness or deficiency of her clergy. The fault is in her system, and no ministers, howsoever devoted or howsoever energetic they might be# could mend that.

The confession of Leo Taxil furnishes us once more those with an insight into the nature of those wretched beMISEBA.BLE ings who now and then apostatise from the Catholic devils. Church, and become the heroes or heroines, as the

case may be. of the freethinking or the Evangelical world, for in this respect these worlds are at one. A more furious enemy of everything Catholic there was not in Europe than this president of the anti-Clerical League and atheistic writer. It would be impossible to repeat one tithe of his blaspnemies, and even the more moderate of them would disgrace the pages of a Catholic publication. If ever a man might be supposed to have attained to a thorough disbelief in God and to a complete contempt of the Church of God, this was he. Jle had probably attained to a hatred of the Church, for what is more hateful to a man than that which be is determined to rebel against and yet to whose truth and beauty lie is unable to blind himself? The very madness of malice then takes hold of him, and fills him with the rage of the possessed. We wonder all the less at the raving that we had been accustomed to associate with the name of Leo Taxil now that we know it was insincere. Pride and folly combined, that have done so much evil in the world, and that doubtless are still to do much more, drave this unfortunate boy, as be then was, to his evil courses, and all the time with the very self-knowledge of the devils themselves he knew that he was sinning grievously, perhaps had determined, as it might well be, horrible as is the possibility, to dare things worthy of hell, and if he must perish, not to go to perdition without full cause. It is impossible to imagine anything more terrible than the state of mind must be in which such a man finds himself, and there is no one in the world but the utterly abandoned who will not execrate it and bold it in detestation. We can fancy that even the atheistic crew themselves, who were this man's companions, had they known of his condition and supposing that they did not themselves share it, would have turned away from him with loathing, if not with fear. And yet in places where atheism is condemned, and where men and women profess themselves to be Christians, to love God and be in charity with their neighbour, we not uncommonly see poor creatures brought forward, who«j state is that of Leo Taxil before he had repented. Reputable people gather round them and encourage them ; nay, even make it necessary for them to thrust themselves deeper and deeper into their desperate condition, and to icmove themselves still further from the chances of repentance. They are obliged by men and women who profess that they love God and man. to draw for their elirication from the hell that iB raging within them, and to express their misery in lying, an 1

all that is calumnious and vile. We do not mean at the same time to say that all the unfortunate people who.fall away from the Church belong to this class. They go for many reasons, and variously betrayed. Some neglect their religious duties until their faith, as it were, dies a natural death, some become entangled in worldly matters and lose sight of religion altogether ; and now and then a few more silly ones follow the guidance of conceit, and cast in their eternal fortunes with those of a community, whose members they perceive to be more wealthy, or judge more suited to their quality and gentility, than the people of the Catholic congregation around them. It is quite possible that pervertssuch as these may get on comfortably enoughin a thoughtless kind of a way, very little troubled by a conscience w hose whisperings they have stifled, and arousing in the Catholic witness no more adverse feeling than pity or contempt. The monster, however, who passes from the profession of fervent religion to war upon the creed by which he or she once seemed to live, is that of which we speak and there is under heaven no more hideous sight. There is no more cruel, base or wicked part, than that which men or women, especially those professing themselves Christians— act in enconraging, bribing and houndon such lost wretches to trade on their damnation, and earn a bread seasoned in advance with the very fire of hell. Yer we see this done continually, and the Atheist and Evangelical join hands in the task at one in the fight against the Church of God.

Some of our contemporaries, as we perceive, are A BEACTIONAEY making a great outcry because two deaths are said outcbt. to have occurred at Auckland owing to over pressare

in the schools. The victims of too much learning are described as exceptionally promising young girls, and much regret is felt at their sad fate. But are not our contemporaries, neverthelessi somewhat reactionary in their complaining ? At least they have no 1 paused to consider the necessities of the times, and the conclusions of science. The educational needs of the day are great, and if they are not attended to first of all the march of progress will be delayed, and, even though ten thousand lives be sacrificed, shp 1 ! we permit anything to bring about so huge a catastrophe as that. The youthful mind positively must prove itself equal to the strain. The exigencies of the period demand it, and nothing must hinder their demand in its accomplishment. Must we not meet all the requirements of secularism and its patrons ? — An enlightened mind must be secured at any cost ( and scientific modes of thought are to be inculcated notwithstanding all the impediments. In comparison with all this what is the value of a mere girl's life? — Shall.any such thing, indeed be allowed to retard the race on its road towards perfection ? And more especially with regard to girls, the intellect requires to be subjected to its utmost tension. The sex claims an equality with men, and aspires to share in every manly privilege. Our female electors will need to understand and determine every public question in all its bearings. All the scheme of government will claim their attention in its minutest particulars, and the fate of the country will hang on the strength and keenness of their intellect. Our " sweet girl graduates " whatever be the colour of their hair, even if it were red instead of golden, must be prepared to prove their profundity and breadth, and in, every learned profession the fair members must be skilled to put to shame the competition of the weaker male. Above all, both boysanp girls must be trained to appreciate the learned arguments of the lyceums and to discern wisdom, and depth, and meaning, where none of us more old-fashioned people can perceive anything but folly' and heaviness, and shallow stuff. — There are plenty of reasons then> why our girls and boys should be subjected to every possible educational strain. — There is every possible reason why they should not be spared : — the Colony is already impoverished in order that they may have the advantage of all that " cram " can do for them, and it would be weak and foolish to yield in any degree to their incapacityScience demands that they shall be educated up to the point, and live or die educated they must be. — It is an insult to science, in fact> to complain, or doubt concerning the results. — Does not the dogma of the survival of the fittest explain all that is necessary, and by close adherence to it shall we not eliminate the weaker element from our school children, and obtain exactly such a race of scholars as the times demand ? — To complain, then, because a couple of girls — or a couple of dozen girls — may die of over- work is reactionary, and opposed to the progressive spirit of our secular institutions. — It is to be hoped that our contemporaries will learn to be consistent, and since they support secularism, will ccise to complain at its natural and almost necessary consequences.— The Saturday Review, meantime, had already pointed out that the only hope of escaping the destructive effects of the educational system of the day lies, for the more fortunate children, in their persistent and ingenious dleness, — the industrious child as a rule being doomed. — But it is all n the interests of science. — Why, therefore, should a progressive Press comnlain ?

A change seems to have cjmc over the spiiit of the calmed down, dreams of certain of our worthy fellow-citizen

since a few months ago when a deputation waited upon Sir Julius Vogel, and wera snubbed by him m rather a

remarkable manner. Then we were all for defence and looked out anxiously for the erection of forts and batteries, and the provision of everything that might enable us to show a bold front to the enemy. The deputation, however, that waited upon the Premier the other day were of a very different mind and all their object was to prevent

measures worth speaking of from being taken to defend our shores.

Even that man of peace Mr. Stout, although he represented himself as acting in the matter solely on behalf of Parliament, and against his private convictions, evidently felt somewhat warmly in the case, and considered that an unreasonable step had been taken in the remonsstrance brought before him. And, indeed there has occurred very little to place things now on a different footing from that occupied by them during the late scare. It is true the disturbing cause that then

* existed has been for the time removed. We have not now before our wyes any cause more likely than not to result in immediate war as *.?as the condition of things when the dispute on the Afghan frontier was at its height. The perils nevertheless, even of that situation have not finally passed away, and we cannot by any means foresee a distant time as that aloue which shall see them renewed. The general consent seems to be that a temporary arrangement only has been made, and even that is not as yet concluded. The Afghan frontier moreover is not the one sole point in all the world concerning which a quarrel may occur between England and Russia, and even as we write possibilities that cannot be overlooked present themselves before the eyes of the world in tbe outbreaks that have taken place in southern Europe. Any state of affairs that may result in a complete alteration of the map of Europe is one to which England cannot be indifferent and in event of a settlement's being made by means of a general war, which after all is not an outrageously extravagant supposition it would most probably happen that England and Russia would be opposed to one another. It migh

happen moreover that France and Russia would be allied, and that would make the situation very much more threatening so far as these

colonies are concerned. But as to the notion mentioned by one or other of the gentlemen who formed the deputation that it was still doubtful as to whether these colonies must necessarily be included in any war declared against England — that received its full contradiction in the information which the Premier said that the Govern-

ment had received as to the intentions of Russia on a former occasion. We may be convinced that those intentions still and always bold good and the most peaceful attitude possible on our part would do nothing more than enable them to be carried with less trouble into effect. — The movement made by the colonies again with respect to the campaign in the Soudan has once for all identified them with the old country in her warfare, and in any case, it would be difficult to see how they could lay claim to immunity so long as they continue united to the Empire. It may again, sound very patriotic to rely on the defence to be made of the colonies by the I Imperial fleet, but it may well be questioned as to whether such a patriotism will stand the test of examination. The tiue patriot is the man who is ready to make any sacrifice demanded of him for the sake of his country, and not he who for his own sake and to Epare his purse is prepared to run the risk of embarrassing his country at the hour of need. Prior to the late scare, for example, and while it continued, very grave doubts were thrown by high authority on the efficiency of the fleet— and, although steps are being taken to remove all possibility of doubt, other powers are also taking pains jto improve their naval standing. We do not see, then, how there can be any reasonable question made as to the necessity of defending our ports and harbours. The very safety not only of our towns but of English mrn-of-war themselves may depend on this, as in fact, the Admiral on the Australian station, according to the Premier, informed our Government when he refused to send a ship here unless such precautions were taken, and the defence of our coasts may be regarded as no more than a necessary part of the defence of the whole empire. Nor does it appear that the Government have done anythirg more than what was required in the matter. ReductioDs have been made wherever it was possible to make them— as in the case of the armed constabulary, and dne expansion has been given ito the volunteer system. The measures for defence, in fact, as we vbelieve, have been very wisely undertaken. In this the Government have proved themselves fully capable. Mr. Stout, as he tells us, con. tinuea a consistent member of the Peace Society, and Sir Julius Vogel was certainly no wild enthusiast in the matter — on the contrary some of our citizens probably remember his appearance in quite an opposite character. Dispassionate and unprejudiced minds were, therefore, brought by the Cabinet to the consideration of the subject and the result seems completely satisfactory.