ANOTHER VIEW.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XX, Issue 27, 22 April 1892, Page 17

ANOTHER VIEW.

invention of printing was certainly a great advantage, and the man must indeed be possessed of no small stock of temerity who should question the merits of a free Press. We should not think of making such a venture, and if wp did, we know we should be assigned a place in enlightened minds by the side of Torquemada and other worthies who occupy there the niche vacated by the defunct Beelzebub. Still it really would appear as if the invention of printing and the freedom of the Press were not altogether without another aspect. A demoralising literature, for example, carrying out the principles of a godless education, we are told, is showing its effects in the marked deterioration notable at present in the rising generation of Paris. A special instance is mentioned in which the perusal of a tale written by M. Gaboriau so inspired one susceptible youth with the desire of out-witting the police that he immediately entered on a criminal career—but not with the happy results he had promised himself. All the passions, in short, are thus excited and the consequence is a grave increase in the evil reputation of a city, that, as things were neither had nor deseived to have a very good name. ' But take that preface to M. Kenan's new work to which we have also alluded elsewhere. What must necessarily be the effect produced by it on people who look upon the author as all that is spirituel, learned, and philosophical ? In the middle ages, he tells his readers, men were consistent. They regarded their sufferings here below as a necessary condition of their full recompense— the rewad to be attained in heaven. With tbe brute creation, he says, it was different They received their recompense here. " The lion whose services St Anthony retained to bury St Paul worked with astonishing vigour to dig the grave. As a reward ft Anthony gave him his blessing, the result of which was that the lion immediately encountered a sheep, of which he made a meal. This was very fair to the lion, but was justice done to the sheep ? Clearly not." «We fear," adds the writer, " that m the organisation of the world there is no trace of justice for the sheep."— We are now all a brute creation— none of us one whit better in the end than the beasts that perish. But possibly it may depend upon ourselves whether we shall figure among the lions or the sheep. m Does any one really suppose— we do not say any one m his senses, because it appears to us that the necessary degree of lunacy is quite out of the reach of even the most raging maniac. No one is half mad enough to suppose that that enjoyment of which M. Ren an speaks of the happiness to come sons after they themselves have been annihilated can be, as things now are, a powerful motive or restraining force among the masses. We cannot, of course, tell what the state of afiairs may be after scores or hundreds of years. 13y that time the masses may be altogether differently disposed, but meantime they will'act on the feelings that now prevail among them. Will not carps diem be their necessary, possibly their wisest, motto, and that in the most sinister sense of the words ? If the world, then, be divided between the lions and the sheep, and there be nothing besides, or beyond, who would not choose to be a lion ? He would thus certainly have a

better chance, even although he must want the blessing of a saint. And why, by the way, should not the blessing of a saint appropriately bring a lion his dinner ? Let him answer with a scoff to whom a leg of roast mutton, for example, is a forbidden delicacy. Justice, of course, was done to the sheep. He fulfilled an end for which nature had intended him. M. Renan's implied sneer is, in fact, a shallow one. Possibly' however, though your lion, too, must meet his fate, all else being removed, most people would think his was the better chance. " We fear that in the organisation of the world there is no trace of justice for the sheep." The choice M. Ren ah places before the people seems easy. To suffer in quietness and self-restraint the chances and changes of this mortal life, with the assurance that, even in annihilation, they may rejoice in the elevation of a world not yet dawning upon the most distant horizon of the future. The other alternative is to assume the lion's part, and, bad as it seems, it may be questioned as to whether it is not the better one. It is in fact, the more natural, and, therefore, probably the more wholesome. It may seem paradoxical, but if there be nothing at all, as M. Renan in effect declares there is, why should we not try to get as much of it as we can ? M. Gaboriau may paint in such glowing colours the merits of criminal trickery that he inspires susceptible, youths with the desire to go and do likewise. Other writer^ each in turn, may gild and glorify a particular vice. But 7 ji[ Kenan gives the rein to all the passions together. £. ludicrous false, impossible, sentiment is all he sets up a *s a barrier against his lesson of despair. Let us look upr , n the lions of the period in a fair light. If they attack pr.iests and processions, and scatter bombs in crowded churches, they are but asserting the place that an advanced philosophy has assigned to them. They are bat attempting to play the lion so as to avoid playing the sheep. And if there be no justice for the sheep, who shall venture to condemn them as criminal ? The stronger lion, indeed, may crush or attempt to crush them for his own ends and his own interests—hardly nobler ones perhaps, than theirs. ' There is, then, another aspect in which we may view the invention of printing and the freedom of the Press, whatever the temerity of expressing such an opinion may be.