Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXVII, Issue 5, 2 February 1899, Page 1

Current Topics

AT HOME AND ABROAD.

Catholics believe in the divinely-enunciated principle of giving to Caesar the things that are Caesar's and to God the things that are God's. They also hold fast by belief in the superiority of the supernatural to the natural order, of the spiritual to the civil power. Hence the timehonoured custom of giving the Pope precedence of all temporal monarchs, and of giving his name precedence of civil rulers in toasts, etc. In continental countries, even where ruled by anti-Catholic Ministries, this ancient usage is fully recognised. When the recently-deceased Sir Stuart Knill, the first Catholic Lord Mayor of London since the Reformation, acted upon the custom a few years ago, there was a brief, sharp, and lively controversy in the London Press. It ended in the general recognition of a custom that, in principle at least, bears upon it the rime of a venerable antiquity. lam glad to welcome a similar recognition thereof by one of the leading daily papers of New Zealand. The N.Z. Times (Wellington) of last Friday has the following in point : — ' Several non-Catholic guests at the Synodical luncheon at Day's Bay appeared to be surprised at the order observed in proposing the toast of " The Pope and the Queen " — forgetting that it has always been the custom of Catholics to give their spiritual ruler precedence over their secular head. This practice has sometimes been condemned as disloyal to he Crown, and there have been frequent heated debates as to the advisableness of continuing it ; but it is now generally recognised that there is nothing objectionable in the practice, and all well-informed people know that her Majesty has no more loyal subjects than the Catholics of the colonies.'

UTOPIAS THAT VANISH.

Utopias, like nine-pins, are set up only to be knocked down. Two more of them have collapsed in rapid succession. One of them was a Suabian attempt to give the Socialist programme a local habitation and a name. The other was the historic little community of New Icaria, in the United States. The strangest thing about the New Icaria settlement was the fact that it somehow contrived to exist atter a fashion for fifty years. Then it wearied of the effort and gave up the ghost. It was founded and guided on the lines of the Voyage en Icarie, Roman philosoplnque et social, written in 1840 by the French communist Etienne Cabet — one of the long line of philosophic dreamers that have extended from Plato to Edward Bellamy and Charles Secretan. New Icaria was founded by him in Texas in 1848. Two years later the settlement was removed to Nauvoo, in Illinois. In 1857 it shifted its quarters again. This time it flitted to Adam's County, lowa. There it wrested against dissolution till the close of the year of grace 1898. The spark of life left it in the year of its golden jubilee.

All this reminds me of a similar double collapse which befel two Utopian ventures in 1895 — the one in America, the other in East Africa. The ' New Australia ' project in Paraguay started with the sound of trumpets and the beat of drums and everything in its favour — free land, immunity from taxation, a good climate, and a decent amount of capital. Lane lorded it over the new colony with a rule which out-Czared the Czar. The scheme made haste to collapse. It fell in and went over like a balloon struck by lightning. The dismal remnant of the settlers were brought back on the dole of charity to Old Australia, and the autocrat of the little Socialistic Amhara so far recognised his mistake as to agree that ' even Communism must leave some individuality to man, and admit some private and personal rights.' New Icaria was founded on the lines of Cabet's book. New Australia was an attempt to reprdflfci*e in the concrete Bellamy's Looking Backward. The otho^eollapse of 1895 — known as the Freeland of East

'THE POPE AND THE ttUEEN.'

Africa — was foreshadowed in Dr. Hertzka's Utopian novel. It came |to nothing: the pioneer expedition that was to have made the fertile slopes of Mount Keina blossom like the rose, broke hopelessly down.

All such schemes are foredoomed to failure — first, because they ignore the weaknesses, jealousies, passions, greeds, and prejudices of human nature ; and, secondly, because they fall into the cardinal error of denying all personal property — the one point which makes men fight shy of all socialistic doctrine. M. de Pacpe is a well-known and thoughtful contributor to the Revue Socialiste, and even he makes this admission :— ' Unless we allow every man personal property in those intimate things which every man holds dear, and unless we allow him to earn these same, we shall never be more than a set of dreamers giving out Utopian schemes which no one will accept, and whose number has no limit, and we shall leave the world no happier than we found it.' The Socialistic Eden is as far off as ever. Every happy Amhara, every pleasant social Valley of Typee they try to set up, has thus far turned into a Tom Tiddler's Ground, where the land is waste, and the dwelling a ruined hovel without a sound pane of glass, and every plank and beam has rotted or fallen away, and a slough of water and a leafless tree and plentiful filth mark the spot where a garden ought to smile. Dr. Knodel and M. Secretan, and Herr Bebel, and all the Collectivists may theorise till the world has ceased to wag. Social well-being can only be settled by falling back upon the eternal principles of the only true Socialist the world has ever seen. He was crucified, but rose again, and lives and works to-day in His spouse, the Church. Somebody has well and beautifully said that the perfect earth) must come by way of Heaven.

STREET RUFHANISM.

We are getting on in New Zealand. At least we are working vp — or down— to the good level average of our neighbours, and that is something. During the past year the 'push' nuisance took possession of and terrorised whole quarters of London and Paris. The fashion has spread to Australia. Melbourne and Ballarat have been for weeks past the scenes of exhibitions of street ruffiianism which recall the good old days of the garrotting scare, or the condition of London before the institution of the City police at the instance of the famous Bowstreet magistrate, Fielding the novelist. The epidemic of ' push' outrages has crossed the Tasman Sea and taken lodgment in New Zealand. The North-East Valley, Dunedin, has been for the past week so terrorised by a small gang of well-dressed young ruffians that no respectable female dares to show her face on the public thoroughfare by night. The honorary justices have, as in Melbourne, put a premium on this high revelry of the hoodlums by absurdly lenient sentences, or by refusing to convict in the face of the clearest evidence of guilt. Fifteen or sixteen years ago the sentences meted out to the ( pushes ' by the Sydney J. P. 's in similar circumstances were so flagrantly lenient that some eight stipendary magistrates were appointed to deal with such cases. The evil is as likely to spread in New Zealand as in England and Australia. If honorary justices are too thin-skinned or chicken-hearted to protect the public, adjudication on the matter should be, as in Sydney, promptly taken out of their hands, and entrusted to men who will stand no nonsense. Various letters to the Dunedin papers suggest the lash as a punishment for aggravated assaults by larrikins, especially on women. The sentimental objection to its use may well be considered in the light of the recent declaration of the Recorder of Old Bailey which I find in the People's Journal of November 2S : 'Where the cat and substantial imprisonment have been ordered, my experience is that none so punished ever come up again.' But an ounce of prevention is worth a ton of cure. A little more of God in the school life of the Colony would be about the best safeguard against the organised and well-dressed hoodlumism that is showing its head amongst us.

SHE HAD NO PROPERTY.

Mr. Beetham, S.M. (Christchurch) —so writes a correspondent — is having his extensive and varied knowledge of humanity 4. cry much widened by his experiences in granting the Old Age Pensions at Christchurch. Mr. Beetham poses as a cynic. He looks upon human nature from the most pessimistic point of view. Possibly it is little wonder that he does so. The seamy side of life has been so long presented to him that he has come to believe that human life has no other side. In a psychological sense he has turned the Rontgen rays of his cold, keen eyes upon the fractures and flaws in poor humanity for the last quarter of a century or so. It is no wonder that he is cynical. " Ah," said he the other day to an old age pensioner who had said that his wife had no property, ' that's reversing the usual order of things. When a man and his wife come into Court now-a-days we find that the wife has all the property and the husband has all the debts. When there are money troubles that's how it's managed.' So it is. ' The economic independence of married women, 1 so dear to the heart of the Women's Convention, forms, even in its present embryonic state, a pretty high jump in the way of tradesmen who seek to recover their debts. The bare-faced manner in which both men and women 'swear up ' in these cases is simply appalling. The old rigid regard for the solemnity of an oath has become very limp in these degenerate days.

HER THIRD WEDDING

Madame AdelinaPatti has found marriage so far from being a failure that she celebrated her third nuptials last week. This time the favoured swain is a Swedish Lutheran named Cederstrom. The London correspondent of the Dunedin Evening Star stated in advance that 'a double religious ceremony' was to take place — a Catholic priest and a Lutheran minister to divide the honours of the occasion in equal proportions. That correspondent is in a state of baptismal innocence as regards the Catholic discipline on marriage. It is quite possible that the persecuting laws still in force in Sweden and Norway may require the performance of the ceremony before a Lutheran minister as necessary tor the legal validity of the marriage. But the Catholic Church forbids the repetition of the marriage service, whether by a Protestant minister after a Catholic priest, or by a Catholic priest after it has been (sinfully; performed before a Protestant minister. In this latter connection I do not speak of the countries where the decrees of the Council of Trent have been published, and where the presence of the parish priest of one of the parties is required for the ecclesiastical validity of the marriage. 'It does, indeed,' says Dr. Bagshawe (writing of the repetition of the ceremony in a Protestant church) ' seem a mockery for a woman, who is bound till death to the husband whom she has just married, by every law of God and man, to go into another chuich, take the ring from her finger, profess herself to be an unmarried woman, and go through a ceremony, every word of which is to her unmeaning and useless. At any rate, the Catholic Church declares it to be unlawful.'

WORTH IMITATION.

After almost seven years of masterly inactivity the powers that rule New Zealand have suddenly stumbled across one of the many Acts of Parliament that have been relegated to the lumber-room of things inoperative. This time it is the Offensive Publications Act. It has been brought out like a rusty gun from an old armoury. Its first shot was aimed at a Dunedin bookseller for the sale of a Melbourne weekly which contained certain advertisements prohibited by section five of the Act. The action has had a result which, I trust, may meet with the well-deserved flattery of extensive imitation throughout New Zealand. The Dunedin booksellers met and unanimously agreed to ', refuse in future to handle any publications which insert quack advertisements which could be construed to contravene the Act.' In the meantime they refuse to supply the following publications : — Sydney Bulletin, Melbourne Sportsman, Melbourne Punch, and Melbourne Weekly Budget. Other newspapers are to be notified that certain objectionable advertisements must be withdrawn from their columns, and — most vigorous and practical step of all — the Postmaster-General is to be interviewed for the purpose of interdicting the importation of the above-mentioned newspapers into the Colony. Such a course has been adopted in Oueensland, with happy results. Why not in New Zealand ?

'During the meeting,' says the Of ago Daily Times, ' Mr. Braithwaite' (the bookseller against whom action was taken, and at whose instance the present crusade has been entered upon) ' stated that, after minute examination, he found that the Dunedin press were almost entirely free from these objectionable advertisements, and that it served as a model for all colonial publications.' Within the past few months the N.Z. Tablet has refused to continue the insertion of a class of perfectly innocent medical advertisements which appear in every newspaper, secular and religious, in these colonies. Acting

upon a decision arrived at some months ago, we have likewise discontinued an advertisement regarding electric belts, even though it contains no reference to nervous debility as laid down by the Offensive Publications Act. The elastic nature of the section as it stands and the wide discretion allowed to justices may occasionally lead to perfectly innocent advertisements being classed as ' indecent.' The difficulty may easily be met by an amending Act. It is, however, high time that the YKUith of the Colony should be protected against the perusal^La class of advertisements that are, in effect, nothing shoß^f incentives to gross crime. The new crusade initiated by the booksellers of Dunedin will have the good wishes of Godfearing people of every creed and class in New Zealand.

PRIEST AND PEOPLE.

'A priest is not an angel,' said a New Zealand priest at the close of a sermon to a large congregation recently. •He is only a man ; he is human. He has the faults of human nature, but his life is given to you. His hand is the anointed hand which gives you the Sacraments. Respect your priests. Be proud ot them. If they have faults, leave their faults to God.' ' That,' says an amiable and thoughtful correspondent, 'is just what so many Catholic people do not. Some persons are so constituted that, as George Eliot has said, they constantly fix their eyes upon the spots upon the sun, and not upon its glorious radiance. We are all apt to take the selfsacrifice and willing service of the priest in much the same unthinking, ungrateful, gratuitous way as that in which we accept light and air. Possibly it is in consequence of this airy appropriation, as a natural heritage, of the services of the priest, that we are so free with our criticism and so stingy with our gratitude. It should be vice versa. When sickness assails us and death faces us, the priest is the only one upon whom we can call, knowing that the call will be obeyed. Other friends may fail us. The priest never fails us. His telephone is never spiked. No matter how cold the night or late the hour at which the urgent ring comes, it is answered. Truly, indeed, we ought to respect our priests. " The Order of Melchisidesh," with the wonderful power which it confers, carries with it the blue ribbon of all earthly dignities, but it carries also with it a great dower of human loneliness. When he dons the garb of his supernatural knighthood the priest is shut out by a wall of separateness from the fair garden of human love. He must go alone, and lonely, and practically homeless through the world. The life of the priest affords the highest ideal that the world holds to-day of the Christian charity embodied in the primary commandment of the Positivist School : " Live for others." Altruism can go no further. In common gratitude, the least that Catholics can give to their priests is profound respect and wide indulgence, instead of cold non -appreciation and flippant criticism.'

HE WAS ' LEIOUT.'

A GRACEi-UL story is told of the young Princess Pauline of Wurtemburg, whose marriage took place so recently. Just before her wedding day she received from a peasant girl a letter of which the following is a translation :— ' Dear Miss Princess Pauline, — Your wedding-day is to be on Saturday, and I wish you every happiness. lam sure you are very happy. My wedding is on the same day, and I should be very happy too if my tather were not sitting in prison. If your father were in prison, you too would grieve. Dear Miss Princess, I beg of you, say a good word to your father, so that he lets my father off, at least let him out for a few hours, so that he may come to my wedding. With much love, yours, etc' ' Miss Princess,' in the midst of all the absorbing cares of the trousseau, promptly handed the letter to her father, King Wilhelm 11., with the result that the peasant girl's father was liberated, and, as his offence was a trifling one, he received a free pardon, and took part in the festivities of his daughter's wedding.

LOSING ITS GRIP.

It is sometimes instructive, though in present circumstances never pleasant, to record in our day the relaxing hold of any form of Christianity upon its adherents. The losses of the sects are otten, happily, gains to the Church, but in probably the greater number of cases, the gains are for the ranks of indifferentism or irreligion. A doleful tale of failure is recorded in a paper read by Rev. A. Rivett at the recent half-yearly meeting of the Victorian Congregational Union :—: — ' The Church,' said he, 'is not miking headway. The income of the Union is but one-third of what it was 10 years ago, while the churches and mission stations were fewer in number. The college, the new church-sites fund, and other projects are but memories. Some new Church -policy is urgently needed to rescue the Church. There are but ■•cc courses open : slow but decorous extinction ; amalgamation with some other Church ; or a new birth.' The steam is evidently knocked out of Congregationalism in Victoria.

The Catholic Church in Victoria still keeps marching grandly on. During the past year 12 new churches were built ; one superior day-school, one girls' boarding-school, and one primary school were added to the 263 establishments of their kind already in active operation ; while the fresh and added motive power thrown into the Church's work in the Colony comprises two Brothers, about a score of priests, and 65 nuns. Jn this connection I might refer to the figures given by M^^>ck in his Classes and Masses (1896) regarding the increase of the clergy in Kngland between the census ot 1881 and thai of 1891. 'It will be seen,' said he, referring to his diagram, ' that the clergy of the Established Church have increased absolutely by 11 per cent, but that relatively to the population they have only kept pace with it. The Nonconformist clergy, on the olher hand, though they have absolutely increased by 3 percent, have relatively to the population decreased by 8 per cent ; while the Roman Catholic clergy have increased absolutely by 20 per cent, and relatively to the population by 9 per cent.' These figures will give small comfort to two classes of people : (1) to the few figure-jugglers who, like Rev. H. Price Hughes, fancy that ' Romanism ' is making no headway in England ; and (2) to the members of the Protestant Alliances, Agencies, and other associations who lament, with the Bulwark, ' the powerlessness of Protestantism to resist the progress of Rome.'

THE GOSI'EL O* I'LI'NDtR.

Bclotia was called by the ancient Greeks Mars' orchestra or excercising ground, because it resounded so often to the clash of strife. Puerto Rico promises to become in the near future, like Cuba, the cockpit of a thousand warring Christian sects. Their agents have been already ' spying out the land.' One of them, a Rev. W. H. Sloan, representing the Home Mission Society, stated on his return that some Puertoricans listened to him haranguing in public, but naively attributed the fact 'not to any ardent religious tendencies, but rather to their curiosity.' According to the New York Herald of December iS, this enterprising disciple of the Lord suggests in all seriousness that the United States Government should forcibly hand over some of the Catholic churches and monasteries of Puerto Rico to the Protestant missionaries. The goods, rather than the good, of the Puertoricans is manifestly the aim of the missionaries. History would thus repeat itself, and the new reformation in Puerto Rico would begin, as it did in Merrie England, by a redistribution of the plums among the adherents of the newly-imported creed. Mr. Sloan has dropped out ol his due stratification in the ages. He belongs by right to the days of King Hal and the Court of Augmentation. Perhaps you h,ue seen the picture in Hood'i, (0,;,/< Annual for 1832 A huntsman asks; 'Which way did the fox go? 'and live unkempt and unredeemed country louts point forthwith in five difterent dn ections, to the great astonishment of the bewildered inquirer, 1-ancy the bewilderment of the poor Puertorican when the representatives of h\e hundred American sects will stand upon his streets and, amidst a babel of contradictory voices and sectai ian strife, point in five hundred dilferent directions as each the only true road to life eternal.

KLONDYKI,.

The Church's energies arc not chilled by the bitter Arctic blasts tint blow over the golden cities of Al.isk 1. A letter recently icccived from Father Judge, S.J., telK of a line Catholic hospital at Dawson City with 13s patients-—' mostly typhoid,' says the Father, and a new church which cost £5, 000 (the gift oi Mr. Alexander McDonald), and in which some six hundred people assemble every Sunday for the great sacrifice of the New Law.

HISTORY ' \S SHE IS V ROTE.'

Thk London Daily TcL^i-apli has furnished us with another of tho&e strange mixtures of fact and fiction which illustrate, in a small way, the untcliabihty of history as told by the gay deceivers of the daily press. When the Empress of Austria was hunting in Meath one season, the fox she was following- sprang over the wall of Maynooth College and rushed past the exerci.se grounds where the ptudents were pacing to and fro, presumably 1 nmersed in pious contemplation. The sight of Reynard roused in them that spotting inxiinet inherent in most Irishmen, and they were on the point ot giving chase when the wall was again cleared — this, time by a beautiful woman on a spirited horse. This was the Empress ot Austria, who had followed the fox through thick and tlun, and evidently through water as well, as the dripping state of her habit tu&tilied. The feat attributed to the Kmptess and Mi. Reyiaid was somewhat on a par with that of the cow that jumped over the i^i; for the College wall is .some eight or nine feet high. P^F over, the ' fox ' happened to be a deer. Furthermore, Empress, dogs, and game came in quite prosaically by the open College gate. The ' pious contemplation 'of the students was at the psychological moment turned upon a decidedly sub-

stantial dinner ; and the writer of these lines was one of a lively trio who rescued the deer from the fangs of the dogs, and received therefor the gracious thanks of the moit famous huntress in Europe.

STILL DRIFTING.

'The land which was the cradle of the Reformation has become the grave of the Reformed faith.' So wrote the Edinburgh Review regarding Germany as far back as 1880. Two recent sets of statistics show that Kaiscrland is still tobogganing swiftly down the slippery steep that leads to the extinction of practical Christianity irom the heaitsof a large body of its population. A Daily News Berlin correspondent sends the following fearfully significant figures of a crime which is, perhaps, more than any other, evidence of a loss of practical faith in God. During the ten years ending 1896, 407 schoolchildren in Prussia alone (331 boys and 76 girls) committed suicide before they had attained the age of fifteen years. The figures need no comment. The other set of figures appears in the Sunday Magazine (an English Protestant publication) for December. It shows that, while the number of students in the 21 universities of the Fatherland was 32,241 in 1898 (an increase of 1,311 on the previous year), the number of Protestant theological students decreased from 2798 in 1897 to 2682 in 1898. And every year (says the Magazine) shows a steady and sustained decrease.

In his Christian Life in Germany (published at the close of 1897), Rev. Dr. Williams, an eminent American Protestant divine, writes as follows of the life of the Protestant theological student in the German Universities: — In the Universities no theological professor thinks of opening his lectures with prayer, as in our [American] seminaries for the training of young men for the ministry. Nor in these schools are there, even for theological students, anything like the ' prayers ' of our colleges, or social meetings for the cultivation of one's spiritual life. . . Life in the other departments of the University, as well as in the professional and technical schools, is yet practically godless. Neither teacher nor student expresses his religious faith, if he cherishes any, in religious worship, nor, except on rare occasions, is he seen in the house of God. The dry rot has done its work in the German school. Under such a system for both laity and clergy one can only expect religious indifference and the speedy denial of every tenet of the Christian faith. It is pleasant to learn from the same book that ' nowhere in the world is the Roman Catholic Church doing better work than in Germany.' She is the hope of the Kaiser's Kmpire.