THE CHURCH IN EVERY AGE.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXVII, Issue 9, 2 March 1899, Page 5

THE CHURCH IN EVERY AGE.

The Right Rev. Dr. Gallagher, Coadjutor-Bishop of Goulbourn, preached at Vespers on the occasion of the blessing of the additioni to St. Joseph's Church, Orange, New South Wales, on February 12. In the course of the discourse his Lordship said : What institution is there amongst civilised nations even at the present day of beneficence and charity that oan compare with the Church of God / What lofty conception of the human mind, for the alleviation of distress, is there that does not owe itß origin to the Catholic Church ? What theory of beneficence could the philanthropist of to-day suggest which the Church has not perfected in undying institutions? For what form of suffering has she not devised a remedy ? To what ailment of the body or the mind has she not applied a balm > Who has instructed the ignorant of every age, who has raised the fallen, who has given courage to the despondent, who has guided the steps of the wavering, who has staunched the wounds of society — pouring in the wine and oil — who in a word has lifted up and pressed to her bosom the weak and the despised and outcast ones of humanity as fondly as Bhe ? Was it not a Catholic lady — Fabiola — one of the brightest and purest ornaments of the Early Church, who founded in the city of Rome itself THE FIRST HOSPITAL that the world had ever seen? Were not the convents and monasteries of the Middle Ages the welcome homes for suffering and old age, and misery and pain, and even in our own day were not these hospitals or houses of refuge that won the admiration of the traveller of every land memorials of Catholic faith, of Catholic charity and beneficence ? What man amongst them was so preju« diced or so vulgar as to refuse the homage, admiration, and gratitude to those exalted sports of the past from whose munificence and enlightened zeal sprung the schools, colleges, and universities of Europe, wherever had been inculcated the pursuit of the good, the beautiful, and the true— where the three graces— Liberty, Learning and Religion, were linked hand in hand ; where with an affectionate — reverent love for the venerable memorials of the past have ever bloomed the highest aspirations after an enlightened freedom— from whose walls have gone forth in every succeeding age THE BUILDERS OF HUMAN PROGRESS, the teachers, the graces, the examplare, and rulers of mankind. Yet hardly one of those notable institutions that does not owe its origin to the Catholic Church. Of all the calumnies, his Lordship went on to say, which, in the Church's struggle against infidelity and secularism, their enemies heaped upon them, that which he could bear with the least equanimity was the calumny that the Catholic Church had been the enemy of the Christian religion. Let the secularists call them tyrants if they will — let them say that in the ages paßt the Church had grasped at power with an unscrupulous hand, and used that power despotically. Let them tell us that we are idolstors— worshippers of sticks and stones — that to a statue chiselled by the cunning old Michael Angelo we bend in adoration— that to a Madonna lighted up with the spirituality of Heaven we bow the knee. All that we can afford to smile at. The Catholic Church possessed, indeed, immense power in the ages that are gone. B,t honest history did not tell that the Church abused that power, but rather used it FOR HIGH AND HOLY PURPOSES wisely and well. Her soulptors have, it is true, carved and our painters have limned images and pictures of perfect loveliness to excite devotion, to lift our thought to heavenly things, to enable us to realise the ideal— never to adore. But that Catholics were the enemies of religion the very stones of the old Sorbonne at Paris, at Oxford, and at Cambridge, in England, become vocal, and with all but human voice cry out that it is a lie. The indignant spirits of Alfred the Great and Venerable Bede, of Anselm, and of Lanfranc, of Lorenzo de Medici and Leo X., of William of Waynefleet, and William of Wykeham, of Cardinal Wolsey, and Henry Vl.— the most saintly of England's kings— arise, as it were, from the insulted graves to hurl back the falsehood. We, the enemies of religion! we, especially the clergy, whose name had been all through the Christian ages synonymous with knowledge and the possession of scholarship — we who, at least many of us, almost grudge to the reciting of the Divine praises those few momenta which we steal, from communing with Plato, and Cicero, and Virgil, Dante, Milton, and kindred spirits of the mighty past — in a word [ we, whose lives are spent in the increasing effort to assimilate the minds of the rising race in every land to the nearest possible likeness of their Maker by cultivating every form of knowledge human and Divine— the highest attributes of the soul. The foundation and endowment of the colleges and universities of Europe, to pass over the cloistral and episcopal primary schools of the Middle Ages, was itself | A WORK OF SOCIAL ELEVATION, the memory of which a grateful world ought not willingly allow to die. To ascend to a higher level, brethren, contemplate the action of Holy Mother Church in moulding the customs, and forming the character, and shaping the destiny of nations and peoples. Turkey, for example, that fair and fertile land, that once captivated the refined taßte of Constantine — that land which was adorned by the piety and genius of a St. Thomas Chrysostom, and enlightened by the wisdom of a Justinian, whose once proud capital, surrounded by smiling gardens and cornfields waving with golden grain, that capital which was enriched with all the precious treasures of classic genius — the centre of civilisation and progress of the Eastern world, had sunk deeper into degradation lower than in the time of Byzantium. And, on the other hand, why had Switzerland or Belgium, with a Bky less eerene, and a soil lees prolific, amid incessant struggles, fostered the highest fruits of virtue and genius, and preserved the highest aspirations after enlightened freedom ? Tfre

reason is because the one country — Turkey — was severed from the STRENGTH AND FAITH AND UNITY of the old Catholic Church, and had been cursed for the last 100 years with the despotism and degrading superstition of Mahommedanism, whilst the two little countries, in spite of their great trials, had sustained by a heroism and spirit of freedom with as pure a morality and enlightenment of virtue as ever followed in the wake of the Catholic Church. In India and Hindoostan, where the inhabitants were barbarous and superstitious, the loving mother was sacrificed on the funeral pyre, the deceased fathers and mothers sacrificed their infants on the River Ganges to appease a false deity. Why was all this ? It was because idolatry and superstition Btill brooded over the land where the Garden of Eden once stood (over the land which once flowed with milk and honey for the chosen people of God), because they stoned the prophets and killed those that had been sent to them, because they had rejected the teachings of God, or were thought by God unworthy to receive the truths of the Catholic Faith. But in the still Greater India of the West, in North and South America, where, 400 years ago, the people were not less barbarous or the idolatrous rites less human than in the East, nations were rising up to the fulness and maturity of perfect manhood, a new world had been called into existence to redress the sins of the old. The march of progress goes steadily to the West ; Liberty, with her flag unfurled upon the Andes, ' looks from her throne o'er half the world,' and saints and heroes and scholars have been formed in plenty through the beneficent influence of the grand old Catholic Church out of the descendants of those who, 100 years ago, offered up human victims to appease the wrath of their angry god.