The cable runneth thus :—

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXVII, Issue 20, 18 May 1899, Page 2

The cable runneth thus :—

THE JUBILEE OF 1900.

Rome, May 12.— The Pope has proclaimed 1900 aa a universal Jubilee year amongst Catbolica, to be marked by the special remission of sins.

The first part of this message from over the seas is quite correct both in substance and in form. The latter part of it is an instance of things that might with advantage have been said differently. Since the days of Boniface VIII. all century years, beginning with 1300, have* been years of jubilee.. In 1343 Pope Clement VIII. reduced the period between the jubilees^to 50 years. Urban VI., in 1389, shortened the term to 33 years, and Paul 11., in 1470, to .25. The coming Annus Sanctus, or year of universal jubilee, begins at Christmas of the present year, and closes with the Christmas festival in 1900.

Short of a personal communication — which is both impracticable and unprofitable — it is impossible to penetrate the idea (if any) that was represented in the cable Sphinx's brain by the statement that the coming Jubilee would ' be marked by the special remission of sins.' It would puzzle the head of a Catholic theologian to fix a meaning to the term ' a special remission of sins. 1 On the face of it, the expression is calculated to convey the idea of 'some new or unusual method of forgiveness. Even ordinary confessors are in jubilee time empowered to absolve from many reserved cases, censures, etc., but the same method is followed as of old ; the condition of forgiveness for grievous transgression of the Divine law are the unalterable ones laid down in the New Dispensation : sacramental confession of sins, true sorrow for them, and a firm purpose of amendment. The cable-man probably meant to convey the intelligence that the jubilee year would be marked by special indulgences. And indulgences are not a ' remission of sin.' They can take effect only when sin has been already forgiven. They are in no sense a remission of sin, but of the temporal punishment which (as we know from the Sacred Scriptures) is often due to sin even after its guilt and eternal punishment have been forgiven. A Catholic penny catechism would be a useful addition to the book-shelf or counter of our cable companies.

THE BISHOP OF THE NORTH POLE. '

Athabasca-Mackenzie is what Hood would call a humpy, lumpy, bumpy country. It lies away in the wild, mountainous part of the great_ North-west of Canada, on the 6oth parallel, where the winter cold is almost as keen and unrelenting as on the gold-fields of Alaska. Athabasca has the very jewel df a Bishop — the Right Rev. Dr. Clut, 0.M.1., who is better known by the title of * Bishop of the North Pole.' The North-West Review tells how this saintly old man — he carries the weight of some seventy years quite jauntily on his shoulders — joumejs over his wide, wild, and desolate diocese, eating of the meagrest and most scanty fare, and sleeping in huts as he goes. In a private letter to a friend — which received publicity without his knowledge — Bishop Clut says :—: — / I have not written to you for a long time. During: the whole summer I was absorbed in manual labour, atid oftener had the spade and the axe in hand than the pen, so lhat my correspondents may have a right to complain. It is true also that we have few occasions to send letters to civilised regions, and we have just spent more than three months without receiving any mail. The Grand Old Man of the North-west can evidently wield the axe with all the skill and effect of the late master of Hawarden. Hear what he says in another letter :—: — During last summer I cleared two acres of the forest, in order to enlarge the Sisters' field ; and when the hard frosts stopped my work of clearing, I took up my axe and chopped sixty ox-loads of firewood. Though these two jobs were not exactly episcopal, they proved very useful to the mission.

Not episcopal, indeed ! Why, the Bishop of the North Pole was just doing what St. Paul would have done in like circumstances. As things stood was not the Apostle of the Gentiles often 'in labours ' — or rather in exhausting- or wearying-out labours ; for that is the meaning of the Greek word he uses (kopois) ? And did he not say of himself : • Even unto this present h&ur we both hunger and thirst and are naked and are buffeted and have no certain dwelling-place, and we toil, working with our own hands?' Athabasca has an Apostolic bishop — one of those grand pioneers of the faith who go out into the wilds with a single aim — to spread God's kingdom, neither solicitous for their life, what they shall eat or drink, nor for their body, what they shall put on. Gods

sappers and miners and road-makers, cffeiring tlie obstructions tint he in the path of- the faith ! Look at them : hands often grimy with toil, faces weather-beaten as the granite outcrlßK below Waimate, old qlothes that a Jew would not, perhaHfc give sixpence for. And do not some of us know the Marfl Fathers who have bravely settled among the head hunters, an? 1 the patient missionaries who live as Maoris among the Maori in order to win the Maori, and the' Jesuit Fathers who lived bare-footed and in' destitution among the Daly River blacks in South Australia to gain the dusky tribesmen to Christ ? There is more of the glory of God and "true heroism in the soul and work of one of those weather-beaten missionaries than there is in a tram-load of sparkling Koh-i-noors or an army corps of men who scrambled over the ice-bound Pass that led them to Klondike in search of gold. Nameless often and unconsidered now, they will yet f . 3 , • • • - ' - Join the choir invisible > Of those immortal dead, who live again • , In minds made better by their presence, liveIn pulses stirred to generosity, • . ' la deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn For miserable aims that end with self. < '

Satan's locomotive CAPACITY.

The verdantly hopeful soul who conducts the religious Saturday column in one of the Dunedin daily papers has been giving- us prophetic glimpses of the peaceful Amharas of bliss that Cuba and the Philippines are to become in the immediate future through the agency of the various Protestant missionary societies. On reading the rose-tinted forecasts of the good, pious man, one feels disposed to ask some awkward questions regarding the results of their missionary efforts in the Hawaiian- and other' Pacific archipelagoes. But it is proverbially a useless and unprofitable occupation to argue with a prophet. - The superior and much more comfortable plan is to bring another and bigger prophet along and get him to out-prophesy the other. Hence I pit Justice Brewer,-of the United States Supreme Court, against the nameless prophet whose light burns dim and low— under a bushel, as it were— in the columns of our Dunedin contemporary.

In a recent speech at Buffalo Justice Brewer flays Uncle Sam with the lash — and rubs salt into his wounds — for his treatment of the Indian. Then he pops the momentous question : ' Are we sure that a century of dishonour in respect to savages at home will not be followed by a millennium oi dishonour in respect to those beyond the seas?' Ha! There's the rub. Justice Brewer's answer to his own query is humiliating, perhaps (says the A<ve Mat ia), but it is wholesome. Here it is :—: — To hear some talk, you would think that all the influences going out from this Christian nation to the heathen have been Christian, purifying, and elevating. The fact is that even from Puritan New England there have gone more hogsheads of rum than missionaries, more gallons of whiskey than Bibles. If anyone imagines that this order of things will be changed when we come into control of the Philippines and attempt to rule them— that thereafter only missionaries and Bibles will pass thither from America — he sadly underrates the locomotive capacity of the devil. Justice Brewer reasons' from the solid of hard, if unpleasant, historic fact; our New Zealand prophet from the airy and unsubstantial foothold of his own, or, most likely, somebody else's, roseate-spectacled imagination. That is just the difference between- the two prophets. Excessive hopefulness is characteristic of the consumptive,, and, in- any case, is an indication of an unhealthy condition of mind.