Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXVIII, Issue 50, 13 December 1900, Page 1

Current Topics

AT HOME AND ABROAD.

MILDER SPEECH.

The world is a university. And mankind is ever at school. An American journalist recently discovered what he calls * the fallacy of the Kilkenny cats.' Some day mankind will realise the fallacy of the argumentum ad baculinum — cudgel-logic or the syllogism of brute force. And then a peace like that of Nirvana will enwrap the earth like a soft furry garment. For the greater part of the past 350 years Englishspeaking controversy consisted largely of litanies and responses of blistering epithets. The Parker Society's publications are a store-house of the theological invective of the Reformation and post- Reformation period. L'Estrange's Dissenters' Sayings is a museum of the verbal instruments of torture of two centuries agone. Some of them will not bear transcription, and the use of them by learned and unlearned divines is agreeably suggestive of the strait-waistcoat and epileptic fits. Scraps and remnants of this old theological slan^ still hang about pulpits here and there; they also adorn ihe sanctums of qmtp a little group of denominational newspapers. • Rutrush, 1 ' Popish,' * Papists,' ' Popery,' ' Romanists,' are a few of tbo«e cvi mus survivals of the theological ' d.-tppcr-clauin^' 01 a i.n:-.c-mannered period when in nearly e\a) ujntiuvtr^ the umi.ulv thin warp of argument was crossed and held together by a stout woof of fierce invective. The Pope is still occasionally referred to in our midst as Antichrist and the Man of Sin ; and within the past 12 months we have several times dropped across labored volumes, written by sublime idiots with sawdust brains, who endeavor to prove, by the aid of a vast deal of puzzel-brained calculations, that Rome is the mystic Bab\ lon of Revelations, and the Catholic Church the Scarlet Woman that St. John saw in vision on the Isle of Patmos. • » • The Scottish reformers held very decided views on this subject. They are expressed — not exactly in the style of the Vere de Veres — in the Westminster Confession (xxv., 6). It is there laid down that 'the Pope of Rome' is ' that Antichrist, that Man of Sin, and son of perdition, that exalteth himself in the Church against Christ, and all that is called God.' A few years ago the noted Scottish divine, Mr. Milligan, ground this and the Babylon theory to impalpable powder. And — according to an American exchange — 'the Presbytery of San Francisco, on October 10, recommended that the section of the Westminster Confession referring to the Pope as Antichrist be stricken out.' This change of heart is welcome as the earnest of better things. Catholic newspapers and pulpits are not given to fling contemptuous terms at Protestant bodies. And it is high time that these should take example by our lesson in good breeding and drop once and forever such vulgar, obsolescent, and offensive theological slang as ' Romish,' ' Popish,' ' Popery,' ' Papist,' ' Romanist,' and the like. The use of such terms is merely an exhibition of discourtesy and vulgar manners. 4 The scholar without good breeding,' said Chesterfield to his son, c is a pedant, the philosopher a cynic, the soldier a brute, and every man disagreeable.'

During the operations of Bismarck's kulhe did not turkampf against the Church in Germany.an pull it down. Irish weekly paper published a cartoon illustrative of the situation in the German Fatherland. The Man of Blood and Iron was represented hauling away for dear life on a stout cable, the further end of which was looped around the cross-surmounted spire of a Catholic Church. To him enters the Spirit of Evil— with horns, cloven hoof, arrow-head tail, and all the other usual 'properties. 1 ' What are you doing?' queried the Father of Lies. ' Pulling down the Church of Rome,' said Bismarck. ' How long have you been at it V ' Two years,' said Bismarck. ' Well,' said the king of demons, ' I have been trying to do the same thing for the past 1800 years, and have not succeeded yet.' A longer and far more ferocious kulturkampf failed to dislodge the faith from the Isle of Saints. Some time ago an Irish Protestant writer drew attention in the English Church Times to the wondrous recuperative energy of the Catholic Church in the Green Me. •In the year 1649,' said he in summing up, 'there were in the country 22 Bishops and four Archbishops. In the Cathedrals there were as usual digniUries and canons ; the parishes had pastors, a great number of secular pnests and numerous convents of regulars. But after Cromwell had attained to supreme power all these were sea. tered. Over 300 weie put to death, 1000 more were driven into ixi'i-. lout Bishops \M-re kill od in the Cromwelhan camj.aiyn 111 In 1 irui ; the others wkc all obliged to fly to foreign count! les, ( \L(j|>i the Bishop ot Kilmore, who was too feeble to be removed. In 1041 trine were in Ireland 4^ houses of the Dominican Order and iy>o religious. Ten \cars after there was not a single house in their possession, and three-fourths of these religious were dead or in exile. ... In 1657 the. newly-appointed Vicar-Apostolic of Dublin, Dr. James Dempsey, wrote to the Pope of the period : " Dublini non sunt tot Catholici quot constituerent tres Parociiias "—"" — " There are not in Dublin Diocese Catholics enough to form three parishes." The Roman Catholic population of this diocese now is probably not under 400,000.'

SOME CATCH NEWSPAPER PHRASES.

The newspaper reporter and correspondent are annalists and chroniclers rather than historians. We look to their corner of the paper for hard fidelity to fact rather than for comment or charms of style or quips of fancy. Voltaire will have it that ' originality is nothing but judicious imitation.' But some particular items of newspaper matter display a needless dreariness of stereotyped phrase which justifies La Fontaine's contemptuous reference to the ' servile race 'of imitators. A long-sutfenng generation of newspaper readers rose at last in revolt against the varlets who spoke of the ' coup iVoeil ' of a landscape, the ' tout ensemble ' of a meeting or a dinner-table; who referred to the thief that ' burglariously entered ' a dwelling ; who described fire as ' the devouring element,' the sound of a fall as a ' dull thud,' or a ' sickening thud '; and who remarked that the voice of a singer at ajjeoncert ' was heard to great advantage.' That style of newspaper report is dead and buried, and nobody wants to resurrect it. But, alack and well-a-day ! we have extricated ourselves from one form of verbal monotony only to stick our journalistic vamps deep in the mud of another. Nowadays, in these colonies at leabt, e\ery sermon — even the most familiar

instruction of priest or parson — is ' eloquent.' Every wedding is ' very pretty ' ; every bride ' looks charming 'in the same old dress ' with the customary wreath and orange-blossoms ' and the inevitable ' spray bouquet ' ; the wedding breakfast (it used to be a ' dejeuner ') is monotonously ' sumptuous ' ; and, as in the average novel, the world comes to an end with the honeymoon. * • * Sydney Smith tells somewhere how the Sioux Indians tolerated their old men until they (the old men) be^an to tell long-winded or monotonous tales. They then choked off the garrulous ancients and sent them to their placr-. For the peace of mind of sorely-tried newspaper readers it i~ about nigh time that the average wedding-reporter received his harikiri or happy despatch. We are inclined to offer some sort of decoration — some new Ordjjr of Merit — to the public benefactor who will lead in the'rireak-away from the stereotyped report of wedding functions. Personally, we have not been accustomed to regard such ceremonies from the modiste's or the spectacular point of view. But those interested may find a germ of inspiration in the announcements that were current in the far-off days of our great-great -grandmothers. We take the pains of transcribing a few from musty and moth-eaten old newspaper files of the eighteenth century. The Gentleman' s Magazine had the following in one of its issues of a.d. 1781 : — Married, the Rev. Mr. Roger Waina, of York, about twenty-Biz years of age, to a Lincolnshire lady, upwards of eighty, with whom he ia to have £8000 in money, £300 per annum, and a coach-and-four during life only. One of the notices in Williamson's Liverpool Advertiser in 1759 ran as follows :—: — Liverpool, May 25. — On Tuesday last was married at Hale, Dr. Zaohariah Leafe, of Preccot, to Elizabeth Martha Clough, of Halewood, an agreeable young lady of IS years of age, with a very genteel fortune. • » * The amount of the dowry and the personal charms of the bride were announced through the rather scraggy Press of those days with sound of trumpet and beat of drum. Towards the close of the century, however, the wedding-reporter modified his style somewhat. The ' fortune 'is thereafter variously described in cautiously vague terms as ' good,' ' genteel,' ' considerable,' or ' handsome.' The upholstery of the bride and her looks are the subject of reportorial comment nowadays. In the last century it was her character and — her temper. Bat this was ever as sweet as a pippin ; for the lady is invariably referred to as ' agreeable,' or ' most agreeable,' or as ' endowed with all the qualifications necessary to make the married state happy.' One wonders where the playwriters and the novelists and the essayists and the biographers of the period found so many Xantippes whose speech was on such frequent occasion like the quacking of a flock of angry ducks. Perhaps the latest instance of the announcement of the ' fortune ' appears in Aris's Birmingham Gazette for July 14, 1800. It occurs in the report of the marriage of the Right Hon. Mr. Canning, then Under-Secretary of State, to Miss Scott, 'with £100,000 fortune.' In one respect, at least— their commendable brevity— the marriage notices of the olden time deserves the flattery of imitation in ours. * * * There may be ' chestnuts ' in quotation or description as in story-telling. In quotation the following and many such are worn threadbare: ' Non tali auxilio,' ' Rari nantes,' ' Auri sacra fames,' etc., in Latin ; and in Plnglish, ' 'Tis distance lends enchantment to the view,' 'Just as the twig is bent,'* I am Sir Oracle/ ' Lives of great men all remind us,' ' A feast of reason and a flow of soul,' ' All went merry as a marriage bell," etc. And yet these and many such are thought jewels. But their frequent misapplication and excessive use have warned scholars to keep off those particular patches of literary grass. ' Genial and gentlemanly ' was an expression long promiscuously applied by editors and reporters to every man they mentioned. It appeared to have been gifted with the vitality of the microbe. It was applied to jockeys, clergymen, gamblers, and swindlers with sweet impartiality, till at last it became a mere catch phrase, lost its original meaning, and ceased to be of use. Then it was strangled to death in the city newspaper offices. It survived in country offices till the bucolic public sickened of it. The ' eloquent ' sermon and the 'charming' bride, and the 'sumptuous ' wedding breakfast have long since passed into the category of stock phrases that are emptied of their original significance. It is about time to hand them over to the undertaker. The words ' No Papist need apply,' and ' No Irish need apply ' frequently appeared as tags to advertisements when England was in the hysterics of the No-popery agitation of 1 850- 1, and when a portion of the American public were in the epileptic fits of Knownothingism in 1856 and the following years. Nowadays the appearance of such a notification is happily of sufficiently rare occurrence. But there are some

* NO IRISH NEED APPLY.

rare specimens of the bigot family who still occasionally thus air the traditions of 1850-1 to prevent them getting bluemouldy. Of such are the trustees of a Glasgow lunatic asylum. They recently advertised for a male attendant, and closed their announcement with the once familiar ' No Irish need apply.' Which led the Boston Republic to remark : ' Irishmen may command the armies of Great Britain, they may become Chief Justice of the realm, they may sit in Parliament, but they are still disqualified to work in a Scotch insane asylum ! '

PREMATURE BURIAL.

Ttir daring and eccentric Wiert/ was, perhaps, the only artist that ever ventured to portray on canvas the hair-raising horrors of being buried alive. His picture — which, by the way, is a mere tour de foree — is in the Musee Wiertz in Brussels, where the scared face of the ' dead ' man looking out from under the coffin lid has met the scared faces of tens of thousands of visitors and loaded their shocked imaginations to the Plimsoll mark with some of the worst stuff that dreams are made of. Wiertz's • Buried Alive 'is credited with having moved great numbers of people to adopt elaborate precautions against the realisation of a like calamity in their own persons. In the early eighties a foolish paper was read before the French Academy of Medicine— the writer expressing his conviction that one person in every five thousand is buried alive. The estimate was, of course, wildly exaggerated. Nevertheless, it created one of those little panics that turn pimples into molehills and molehills into Cordilleras. Some time afterwards— it was, we believe, early in 1884 — the President of the French Chamber of Notaries declared that express instructions were given in one will out of every ten to have the testator's heart pierced by a qualified surgeon before the lid of the coffin was finally screwed down. Similar instructions were, by the way, given in the will of M. Nobel, the noted inventor of dynamite, who died about three years ago. He had scarcely passed over to the majority when lo ! a London contemporary brought us news of the formation of an association, one of whose rules provides elaborate precautions against its members being inhumed alive. • • • Three years have gone by since then. And a few days ago we learned from the columns of a Dunedin contemporary that the buried-alive bogie is still above the ground. In fact, to use Gilbert's words, he is evidently still 'an influential goblin.' Our local contemporary records the formation of an association in New York for the purpose of securing legislation to make compulsory certain tests to be applied to supposed corpses before certificates of death are granted or burials are permitted. The American correspondent of a Dunedin daily paper gives the proposed tests as follows : — ' Two or more incisions in an artery ; the palm of the hand exposed to the flame of a candle within sm. distance ; a mirror held to the lips without sign of respiration ; a hot iron applied to the flesh without producing a blister.' The ancient Egyptians gave the ' corpse' a chance of again walking among men by making four days the minimum between death and burial. The pagan Roman * wake ' lasted six days ; that of the Greeks was a festival long-drawn-out of eleven days — by which time all reasonable doubts as to condition of the chief actor in the affair must have been pretty thoroughly set at rest. • * • Other times, other manners, and other fears. For nearly 30 years preceding 1832 the 'resurrection-men' or body-snatchers were the terror of ' the friends of the corpse in the British Isles.' The anatomical teachers — of whom there were many — relied chiefly upon the members of this odious profession for obtaining a steady supply of subjects for dissection. The occupation was followed in every part of the British Isles. But it flourished in England like the green bay-tree. Andrews' Bygone England gives many curious particulars regarding this strange profession and its ways. Keen competition and high prices ruled in the palmy days of the snatchers. ' Fifty pounds clown and nine guineas a body, 1 were often accorded to the nightprowlers, and ' in some cases £20 have been given for a single subject in healthy seasons.' In 1831 a 'Grave Club' was formed at Rothwell to keep watch and ward for five weeks beside the recent graves of members. Al2 feet grave was also resorted to with a view to circumventing the swift and silent ' resurrection-men.' A drunken man, safely 'bagged' was once sold as a subject to the anatomist Brookes. Murders were committed by snatchers in Edinburgh in 1828. ' The exactions, villainy, and insolence of the resurrectionists grew intolerable ' at last. A Select Committee of the House of Commons was appointed to investigate the question of bodysnatching. Dissection was legalised under restrictions regulated by Crown Ministers, and was allowed only after certificate of death, and in schools of anatomy licensed by the Government. The occupation of the resurrectionists was strangled, and after 30 years the incubus-fear of the bodysnatcher was lifted by Act of Parliament from the minds of the British public.