Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXIX, Issue 40, 3 October 1901, Page 1

Current Topics

linCS : 111 fareß the land, to hastening ille a prey. Where wealth accumulates, and men decay. clustering olive branches round *c 'am»^tir« ide saddened by «.«ta« °f reS ults from duties of paternity and ™ a ?he birth-rate (he adds) 'is possibly for legislator^ which ™^« Jo™^J o ™^ is in the fact improper practices The only crumD 01 from th£th>e was a slight rise mtteb^h^e la^y had 25.12, its lowest point, to 25.00 .. DW in whjle th<j also increased; and rt .« »s^ foT^ the thousand of marriages have increased from 5^+ to 7^7'n I&st population between 1895 and 19 00 . me year steadily decreased.'

with an averaee of about 83 to the thousand ; and Auckland Sd Taranlkf with 105 and 102 per thousand respectively. Even therefore, 7f 8 S were an irreducible minimum, which I (Jo St ßelieve alar^e part of the Colony averages over 105. Now cHmate no doub? may have something to. answer for, but I cannot believe that a/y. climate condit^s , in "ygj^f.^ neglected t^the warmer places the effect maybe more deadly. increasingly precious when there are too few of them ? Imor the SSSSTnars. and skilled baby-feeder. In the meantime country.

scarcely be questioned,, says Mr. AshcroH tto rate o( infants is far h.gher than t ought to be^ reliable information on this subject is, he says, ou ■ [he comparison of the various P^^^ l^ Sea-

Two School Duels.

boards, and it took on tne^ cca y w „ it has since then old 'sm yellow Portadown, the ago sold r \ he ra b^ a St s ° w n e cce cp i"g reduction '-at, in fact, a fraction the drapers call a • sw^P l "« . { nR « Papists" voices of to*"W«*™ifi£™eo"?tot£9\£»htei Secularism is now dai y heard m onert tne P death . blow to the erected for the declared purpos » iU probab iy m e et orr-stuTd^o-re^^nists insane bounty,

Kansas. We hope it will serve as a tonic to their resolution and nerve them to still further imitation of their distant friends in Crossley.

•Not to be Trusted.'

Have our non-Catholic contemporaries sewn up their mouths ? They — and the compilers of those fearful conglomerates of religious news that some of our contemporaries indulge in at the week-end — have no whisper, not a breath, concerning the lately vaunted ' movement ' of ' Roman ' clergy in France towards some unstated form of Protestantism. It is the old, old. lesson — two or three genuine, but unfrocked, clerics who were welcomed with injudicious haste, and, we suppose, the usual percentage of criminals and adventurers of the Ruthven and Widdows type who saw there was money in the business. But French Protestants have learned a lesson of caution. They ' voted at their last synod,' says the S.H. Review, 'that no "converted priest" should be ordained in the Reformed Church of France without having made for five years a public profession of Protestantism. In other words, he is placed on probation. They want to see if the weed from the Pope's garden will develop the quality of producing flowers. He mostly does nothing of the kind. They know this, and hence they are placing restrictions upon him.' •As a rule,' says a recent issue of the Living Church (an American Protestantant Episcopal organ), 'such men are not to be trusted, and people are getting to find it out.' The Living Church was referring to a drunken ' pal ' of Slattery's who was ' turned down ' a few weeks ago by the Protestant Young Men's Christian Association in Long Island.

4 Sheer Mendacity.'

Thanks to the prompt and timely action of the N.Z. Tablet and to the ready pens of some well-informed Catholics in Wellington and Auckland, the spurious ' Jesuit Oath ' is no longer current as a fact-coin in any part of New Zealand. The clumsily forged thing was as fully exposed, although at a later date, by eminent Catholic and non-Catholic writers in the religious and secular press in England ; and yet, strange to say, a little menagerie of fact-proof intolerants there are bandying it about and jumping and shrieking over it like a cage-full of monkeys with an indiarubber ball. The explanation of this sudden revival of professed belief in Ware's brazen forgery is, perhaps, not far to seek. A libel action on the subject is at present pending between Father Gerard, S.J., and a Methodist religious weekly, and the tactics employed remind one very forcibly — although in a smaller way — of the discreditable attempts made, during the Coningham case, by an association of ministers in Sydney to poison the public mind against the evidence of all Catholic witnesses whatsoever. Through some editorial oversight a letter from one of the British anti-Jesuits found its way into the columns of the Daily Chronicle. In the next following. issue the editor triced up the writer and flayed him to the following tune: ' We greatly regret that, by a pure inadvertence, a foolish letter signed " C.X.M." appeared in this column yesterday, giving what purported to be the Jesuit oath disowning allegiance to Protestant Sovereigns and States. This so-called (< oath "is a piece of sheer mendacity, having its origin, we believe, in an actual forgery perpetrated a good many years ago. No sensible man, of course, believes such twaddle, or is influenced by it in the smallest degree ; but none the less we very much regret that by an oversight the absurdity should have appeared in the columns of the Daily Chronicle, and we trust that our regret will be shared by " C.X.M." when he learns that this alleged " oath "is a bogus production.' We do not share the trustfulness of the Chronicle editor. The addled egg is the favorite — and natural — weapon of one class of controversialists. They use it just because it's addled, and are not ashamed.

An Appreciation.

No creed holds a mortgage on all the tolerance and tairmindedness that there is in the world. We are reminded of this by the fact that from a Baptist anniversary recently held in Springfield (United States) there comes an incidental appreciation ot the Jesuits which is as refreshing as it is unexpected. The speaker was the Rev. Dr. Lemuel Call Barnes, and the Watchman (a Baptist organ) summarises his remarks as follows : — ' Among other things Dr. Barnes said that we Baptists owe a great debt to the Church of Rome. We owe not a little to Martin Luther, but also much to Gregory, the great Pope who sent Christianity into England. The Roman Church propagated Christianity far and wide among our pagan ancestors. It was she who preserved for us through the Middle Ages, not only letters and learning, but also piety. Augustine of Africa, Francis of Assisi, and a thousand more are the spiritual friends of us all. To Roman Catholics we are indebted in connection with the missionary enterprise. The universally admired seal of our Missionary Union and its inspiring motto were copies from a publication of the Jesuits ! Why be startled at that ? The despised Jesuits were daring, dauntless, heroic missionaries before Judson, before Carey, before the Moravians, before even that Baptist who was at

once the pioneer missionary in the United States and the pioneer missionary to the heathen. I hold in my hand a priceless copy of the first great missionary document of our denomination and our country, Roger Williams' "Key into tht Language of America, or aHelp to tht Language of in* Natives." In unfolding what he calls the "great point of the conversion so much to be longed for," he appeals to the example of the Jesuits in Canada, in Maryland, in the West Indies. Later on, Cotton Mather and other Puritans — as you brethren in New England who are acquainted with their missionary writings remember— were conscientiously fired to some sort of missionary attempt by the zeal of Roman Catholic missionaries in various parts of the world.'

Our valued contemporary, the Catholic Citigen, is wondering what is going to happen to Dr. Lemuel Call Barnes.

Another Great Pillage.

'To study man from the past,' says Disraeli in Contmrini Fleming, ' is to suppose that man is ever the same animal.' But it is just because he is pretty consistently the same that history has a habit of repeating itself and a capacity for teaching lessons to those that — for a good purpose or for an evilcare to learn them. The puny rulers of France have been of late laboring to forget the lessons taught by the long wars waged against the Catholic Church by the two greatest figures in the political history of modern Europe, the First Napoleon and Prince Bismarck. Both alike learned the truth of trie old French adage — gui mange dv Pabe en meurt (who eats of the Pope dies of the feast) — and capitulated before it was too late. But Waldeck- Rousseau and his cabinet of Brummagem statesmen have apparently been reading English history of late and have found inspiration for their anti-congregation policy in the cruel and heartless pillage of the patrimony of the sick and maimed, the orphan, and the aged poor by Henry VIII.

' Bluff Hal's ' policy of wholesale pillage was only in degree more flagrant than the plunder of the poor which is now contemplated by the infidel French Government. Henry's policy saddled England with the curse of pauperism which endures to this hour. How the French regime of thievery will end, time alone can say. Dr. Jessop, an eminent Protestant writer, thus describes the great pillage in England: 'The monasteries were plundered even to their very pots and pans. Almshouses in which old men and women were fed and clothed were robbed to the last pound, the poor almsfolk being turned out in the cold at an hour's warning to beg their bread. Hospitals for the sick and needy, sometimes magnificently provided with nurses and chaplains, whose very raison d'itre was that they were to look after and care for those who were past caring for themselves, these were stripped of all their belongings, the inmates sent out to hobble into some convenient dry ditch to lie down and die in, or to crawl into some barn or hovel, there to be tended, not without fear of consequences, by some kindly man or woman who could not bear to see a suffering fellow-creature drop down and die at their own doorposts. We talk with a great deal of indignation of the Tammany ring. The day will come when someone will write the story of two other rings ; the ring of the miscreants who robbed the monasteries in the reign of Henry VIII. was the first, but the ring of the robbers who robbed the poor and helpless in the reign of Edward the Sixth was ten times worse than the first.'

* At present the French religious Orders are offered by the Government a Hobson's choice between the devil and the deep sea — between an outright suppression which means the destruction of the noble works of charity which they have been carrying on, and an application for ' authorisation ' or permission to exist, which may come directly to the same thing, or mean the continuance of their labors of love under harassing and heart-breaking conditions. The persecuted ecclesiastics and religious of the Republic have all along displayed a marvellous patience under their trials. But, as Uncle Ebben says, ' a man may compliment hisself on habbin patience when he's simply too lazy to make a kick.' What is needed in France is that form of patience, stiffened with courage, which goes defiantly to martyrdom. We hope that the members of the French religious Orders that are doomed to extinction will wait to be put out of their homes and separated from their beloved poor at the point of the bayonet, and that, if necessary, they will be prepared — both men and women — to go to prison and rot there. That would lead in time to a settlement of the religious question in France as it did in Germany. The Church in France is sadly in need of about five hundred martyrs just now. We only hope that the stuff that these are made of has not been all exported to Cochin-China and Pe-chi-li.

The animal Voltaire — who was imprisoned for gross crimes against morality— exclaimed : ' I am tired of being told that

it men sufficed for the establishment of Christianity, and I long to prove that only one is necessary to destroy it.' He essayed the task, and falsehood, satire, and ridicule were the infantry, cavalry, and artillery of his warfare. But the Church flourishes as if he had never lived or written a line, and his dried bones are crumbling into dust in the Pantheon, beneath Tissot's tall dome, within easy sight and reach of the Parliament buildings where Waldeck- Rousseau and his colleagues forged against her the clumsier weapon of the pickpocket and the burglar.