An Itinerant Lecturer.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXIX, Issue 49, 5 December 1901, Page 1

An Itinerant Lecturer.

A reverend non -Catholic lecturer who is at present perambulating New Zealand realises, like a minor Barnum, how sweet are the uses of advertisement. The constant drop of water Wears away the hardest atone ; The constant gnaw of Towser Vanquishes the toughest bone ; The constant cooing lover Carries off the blushing maid ; And the constant advertiser Is the one that gets the trade. The present ' greatest show on earth ' that seeks to capture ' the trade ' in New Zealand consists of two or three lectures on historical subjects — the Puritans, the Methodist Revival, etc. But instead of history the reverend lecturer gives us histo'ricai —or rather hysterical— romance. The strange world that he describes is not peopled with ordinary human beings, but with wingless angels and with shrieking demons in the flesh. The angels are his friends the Puritans and the Methodists ; the demons are the Anglicans and the Papists — especially' the Papists. J

Artemus Ward once said that a ' goak ' once in a while improves a comic paper. And an occasional historical fact is, we ween, a jewel that sets off a historical lecture. But our travelling lecturer does not deal in facts. They are apparently not the sort of thing that ' gets the trade 'he is after. He is all gold-leaf and tar-pot : the gilding for his friends ; the tar —and feathers — for those chuckle-headed Anglicans and Papists. It is not magnificent ; neither is it history. We have already shown that his Puritan ' friends of civil and religious liberty ' were the constant foes of both ; that they believed only in liberty to worship in their own way; that in the British Isles and in North America they employed prison, stocks, lash, branding-iron, confiscation, the ear-clipping shears, the nose-slitting knife, and the gibbet to compel consciences; and that the first experiment in equal civil and religious liberty was made by the hated Papists in the Catholic colony of Maryland. He would have us believe that his ' Puritan forefathers ' were the salt of the earth, and that the faith and progress of to-day are the work of their hands. They had, it is true, many sturdy good qualities deserving of admiration, but it is really high time that such tinseled myths and gilded exaggerations should cease to be retailed as sober history, and their false theatrical sheen used as a foil to deepen the unrelieved blackness of the pall of diabolism with which this unskilled artist covers over the characters of creeds, the head and front of whose offending seems, in his eyes, to be their belief in the Christian priesthood.

Others, better informed than this much-advertised and enterprising travelling lecturer, see the facts of Puritan history through different spectacles. The Interior, for instance — a Presbyterian organ published in Chicago — says in a recent issue : ' The Puritan Church, in which so little was made of the fatherly love of God, and so much of the sovereign distribution of His favors, did not live in a state of continuous revival by any means, but, on the contrary, sank from time to time deeper than it rose, and at the opening of the present century all this emphasis laid upon the sterner attributes of God and this exploiting of the mysteries of election had not sufficed to stop the downward plunge. By the close of the eighteenth century religion had reached a lower ebb in America than ever before. Only one in fifteen of the population was a professed Christian. The schools and colleges were filled with sceptical students. Yale College had but two young men in four classes, and Bowdoin but one in eight classes, willing to confess Christ. Throughout the newer settlements, in "the Genesee country " of Western New York, there was little more regard for the Sabbath than to-day in some Montana mining town. Drunkenness was almost universal, among the officers of the churches as well as among the wordlv. Gambling has reached such a height that ministers piously gave thanks for successful investments in lottery tickets.' The once sturdy stock of the Puritans of New England has degenerated and dwindled ; their cradles are ceasing to have occupants ; and other and stronger races are taking their place. Belief in the inspiration of the Bible is fast diminishing, even in the pulpit, and doubt and uncertainly are gradually eating into religious faith. The American Christian Advocate (Methodist) of August 29 says that, ' if the extreme Higher Criticism go much further,' in America, 'there will be a divorcing of the Piotestant Churches from the Bible, and that within the next thirty years' ; but that ' meanwhile Catholicism will be^in to spread with marked rapidity. For people will have a stiong religion ; they will not have a jellyfish religion, a misty or a musty religion.' The Catholic Church shows the strong vitality of evergreen and lusty >outh amidst the decrepitude and decay of New England Puritanism. She is already the dominant creed in the land of the Puritan Fathers, and stands ready to save the modern world from the new paganism as she saved the ancient world from the old.