They were 'Dismayed'

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXI, Issue 19, 7 May 1903, Page 1

They were 'Dismayed'

The French writer Chamfort was the author of many Bharp and pungent sayings that scorched and bit like vitriol. A lady once remarked that a conversation with the hard-faced cynic left her in a state of melancholy till bed-time. And yet it was Chamfort who coined the sayind that ' tho most wasted of all days is that on which one has not laughed.' Now there is somewhere in England a body of more or less pious people that has recently saved the English-speaking public, or a goodly portion of them, from letting a day go to waste. We refer to tho Church Association. We know nothing whatever ol the Church Association beyond the fact that it has added to the gaiety of the nations by cabling to King Ed w aid last week expressing ' dismay ' at his proposed \isit to the

Pope ! Jn his book, 'If Christ came to Chicago,' Mr. Stead flailed American Orangeism for dressing up ' Popery,' as their Ulster brethren do, ' with its familiar hoof and horns and tail,' and ' scaring the old women of both sexes with the bogey of impending massacre.' The ' Church Association ' in England is probably, like the ' Protestant Defence Association ' in New So/uth Wales, merely a branch of the Orange tree. And to e\eiy Orangeman it is, of course, an article of divine faith that the Pope is the Man of Sin and ' Home ' the Beast of the Book of Revelations. Possibly the collectne ' dismay ' of the Church Association may have arisen from the awful thought that King Edward might be devoured alive by the seven mouths, or impaled upon the ten horns, of the Beast. The Pope has been charged with greater impossibilities than playing the Dragon of Wantiey to a live King.

This is by no means the first time that King Edward and the i oyal family have been howled at and spat upon by ' dismayed ' fanatics for having manifested a friendly feeling towards Catholic persons or institutions. In 1893, when the present King was Prince of Wales, he was denounced in frothy speech at an Orange assembly in Victoria for the esteem in which he held the late Cardinal Manning. Queen Alexandra and the present Prince of Wales were likewise flailed in angry style by

' the accredited organ of the Orange institution ' in Melbourne for having dared to visit ' the head of the Popish. Church in Home.' We could compile a curious anthology of the rough abuse and fierce threats directed against tho late Queen Victoria by the Irish members of the fraternity at various periods of her long reign, but especially m 18G8-9, when, at the great Orange gatherings at Newbliss and elsewhere, the raucous watchword i ang out among the brethren that their allegiance to her wo(uld cease and they would ' kick her crown into the Boyne,' if she dared to give her royal assent to the Bill for the Disestablishment of the then dominant Church in Ireland. The Church Association seems to have caught some of the infection that is endemic hero and there north of the Boyne. The cackling of ' dismayed ' geese is said to have once saved Home from tho Gauls. Last week's cable message was, perhaps, an effort to repeat the experiment on behalf of a British King.