The New Zealand TABLET

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXI, Issue 24, 11 June 1903, Page 17

The New Zealand TABLET

* To promote the cause of Religion and Justice by the tvai/s of Truth and Peace.' LEO XIII. to the N.Z. TABLET. THURSDAY, JUNE 11, 1903.

It is needlesß to prolong the agony of clamorous contradiction. It will be time enough to take the professors of the new ' morality ' seriously when they shall have evolved a sane theory of the origin of matter, life, mind, will and conscience, aud presented at least some decent semblance of agreement among themselves as to the basis of the code which they would substitute for that which has dominated the human race from the dawn of its history to the present hour. The contradictions and absurdities of the new-pagan school are, however, instructive in so far as they furnish a melancholy, but luminous, proof of the vagaries of the human mind when it sets forth to devise a scheme of domestic and social relations which shall not be based upon God. ' I'm honest,' says ' Mr. Dooley,' ' because iv th' polis force.' Punishment is in the nature of things. Its necessity and value are recognised. It is an ordinary and necessary part of domestic and civil life, down even to the sewing union and the boys' debating club. But fear of the policeman's truncheon or of the soldier's bayonet is not everything in civil life. It may, and does, keep the small criminal in order, as fear of the cat o'-nine-tails suddenly stopped garrotting in London a quarter of a century ago when all other means had failed. But what control can it exercise on those in high places who hold the police and the judicature in the hollow of their hand ? Montesquieu's taying applies forcibly here : ' The laws arc like spiders' webs : small -les are caught in thf-m, but larger ones break

through.' Let it once be proclaimed and believed that man's natural instincts are his moral law, and the last protecting barrier of civilised society is carried away, and the world would witness once again, and on a vastiy greater scale, the red pandemoniums of the French Revolution and the Paris Commune. Hope in God and love of Him, and of mankind for His dear sake, sustained the martyrs in their torments from lapsing into the crime of idolatry, and led, and still lead, to those splendid acts of patient heroism — such as those of St. Vincent de Paul, St. John of God, and Father Damien — that ennoble our race. But every human