The Age of Cheek

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXI, Issue 36, 3 September 1903, Page 1

The Age of Cheek

When a representative Catholic steps, on challenge, into the arena of newspaper controversy, this is his practically invariable experience : a crowd of nonCatholic writers, dissatisfied with the ©manner in which their end of the discussion is handled, sally forth, with much ado and hullabaloo, to aid their failing champion. This customary compliment has been paid in generous measure to the dialectic skill and historical knowledge displayed by Dean Burke in his replies to the unprovoked and unseemly challenge of the Anglican Bishop of Dunedin. A number of lay and clerical combatants came to the aid of his Lordship. By far the greater part of them, however, were dealing with a subject that was far too big for the weight of their brains. But they sailed in,to the strife, nevertheless, with the serene and reckless conceit which comes of mental rawness and shallow reading, and they added not a little to the gaiety of the discussion by the sort of crude fancies which they poured into it. Josh Billings says that ignorance is bliss when it is a question of sawing wood. Its chief value in controversy is the healthy amusement which it furnishes to those who have got to the root of the subject under discussion. In a way, too, it serves to show up a curious characteristic of our age to which the ' New World ' refers as follows in a recent issue :—: —

' It is, indeed, one of the most remarkable phases of twentieth century culture that a number of persons are writing who have lamentably small knowledge of the topics they attempt to discuss. Here people are writing about scieince who scarcely know the difference between a perihelion and a parallax. Other scribes are writing about religion, and settling the meaning of Scripture, who do not know the difference between a Hebrew verb and the inscription on a Chinese opium jar. Some one has called the present the age of steel. Really, is it not in truth the Ai*e of Cheek ? '