THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 1903. PERPETUAL ATTACK

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXI, Issue 38, 17 September 1903, Page 17

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 1903. PERPETUAL ATTACK

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LE days are happily past when men suffered stripes and chains and stocks and prison-cell for their religious beliefs. But there exists even to "the present day a form of persecution against which Emancipation Acts can afford no protection. It is calumny. ' A nickname,' said Isaac Disraeli, ' a man may chance to

wear out ; but a system of calumny, pursued

by a faction, may descend even to posterity.' It is the cruellest of all forms of religious persecution The Protestant view of the Church has undergone full many a change since the w lute-hot fury of the days when Newman wrote his ' Present Position of Catholics in England ' Outside the lodge-room and the platform of the roving gaol-bird, the old fierce epithets, the hissing theological nicknames, resound no longer ; the movement towards Catholic doctrine and ritual has swept over the face of Anglicanism— even the minor dissident sects arc drawing gently and tentatively in the same way ; and practically the whole ground of controversy between us and the Reformed creeds has shifted since the days of Milner. The grosser superstitions regarding the Catholic Church are, like the last rose of summer, faded or gone. But a full knowledge of us is still a far-off hope. Titcomb could write learnedly on Buddhism, Clarke on fetich-worship, and Brown on the Moki snake dance. But the Catholic Church is even still to the average Protestant divine an unexplored, or almost unexplored,

land. The Protestant view of her has still tradition for its sustaining power, fable for its basis, prejudice for its life, assumed principles for its intellectual ground, and ignorance concerning us for its protection. The world moves. But it takes time to shuffle off the thick coil of three and a half centuries of prejudice.

When prejudice is ingrained and strong, the tongue is commonly limber and as given to wagging as an aspen leaf. Once in a while some cleric delivers his ' protest ' against ' Rome ' from the pulpit. Then he hastens to the press with his oratorical tornado condensed and bottled up. Perhaps a controversy ensues. When it does, it almost invariably shows that the assailant does not know the contents of the Catholic penny catechism, that he has never seen so much as the cover of the ' Romish' authors whom he professes to • quote/ and that his well-meditated attack is marked by lack of knowledge, of cultivation, of accuracy and deliberation in statement, of justice, charity, and every other requirement that befits the character of a minister of the Gospel. In our small way we have shown this full many a time. But newspaper discussions are merely the play of intermittent geysers. Beneath the public surface of things there is a constant ' bubble, bubble, toil and trouble ' of religious controversy. It hums and simmers, here more, there less, in shops, factories, public departments, and in practically every place . where men or women of different creeds are gathered together. Every priest engaged in the work of his mission is well aware of this. Our Catholic men and maidens are frequently assailed with the coarse brutalities of itinerant impostors like the Slatterys and of gaol-birds and ' soiled doves ' like Margaret Shepherd of the many crimes and aliases. They hear, in substance at least, the disgraceful and unconscionable misrepresentations, garblings, and ' doctored ' ' extracts ' of Blakeney, Littledale, Collette, Salmon, and other Protestant writers who, whatever their standing in ecclesiastical circles, have forfeited the right to honest men's consideration by pursuing the dishonorable methods of the tag-rag-and-bobtail of cheap and nasty controversialists. No point of the Catholic faith remains unassailed. Even the foundations of belief in revealed religion are made the object of frequent attack by more or less fluent and empty-pated gabblers who have caught a few hollow-sounding shibboleths from a chance newspaper paragraph or letter or from the shallow ' popular ' scientific romances of Clodd and Grant Allen.

The interest of our Catholic masses in the work of the Catholic apologist who accepts the gage of battle, is a keenly personal one. It gives them— perhaps for the first time, the reply to fallacies and objections that, in various crude or cunning or cutting ways, they have heard urged scores of times against their faith. Others of our fold are guarded by educational advantages 1 , by social position and social conventions, against this dingdong of nagging controversy. But our workers, male and female— our young men and maidens especially— have to bear the brunt of battle. They have to go into the arena, to bear the bitter sneer, to endure the grievous calumny, to hear the subtle or the shallow sophism of ' no-Popist ' or Agnostic day by day. fror them the work of the Catholic apologist is a God-send. It is chiefly a keen sense of their perils and their needs that has impelled us to make almost every issue of the ' New Zealand Tablet ' in small part a Catholic Truth Society publication. But that is by no means sufficient. There is a crying need, among our young people especially, for systematic and more advanced dogmatic instruction than is furnished by the Sunday or parochial school. Much of that could come from the altar. But the organised, persistent, and extended circulation of "the various Catholic Truth Societies' publications would meet that urgent need best of all. It would enormously strengthen the faith and devotion of our young people of both sexes at a perilous age, enable them to give a reason for the belief that is in them, enlighten others outside our Fold,

and save many a precious soul from lapsing into indifferentism or infidelity. There is a wide field in New Zealand for the operations of an energetic Branch of the Catholic Truth Society.