THURSDAY, APRIL 21, 1904. PRIZE BOOKS—A SCANDAL

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXII, Issue 16, 21 April 1904, Page 16

THURSDAY, APRIL 21, 1904. PRIZE BOOKS— A SCANDAL

SMERSON once suggested a professorship of books. It is sorely needed. And the professor's understudy might usefully be, at times, a common hangman Who would do justice to sundry conglomerates of paper and printing that blight the f»oul artd poison the springs of life. Time and ag,ain we have raised a Voice of warning agai*n!st the damger that lurks in the prize-book system, especially

in the State schools of the Colony. There is apparently no supervision and no responsibility in the matter of selection. To our personal knowledge the prizebook system has been made over and over again, in State schools, the means of placing in the hands of unsoistpecting Catholic children some of the most strongly-flavored controversial literature of certain Protestajut denominations. While nominally and legally undenominational, some of the schools are made, year by year, underhand agencies for the. circu Nation of denominational tracts. The annual distribution of bookprizesi presents big possibilities of mischief to Catholic childjren, even where there is no direct intention to outrage their religious sentiments. But there are manifestly far wider possibilities for abuse where— as sometimes happens— the selection of books lies in the haavisi of men of strong religious bias, who could scarcely be expected to forego such a golden opportunity of stabbing ' Rome ' through the little ones that are the apple of its eye.

A few days ago there was placed in our hands an evil book that was distributed — though not lately — as a .prize to an innocent Catholic boy in the Woodstock (Ritrrvu) State school, on the West Coast. The book is a well-known, or rather notorious, one— as notorious, in its way, for its coarseness, vulgarity, and (at times) for its veiled or undisguised pruriency, as are .the works of Fielding and Smollett. The man who wouM place the 'b'oolc that we refer to in the hands of a chiild, must be either a great simpleton or a great scoundrel. One of the tit-bits in this precious prize volume represents (in terms unquotable here) a Pope indulging!— on G-ood Friday, of all days of the year— in the lowest debauqhery. At the close of his orgie he is represented as giving his paramour ' absolution not only for every sin she had, but all she might hereafter commit ' ! This and other parts of that scandalous prize-book might haVe been edited in the sanctum of the Father of Lies. ' Against Papacy,' said Luther, ' we accoiunt ail things lawful to us.' And it seems as if there are in or a-bout Woioldstock bigots of so fanatical a stamip tihat they are prepare 4to drag the souls of innocent children through swinish moral filth ias well as diabolical calumjny for the incomprehensible comfort of getting in a coward's blow at ' Rome.'

We have in our possession another model pri/.ebook that was presented to a Catholic child at the Park Street State school in Tnvercargill. -It is a gaudily upholsteied but savage work of fiction. It is frankly contro\ersial in its cnaraetet, iM marked throughout with an incredible ignorance of Catholic teaching and practice, a>nd is written for the evident purpose of bulging out the youthful brain-cells with a fierce hatred of ' Romanism.' Its characters are of two sorts : a few Protestants w<ho are angels of light, and a collection of Catholic ecclesiastics who are simply incarnate demon's— liars, hypocrites, tyrants, kidnappers, druggers of defenceless women, low schemers and plotters, savage in their vengeance, cruel as tigers, vindictive as infernal spirits, constructive if not actual murderers, and, in a word, as finished a collection of diplomaed scoundrels as were elver gathered together in waxen effigy in the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud'.s. All this is bad enough. But the worst of the foul business is this : that this pack of demctns are praced before the 1 me'rttal eye of State school childhood as types of the really PIOUS Cailholic clergy— as the flower of their kind ! The rest, of course, must be walking miracles of sheer diabolism But to the noisome class who compound such pestiferous ' prize ' poison, and to the larger class for whom tlhey cater, a Catftolic priest is no more a Jfuma'n being than is a cobra di capello or a m)an-eating Bengal tiger. And the infamous book of ' prize ' fiction just referred to professes to be a cool narrative of ' facts ' ' We have in its mendacious pages a savage fulfilment of the quoted Lutheran (not Jesuit) principle that a (supposedly)

goad end justifies the use of sinful means, and of the comfortable theory of Anne Hutchinson's followers, that the moral law— and especially the law of truthapeajking—lays no obligations on the consciences of the ' elect.'

The cases to which we refer merely indicate a general danger tihat lurks in the State school tor every Catholic child. Parents and the clergy would do well to bear a hand in removing such grievous perils from the sohool-lives 'of Catholic children. The remedy lies .partly in the removal of every Catholic child from State schools, when a Catholic school is witjhin reach ; partly in the selection by competent Catholics- pi prized books for Catholic children ; partly in the substitution of certificates, medals, etc., for book prize®, Sucn incidents as we have related may well teach a Wesson oven to o,ur Catholic schools, where the choice of prizevolumes is sometimes made on random or haphazard lines. Our prize-books should be procured from Catholic publishers or booksellers. And among them should ever figure prominently, the admirable publications of the Catholic Truth Society, the ' Aye Maria ' Series, and the varied and charming writings of Miss Catherine E. Conway (' Pilot ' Publishing Company, Boston, U.S.A.). Every Catholic convent and school ghould, moreover, halve at hand, for reference, at this season, the useful catalogues of good, sound, safe literature which is issued by the Internat onal Catkolite Truth Society, Arbuckle Building, Brooklyn, New York, United States., It is a guide of' enormous value, and! for the purpose to which we here immediately refer is the nearest approach that we know of to Emerson's dream of a professorship of books.