Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXII, Issue 18, 5 May 1904, Page 1

Current Topics

Dr. Gibb on Nomad Evangelists

The Rev. Dr. Gibb, of Wellington, is again on the war-jpath. This time he has been laying o*pen the scalp of the wandering evangelist, who seems to have been invading the green shores of New Zealand ' rayther numerously ' of late. We aore in no way concerned witlh tyie soundness or unsoundhess of the reasons which induced Dr. Gibb to put on his war-paint, seize tomahawk and scalping knife, and set out on the trail of the nomad gospeller. But, incidentally, the bellicose Doctor gave utterance to a sentiment which —to use a long consecrated expression of tine rea(dy-made toast— does honor to his head and heart. Owing (said he) to the ' everlasting visits of evangelists,' ' ministers were tempted to throw upon outside agents their own proper work.' Now it so happens that this is the very thing that Dr. Gibb and his folllow-clerics of the Bible-in-sfchools League are themselves endeavoring with all their might to do : 'to throw upon outside agents '•—'to wit, paid State officials!—' their (that is, the ministers') own proper work ' of imparting religious instruction to the children of their faith. To be consistent, tihe doughty doctor must recede from either one position or the other. Or does he hold with Emerson — who wrote on the lintels of his daor-ppst, • Whim '—that consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, lanti that great solu'ls have simply nothing to do with it ? • Speak,' said Emerson, • what you think now In hard wotds, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict everything you said to-day.'

In this matter of the Christian-up-hringing of youth, we Catholics feel no temptation 'to throw upon oftitside agents our own proper work.' We axe but a seventh of the population of New Zealand. We are endowed with comparatively slender resources of worldly wealth and power. But thanks to the zeal of our clergy, to the sacrifices made by our laity for conscience and principle, and to the devoted labors of our religious Congregations, we hold to-day almost a monopoly of the whole field of Christian education in New Zealand.

A Military Bone -crusher

It is not, in time, a long cry back to tihe' days of the Pieninsula war, when the old spherical musket ball

was Mg enough to shatter the leg of an elephant. It had, howetver, poor initial velocity, aod when it found its billet in skull or rib or tibia, it curled up comfortably and rested there. But for all its slow gait, it was a famous bone-crustier. It gave the military Sawbones of the day plenty of practice in amputation and reduced many a Valiant Tommy Atkins— and Paddy Atkins and Sandy Atkins— to the condition of luckless Ben Battle, who left both his legs ' in Badaips's breaches.' The hits of conical rifle-metal with which Jap and Russ are now perforating each other on the i>anks of the Yalu are much smaller in size, move at a terrific velocity, can penetrate* two or three human bodies at a distance of 2600 to 3900 feet from the muzzle, can drill holes in several layers of bones 6500 feet away, 'and can crush and splinter arm or leg in a woful way even as far off as 9000 and 11,000 feet. The old round bullet of Peninsula days hit with the stroke of a sledge-hammer. The small-bore compliments that Japan arid Russia are exchanging on tihe Yalu do their work with such 'neatness and despatch that the victim is scarcely conscious of the moment of impact. Sir William MacCormac, after a long experience in tihe South African campaign, said that when Mr. Atkins is struck by a Mauser bullet 'he feels n,o pain or shook, but a stupid sensation and a strange singing in the ears are felt which render the majority of soldiers unconscious.' As a result of the merciful character of tihe small-bore bullet, some two-thirds of the wounded recover so rapidly as to be fit for service again in about a fortnight.

How it Feels

The best description we have yet seen of ' how it feels to be shot ' was contributed by an American scldier tio ' Scribner's Magazine ' for September, 1898. The writer took part in the fierce fighting around Santiago (Cuba) in the Spanish-American war, and his words will bear reproduction for the secotod time in our columns. He says :—

' I saw many men shot. Everyone went down in _ a lumb without cries, without jumping up in the air, without throwing up hands. They just wetit down! like clods in the grass. It seemed to me that the terrible thud with which they struck the earth was more penetrating/ than the sounds of the gluns. Some were only wounded, some were dead. There is much that is aweImspiring aboftit the death of soldiers in tftie battle-field Almost all of us have seen men or women die, Wut they have died in their carefully arranged beds with doctors daintily hoarding the flickering spark ; with loved ones clustered about. But death from disease is less awful than death from bullets. On the battle-field there are no delicate scientific problems of strange microbes to be solved. There is no petting, no scolding, nothing—

nothing but death. The man lives, he is strong, he is vital, every m{uscle in him is at its fullest tension when suddenly " chug "—he is dead. That " chug " of the ballets striking flesh is nearly always plainly audible. But bullets which are billeted, so far as I know, do not sing on their way. They go silently, grimly to their mark, and the man is lacerated and torn, or dead. I did not hear the bullet shriek that killed Hamilton Fish ; I did not hear the bullets shriek which struck the many others who were wounded while I was near them ; I did not hear the bullet shriek which struck me.

4 This bit of steel came diagonally from the loft. I was standing in the open space in the front, had partially turned to see Roosevelt's bravery, and the sjplendiji conduct of his soldiers. But I did not see Roosevelt. " Chug " came the bullet and I fell into tfae long grass 'as much like a lump as had the other fellows whom I had seen go down. There was no pain, no surprise. The tremendous shock so dulled my sensibilities that it did not occur to me that anything extraordinary had happened—that there, was , the least reason' to be worried. 1 merely lay perfectly satisfied and entirely comfortable in the long grass. It was a long time before anyone came near me. The fighting passed away from me rapidly. There were only left in the neighborhood of my little episode the dead (I could see a dead man not far away if I looked through the grass near the ground level), other wounded, aftfl a few first>-aid-for-the-iiijured men who were searching for us. I heaid two of these men go by calling out to the wounded to make their whereabouts lcnown, but it did not occur to me to answer them. The s»un was very hot, and I had some vague thoughts of sunstroke, but they were not specially interesting thoughts, and I gave them up. It seemed a good notion to go to sleep, hut I didn't do it.

' Finally three soldiers found me, and putting half a shelter tent under me, carried me to the shade

After all, 'the small-bore rifle bullet of to-day is more merciful to the fighting man than the heavy spherical bone-crusher of the Napoleonic campaigns.

Dry Rot

Divorce is one of the surest marks of the moralLtiegeneracy of a people*. ' Divorce of any kind,' the late Mr. Gladstone pithily said, ' impairs the integrity of the family ; divorce with re-marriage destroys it root and branch.' This form of polygamy—' tandem polygamy,' it has been called— was fearfully prevalent in pagan Rome in the period of dry rot that preceded its decay and extinction. Then, as now, immorality increased as facilities for divorce were enlarged, and the world was presented with the spectacle of the ' best society ' breaking the most sacred domestic ties in a wholesale way, and on the most frivolous pretexts*— or on none at all. Paulus Aemi'lius, for instance, assigned no reason but this for putting away his lawful wife : ' My shoes are new and well made, but no one knows where they pinch me. Juvenal tells of v woman who had eight hMsbands in five years ; Martial records the case of another flighty matron who had arrived at her tenth husband ; and St. Jerome, in his second epistle, declares that there was in Rome a female creature who had married her twenty-third husband, she herself being liis twenty-first wife !

Other countries, New Zealand included, are fast following the evil example of pagan Rome. The extension of the grounds of divorce under our Act of 1 599 has already about doubled the number of decrees for dissolution of marriage in New Zealand. Modern divorce I'aws induce the pernicious belief that Christian marriage is not a contract for life, but a mere civil contract, terminable at any fame that the passion or caprice of either party may determine. Under siuch a system the obligations "of the marriage bond are sure to be treated with heartless levity ; public and domestic morality is sure to Suffer ; scandals wi'l become more and more frequent ; and disintegration of home ties and national degeneracy will be the result of the civil legislature arrogating 'to "itself a right which it does not possess— of severing a life-long bond that G»d has joined together. Facile divorce is now, asi it was in pagan Rome, a perpetual incentive to matri-

monial quarrels. Samuel Butler says of ill-aJssorted coXiples who seek by divorce to flee from ills ' of their own procuring ' :— 1 As spiders never seek the fly, But leave him, of himself, t'apply ; So men are by themselves employ'd To quit the freedom they enjoy'd, And run their necks into a noose, They'd break 'em after, to 'get loose. As some, whom death would not depart, Have done the feat themselves, by art.'

The number of divorces from the marriage bond in New Zealand is, however, still small in comparison with the returns presented by the mostly pagan nation over which wave the Stars and Stripes. A short time ago the following cable message appeared in the daily newspapers of New Zealand :— ' There were half a million cases of divorce in America during the last twenty years, or double those for the whole of Europe. Many Churches, in denouncing these divorces, declare that they are equivalent to progressive polygamy.'

The Catholic Church, at least, was not one of t/hlose that minced matters by using the word ' equivalent ' in the connection set forth above. American legislatures look with serene calm upon this great national scandal, while they crack their cheeks denouncing the relatively petty polygamy of the Mormon, who— as 'Mr. Dooley ' says— merely does « what a good many others are restrained fr'm doin' be conscientious scruples an' the polis.' But the cabled news given above is by no means fresh. Over two months ago, Mr. John V. Finley, a Cleveland justice of the peace, said in a speech to the students of St. Ignatius' College : ' In the last twenty years 500,000 divorces have been granted in the United States, and 1,500,000 children have become homeless on account of the separation of husbands and wives. In Cuyahoga County there are three divorces to every five marriages.' Many of those unions axe probably not really true marriages, but mere temporary

' Bargains at a venture made Between two partners in a trade '

somewihat after the principle of the one-day marriage that was set forth Mn the curious English misprint ol 1554, which made the woman say : ' I N. take thee N. for my wedded husband, to have and to hold for this day.' (' From this day,' was, of course, intended ; but compositors were mere fallible 'mortals then, as they are in our epoch of linotypes and monolines). 'For forty years,' said President Hopkins of Williams College latc'y, ' crime has increased (in America) five times as fast as population. The proportion of divorces to marriages is astonishing and f.ickening not only in the newest States, but in the oldest Commonwealths. Disintegration, decadence, and often destruction of the family and lowering of the ideal of the home go on unceasingly ; and bade of it all is a vast and swelling volume of dishonesty, unchastity, and crime. 1 This is the evil legacy that secular education has given to 1 America— besides leaving over 50,000,000 of its population churchless.

Look at that picture and then look at this : ' Ibe Giolitti Ministry in Italy has withdrawn its divorce Bill in deference to the overwhelming sentiment against the proposed law. . . The number of divorces for the year 1901 ,was only one to every 10,000 families in Italy. The percentage in Spain and Portugal is equally low, wihich shows 'ttoat those three nations, regarded with so much contempt by Englishmen and Americans, are sotunder "at the core than those which seem to play a greater part in the world.'