Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXII, Issue 26, 30 June 1904, Page 1

Current Topics

The Age of Sham

A cable message from Melbourne, published in last Friday's daily papers, runs as follows :— ' Before the Butter Commisision an ex-Government expert gave evidence that up tio 1892, when the Government brand disappeared, large quantities of New Zealand butter were irrtported into Victoria. The witness continued : "It was an • infernally bad lot. He had never passed any ; somei may have gone to England. He also believed that margarine was at times introduced - info milled butter and sent Home in order to earn a bonus." ' As to the New - Zealand butter of 1893 — let that pass, for we haVe mlbyed fast and far since then, and in our commercial history twelve years agone are a worM away. But the ' ex-Goverinment expert ' expressed, in his owoi way, his belief that tracers beydnd the Tasman Sea have leairned and taken to heart some at least of the arts that ha,ve combined to make our time The Age of Sham. The worst sins of our age— in the material order— are to be laid to the charge of the very science that has, perhaips, suspassed all others in the marvellous extent and perfection of its achievements. We refer to the science of chemistry. Over twenty years ago, when margarine (then called butterine) was placed u'poji the maarket, it was a flabby, greasy, sickly-looking compound of animal fat and oil that looked as if it had seqn trouble. Cunning British ajnd American vendors colored the pallid taring and sold it to the poor as butter, till the Governmeiit stepped in and .maide the heartless frauti too risky. ♦ Nowadays the chemist has got his finger deep into tjie pie and perfected a non-injurious margarine that wiojuld almost deceive the elect. This ' last woid ' of tjhle margarine trade has been said at Swift's biig h,ogsticking establishment in "Chicago. Here is how the author of ' America at Wotk ' describes it : • Then there was the dairy, where butterine or margarine is made from beef fats. This was another great biusineste te itself. Men drtove spades into the butterrne— made actually of 40 per ceJnt. oleo oil, some cotton-seed oil, and tihe rjest milk?— and seat it flying down a shoot, when men seized handfuls, threw it to a mafchine that turned out two-pound pats and dropped the piats before girls, wftSo wrapped them neatly. All 'butterine stold in Illinois State must be labelled as such, and being in the

main white, makers have to pay a 10 per cent, duty if tliey add coloring matter to make it look like real butter. Swift's I found very cock-a-hoop with themselves, for they had discovered a means by which, without using coloring matter, they could obtain a ricjh yellow tint, and so provide their customers with something that looked like butter. And the look of a thing counts far more in America than it does in any other civilised eojumtry.' Sanded sugar and wooden nutmegs represent crude and clumsy modes of adulteration. The manufacturing chemist of our day has fallen into, evil courses ajnd has bent all his skill to the adulteration of foodstuffs—especially those of a perishable kind— with all siorts of injurious substances. In our issjue of January 14 we gave a lengthy catalogue of the variegated forms assumed by this muirderous kind of cheating. Tn this resipeet the commercial life of o)ur day is saturated with fraud. Adulterating manufacturers, no djoubt, contrive to benid their intfiarubber consciences to their dealing. But ' The Ten Commandments will not buidge, And stealing still continues stealing.' % It is, relatively, a small matter that the ' vigneron ' can now prodiuce ' the good Rhine wine" without the aid of the grape, and that a chemical Willie can produce Hielan' whusky and Burton ale without the trdWble of brewing a pe'dk o' m'a'ut. - Rut dietetic fraWds in the necessaries or comforts of life are, no doubt,- largely responsible for the heavy mortality of childhood arid fojr muqh of the disease and malaise of adult age. The adulterator is spoiling, in part, the benefits that the public should derive from our ever T widening knowledge of hygienic laws. And the sooner . the better, our lawmakers and police set themselves . to effectively convince every brand of food and drug adulterator ttiat honesty is tflie best policy as well as the best morality. * -.'

The French Persecution

How many people in New Zealand are aware that coestablishment exists in France for two sects of Protestajnits and for the Jews, as well as for the Catholic Ohurch ? But the reason and mode- of establishment differ. The 'slender stipends paM to the CatWolic rishops and clergy are a small compensation t!o .the Church, agreed upon T>y the solemn treaty kn'owln as the Qomcordat, for the whosesale plunder of her property du'rioig the rdd regime of the Great Revolution. The grants to Jews and Protestants 'are p.ucely an act of grace. The other point of "difference is this : ttoat the Stale salaries accorded to these are, proportionately,

far more substantial than the generally miserable pittances doled out so grudgingly to the Catholic clergy and withdrawn on all sorts of capricious pretexts! /I he French Protestants,' says Ilamertwi, a nan-Catho-lic English writer (in his ' French and English ') ' form a little world apart, which (except, perhaps, in the most Piotcstont districts, and they are of small extent) appeals to be O ui*ide the tuaxcat of W,e national hf, Just as in England, you may l,ve in the upper clas.es for a lifetime without having once been mside a diss. nter s house, or seen < a dissenter eat, so in France aristocratic people go from the cradle to t<he g,a\e without having seen the inside of an "evangelical " home' The wholesale dismissals of practising Catholics from the public service, under the Combes tyranny has, however, resulted in the introduction of vastly disproportionate numbers of Protestants into State employments ; and the active countenance and supnort given by some of their political leaders to the present regime of heartless persecution has aroused some feehnagainst the Reformed creeds in France M Vnatole Leroy Beaulieu referred to this feeling in the couise ot a recent lecture at Harvard University (United Stales, Hut (says the ' S 11. Review') he declared that the most clear-sighted French Prot<*lants weue opposed to this Avar feeling that anti-clericalism attached not alone Catholicity but Christianity and all religion Protestants or Catholics and Christians of every denomination ically have the same adversary in agnovticism and materialism M. Beaulieti asserted, and they muM not forget that they have the same Christ and the same Gospel The American Protestant editors who u M oice in the triumph of M. Combes any his followers would d 0d 0 wel (says our Boston contemporary) to pay attention to these significant words of M. Beaulieu '

' Smashing' the Bible

The Reformers began their work by making the Bible a fetish. Their spiritual descendants, dencal and lay-«omctimes ycleped ' higher critics '-have ended by making !t a foothall, and aie trying to kick it tb rags and tatters as fast as they (an. At a iccent merlins of the American Bible League in Phil add pin a, tdie Re\° Dr. R R Booth, a former Moderator oi the Piesbyteritlfe General Assembly, described in the follow, no c.uitiid terms the havoc which a false, stipcifnial, ami unscientific scholarship is woikin-R amcrtip, some of Ihe non-Cathohc clergy m our day l Foi nineteen rentmies,' .said he, 'the Christian Church has been the Ohurcli persecuted ami the Church militant, and why we must fight treason in our midst Men are using their positions in our pulpits and chairs of learning to disseminate treason. Church collections, salanes, and endowments are used to support those w;ho spread heresy. A minister in this city, as prominent as any in the land, reads his Apostles' Creed : " Jesus Christ, Who, they say, was born of the Virgin Mary," a^d " Whh they say, was raised from the dead iaftor the third day." No worider men find excuse for easy virtue when ministers ordained of Gad insert " they say" into the Creed' 1 But tjiere are, perhaps, worse foes to the Sacred Word than tho.se who are its avowed enemies. And among them we must "ount those who, professing belief in the truths of Christianity, are ever ready (as our Bishops declared in their recent rejoinder) to surrender those truths at the bidding of ' supposed social convenience or political expediency.' Among this class are the ' higher oritics ' of the Bible-in-schools Conference. The story of the Creation and the grand central fact of tiie Christian Faith— the Incarnation of the Son of God— stood in the way of their compromises aj>d artificial arrangements So they were ripped out and flung over the fence vhere they could not offend the eyes of the school-dhild Could compromise go farther ? To Catholics, this is an outrage upon the integrity of the Sacred Narrative. And tftils free use of the butcher's knife and the bras en boot-

tjoe on the Sacred Volume shows how real and much needed is the Church's office of guardianship of God's Written Revelation. The Church existed and flourished before the Bible, as we know it, was written. She still remains its divinely appointed guardian, interpreter, and protector. ' Luther, Calvin, and the rest of the I' Reformers," ' says the Buffalo ' CatJhiolic Union,' ' l-uud tv mu«uli the Church with the Bible. And now the grand old Church has to step in and prevent their mfidelised followers from smashing the Bible, by proclaiming it to be largely made up of fables. What irony of fate ' ' * Those who have lately been talking so glibly in New Zealand about ' Rome and the Bible ' owe it .k> ' Ro/me ' that they have a Bible at all. ' For the sacred writings, ' says Charles Butler (a Protestant writer, in his ' Irorae Biblicae,' pp. 35-30), ' which contain the Word of Gwl, and for the traditions of the wise and good ras'pecling it, we fere almost wholly indebted under Providence, to the xeal and exertions of the priests and monks of the Church of Rome, during the "Middle \ges. • ■ • Copjing the Bible was a task of infinite pains and perseverance, to which (for gain was out of the question) nothing but the conscientious and unwearied industry of a religious copyist was equal." Nowadays a Catholic can purchase a New Testament for a few peov-e He can, for two or three shillings, become the owner of a bound volume containing all the Inspired Writings of both tihe Old and the New Testament. Rut it was not always thus. Before Catholic brains and hands invented tihe art of printing with movable type, a Bible was an expensive luxury. Every word of its 35,879 verses had to be copied with minute and toilful care. When the long and afoxious task was completed, the written characters covered 12,783 folios. These were of parchment, for paper was little known fn Burcrfpe before the days of Gutenberg arid his primitive little printing press. The monk-scribe's work ' used up ' 427 slkins of parchment-t'he cost of which at t!he present day (as estimated by Mr. L. Buckingham) would be £85 while (■he copymg, in the usual engrossing hand, would amount to the tidy little sum of £133 for wages atone This would lepresent a first-cost price of £218 for a sinelc manuscript copy of the Bible. Very few of our critics would, we opine, be the happy owners of a copy of the Written Word ,f they had to part witjh over £200 for lie luxury And it is one of the glories of the Cath•>lk' (Munch that, through the pious labor of her monks •die v.is able, before, the days of the printing press and f'hoap paper, to widely circulate the Sacred Writings under circumstances of such enormous difficulty. • Many of our readers may 'have come across Mr W IT. Mallock's bodk, ' Doctrine anti Doctrinal Disruption ' It was published four years ago, and its authoiv-a well known writer— is a keen and shrewd observer of the religious life of our day. Ue points out that the adherents of the Reformed creeds believe in the Biblewhose preservation they owe to the labors of the monks , but (he acids, p. 76) ' -until they can tell us definitely, coherently, and fully on what foundation's Hheir belief and their interpretations of the Bible rast all the emphasis they expend in asserting their rivai doctrines is as meaningless as the crowing of cocks in a farmyard.' Two pa,ges further on he says (p. 78) : ' The Church of Rome, when asksd on what ferjoujids we are to believe in the Bible, and by what means, believing it, we are to discriminate its true .meaning, answers us that these grounds arid means are the Roman Church itself, which is an ever-living and ever-infallible teacher, the same Church to-day as it was on the day of Pente^ co&t , and which, though it speaks officially at distant intervals only, sfo speaks, when it dbes speak, in a manner which all can recognise, thus progressively defining the faith, as successive definitions become nec€»s>sary.' And this principle, which is the basis of the intellectual life of the Church, Mr. Mallock declares (p. 143) to le 1 logical, effective, and complete.'