Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXIII, Issue 26, 29 June 1905, Page 1

Current Topics

Derailed Logic An esteemed religious weekly points out, in a recent issue, some deplorable instances of the ignorance of religious subjects displayed by certain pupils attending the State schools of New Zealand. It concluded therefrom that the Protestant version of the Bible should be taught by State officials, at the public expense, as a part of the curriculum of our State schools.

Now, thai conclusion is obviously not (as logicians say) contained in the premisses. It reminds us of a contention of Artemus Ward's. Tne Genial Showman had ne\er seen a toothless man beating the big drum in an orchestra or band. He therefore concluded, somewhat rashly, that a man wi Shout teeth could not ' welt ' a drum- at all. But up in Oregon he four.d that his logic and his experience were at loggerheads. ' I met a man in Oregon,' said Artemus, ' who hadm't any teeth — not a tooth in his head ; yet that man could play cm the bass drum better than any man I ever met.' We commend the experience to our valued contemporary. It has come across a series of cas.es in which trie family and the (non-CailhoHc) Churches have failed to do the work of religious instruction. It rather hastily concludes that they could not have performed that duty, and that it therefore becomes the business of the Government to take it up. But we, with the les-sons of long and direct experience before us, come to a quite different conclusion. It is this : The direct and obvious remedy is for the Churches that are at fault to wake up and do their duty— to the children by organised and sustained religious instruction, and to the negligent parents t>y arousing them to a sense of their tremendous responsibilities. A country clergyman once waited on Henry WarQ Beecher and asked him for a recipe far dealing with the bucolics who slept during his (the visitor s) sermons. ' When I first came to New Plymouth ohurch,' Ward Beecher replied, * I thought about this problem, and I will tell you the course I decided upon. I gave the sexton strict orders that if! he saw any person asleep in my congregation, he should go straight to the pulpit and wake up the minister.' The moral of this story is on the surface. What the Bible-in-schools clergy need is, first, waking up, and then a tonic to brace up their spiritual systems. Like pastor, like people. The people slees) at their post of, 'duty, just because their /pastors set 1 them the example of nid-nid-nodding. And, in any case, it

is no part of the Civil Government to turn housemother and to put on the white choker and teach either denominational or pan-denominational Protestantism, or to degrade Christianity to the level of a mere system of ethics,

A Grateful Country Our Home files record the passing of another gallant fellow that -took part in the wild Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava. The British and Colonial Public put Thomas Atkins and Paddy Atkips ana Sandy Atkins on o, pedestal and dance and sing around them— when the band begins to play and there's something harder than atmosphere in the air. But they commonly look the other way when Johnny comes marching homesometimes on a wooden leg. The latest Light Brigader passed out; like so many of his comrades, fn poverty. Oli Pugsley, in ' A Comedy of Lieutenants,' summed up the customary rewards of the linesman's bravery in these words : ' Two bullets in my -head, sir, one) in my neck, three months in the hospital, and a penny a day.' That was in Wellington's wars. Thomas Patrick Alexander Atkins's lot is not even yet a much happier one.

The Compensation Question Local Option, with compensation, has long been on the statute-book of Victoria— we mean the Victoria that is our neighbor across the Tasman Sea. In New Zealand feeling on such subjects reaches high temperatures. The question of compensation vs. non-compensation, w,hen it arises here (as it often does in the newspaper press), is commonly discussed with literary road-metal and with personalities that are as ' high ' as the eggs that have been ' held over ' since 1901. In Victoria, people are disposed to take these things more quietly, /to deal with them more upon their merits, and to ' argy them out as sich.' A deputation recently waited upon the State Premier in Melbourne, urging, among other things, ' a time-limit in lieu of the present monetary com^nslation ' which is given to hotel-keepers whose licenses are ca.nlcelled as the result of Local Option. It was stated that the League of the Cross would be represented upon the deputation. The Archbishop of Melbourne thereupon wrote to the local secular press : ' Individual members of the League may hold and express any views they please on the question ofi a time limit, but they do not tlhereby commit the League to any particular line of policy. For my part, I am strongly of opinion when the State encourages a man to invest his money and devote his life to the management of a hotel, and profits by

his doi% so* It sho|uld not deprive, him of hifc mdans of livelihood without giving him substantial pecuniary cony pensation. A short time limit is no equivalent for such compensation. Whether the whole amount of the compensation should come from the State, or whether a part shoulld be contributed by the hotels whose business is increased by the closing of others, is a question well worthy of the consiaeration of statesmen.'

Consumption Many years ago, while yef, a slender student, we explored full many a charming nook ol what are, perhaps, the most interesting provinces of France—Normandy and Brittany. We were partly in search of health, and partly (paradoxical as it may seem) upon the track of the many ' maladrenes ' or ' leproseries ' (leper-houses) that were dotted over those two fair provinces in the middle ages. In the neighborhood of Caen alone we, with the friendly aid of a local archaeologist, prowled around the ruins or the hare sites of some thirteen of those leper-homes, and in the famed old library ol Bayeux came across some of the quaint regulations of a bygone day for the detection and isolation of the hapless ones that were stricken with this ' most ancient and most human of all diseases.'

Leprosy long lay like a sullen pall of death over both Continental and insular Europe. Great colonies of its specific microbe settled in every country, and their burrowing industry mafle that ' living death ' as familiar, perhaps, as the consumption scourge is in our day. Yet hygiene has banished leprosy so effectually from among Caucasian peoples that to-day it is scarcely known among them exceut in Norway, and here and there in Iceland, Finland, New Brunswick, the West Indies^, and a few of the countries that are washed by the blue waters of the Mediterranean. Leprosy still has the strong and s&Vage grip of a Giant Blunaerbore upon the slant-eyed yellow man and the dusky Polynesian of Hawaii . But among white-skinned peoples the disease Is well in hand and dying out— chased to the outer fastnesses of habitation by the conquering march of Queen Hygeia. It is no longer the crowned king of terrors that It was once upon a time— in the days of the jmist and tourney, and of doctors of the school of old Sangrado. Some day— and there are, perhaps, tho^e already born of woman that may see that day—consumption may be banished in like manner to the wild and woolly places of the world. New Zealand has waked up and is taking a hand in the campaign. Last week Invercargill joined hands with Wellington and Christchurch and Wanganui. And so the good cause, like John Brown's soul, goes marching along. The open-a,ir treatment has extracted the poison of death from the shaft of tuberculosis. The man and woman seized by consumption need no knger order their coffins. But it is of prime importance to the country that the full curative treatment be placed, and in good time, within easy reach of every tubercular patient, ana" especially of the poor. And let our Health Department organise and continue a relentless campaign aga.inst the various modes by which the colonies of bacilli are spread around. Chief and most pestiferous among these is the spitting habit. Aulus Gellius tells of a place in ancient Rome where spitting was unlawful—' übi spuere non licebat.' The eye of the compound" microscope had not then pried out the secrets of minute life. But the law was a good one and deserves the flattery of extended imitation in our bacteriological day.

That ' Conscience Clause ' We have read somewhere of one of Nelson's officers who was so keen and wide awake that he could scent an ejnemy's dodge ten miles off. One does not need so much penetration — or, indeed, much sharpness of wit— to know that the so-called ' conscience clause ' of the Bible-in-school? leaders is merely a dodge to mislead the unwary voter as to the true character of the movement to introduce a Protestant version of an

emasculated Bible, on Protestant lines, into . the'public school curriculum of New Zealand. We have said full many a time that the proposed * conscience clause' would afford no protection either to teacher or pupils. In our editorial columns we have already pointed' out ihe open, wholesale, and deliberately prerintended proselytism of Catholic children that was carried out in the Irish National Schools under the ' safeguards ' of a ' conscience clause.' The revolt against using the public schools 'as an instrument of conversion ' (these are Archbishop Whateley's words) produced one interesting result : The Irish National system rapidly developed, in practice, into a scheme of separate schools for Catholics and Protestants. That movement has been steadily gaining ground ever since. In 1867, for instance, 39 per cent, of the Irish National Schools were used exclusively by Catholics or exclusively by Protestants. In 1881 the schools of unmixed religion had risen to 44.9 per cent, of the total ; in 1887 to 50.6 per cent. ; in 1831 to 54.3 per cent. ; and so'onwards in a regiulajly progressive increase till, in 1900 (the last date for which weihave returns 'before us). 6,4.4 per cent, (over 64 in every 100) of the National schools in Ireland were absolutely ' unmixed,' while an overwhelming percentage of the remainder were practically ' unmixed.' The man who runs may read the lesson.

In this connection we may quote the following passage from the first Manifesto of our Bishops on the Bible-in-sohools scheme :—: — (2) 'At least one State of the Australian Cony monwealth— namely, Victoria— furnishes (as the late Royal Commission's report abundantly shows) plentiful evidence of the flagrant manner in wnicn the religious rights of minorities may be violated with impunity in public schools, aespite the provisions of Acts of Parliament and the pretended protection of this form of conscience clause. (3) E\en the scrupulous observance of an ideal conscience clause by teachers would still leave Catholic children exposed to a serious measure of moral pressure or compulsion to remain for Protestannt religious instruction— namely, to the jeers and insults of their companions and to the other forms of social martyrdom which ohildren know so well how to inflict on those whom they deem foreign to their modes of thought and action. Catholic pui'ils in State schools would, in a word, be placed between these two alternatives — proselytism, or penalties to which no children should be exposed.'

Here is a timely comment on the latter portion of che quotation just given. It is from an article by a Canadian Protestant journalist, Mr. E. W. Thomson, of Ottawa, in the ' New Freeman,' of St. John's, New Brunswick, Mr. Thomson is speaking from personal experience when he refers to ' that " you be d d " air ' with which Catholic children are treated in many of the public schools of Canada. He says :— ' In many a Canadian public school some boys of the creed majority are sure to apply foul taunts to those of the creed minority. No supervision by teachers can prevent this. The vilified boys seldom tell. They may retort in kind, or fight, or keep silence, for fear of worse .happening to them later. I well remember Catholic boys at several public scnools of my youth being taunted as " Dogans," " Papists," compelled to hear the Mass reviled, insulted in every way conceivable by young savages of the hostile persuasion. The young savages were not irretrie^ ably bad, they were merely boys untrammelled by so much civilisation as some few boys obtain early. Sometimes they were promptly " swatted " by other boys of their own faith, generous spirits who happened to be fond of one or more of the boys or girls assailed Oftener the evil example was imitated, and wholly unrebuked. This sort of thing breeds some personal and creed hatreds that last as long as life.' The same evil tendency has manifested itself time and again in these younger lands, and our Bishops were speaking 'by the book when they told of ' the jeers and insults '" and ' the other forms of social martyrdom ' to which Catholic children woulld be subjected in public schools if they were to be turned into sectarian institutions.