The New Chivalry

New Zealand Tablet, 13 September 1906, Page 22

The New Chivalry

- The new crusade, organised by the 'Archbishop of Melbourne, is well timed. It is an order of modern Christian knigjits, organised, not to fight for the rescue of the% Holy Places of Palestine ironi Saracen • hands,, but for the defence of the holiest things of\ domestic and social life against' the onset of the hard and unselfish materialism of -our day.. "But the spirit is that of the crusaders of old, in the', glow of their best period. 'The Crusaders,' says the leafnr ed Protestantrhistorian, Dr. Stubbs, 'are not, in my 'mind, either the popular delusions that our cheap literature has determined them to be, nor papal con- ■- spiracies against kings and peoples, as they appear to the Protestant controversialist. . \ - They were 'the first great effort of mediaeval' life to go beyond-.' the pursuit of selfish and isolated - ambition ; they were the vtrial .feat of- the young -world" essaying to use,to the glory of God- and the benefit of man, the arms; of its new knighthood. . .That in. the end, they were a benefit to the^world, no one that reads , can doubt ;-~-and that in . their- course they broUghtout a loye* for all that is heroic in human nature— the lover of freedom, the honor of^prowess, . sympathy with perseverance to the last, and patient endurance without hope—the chronicles of "the

age abundantly prove ; proving, moreover, that- it was by the experience, of those times that the former of these virtues were realised and presented to posterity.' '"■-_■-