The Demon Mirror

New Zealand Tablet, 4 October 1906, Page 10

The Demon Mirror

~ln one of his fairy tales; Hans Andersen tells the' story of a mirror-habgoblin-^or rather demon, for he was one of the- worst. 6f his , class. Once upon a time this demon made a looking-glass ' whioh . had the power of making everything good or beautiful that was reflected in it shrink almost to nothing, while everything that was worthless and bad looked increased in size and worse than. ever. It made the most beautiful landscapes look like boiled spinach , it made the people appear to be hideous monsters, without bodies, and standing on distorted heads ; it made the smallest freckle look as if it were a cancer spread all over the fape. The demon kept a school. Those who frequented it waxed enthusiastic over the distorted mirror. 'Now,' said 'they, 'we can see what the world and mankind are really like.' They walkod up and down the earth, till there was not a land or a people that had not been looked at through t/he demon's lying mirror. 'T<hen, like Alexander, they sighed for other worlds to conquer. So up they flew to see the angels of God in the goblin's glass. ' But the higher they flew the more slippery the glass became,' and they could scarcely- hold it, till at last it slipped from their hands, fell to the earth, and was broken into millions of pieces.' But things then became worse than ever. The fragments flew all over the world. Some were large enough to turn into ■ window-panes ; others were made into spectacles. But, most of them were mere atoms. These floated about in the atmosphere. Many of them got into people's eyes, ' and from that moment they saw everything through a distorted medium, or could see only the worst side of what they looked at ; for even the smallest fragment retained the same power which had ■belonged to the whole mirror.,. Sometimes a bit of the demon glass worked its way to the heart, which then ' became cold like a lump of ice '. People who looked through pane, or spectacles, or atom of the bewitched glass could see nothing as it really was. Everything was distorted. And at all this the wicked demon • laughed till his sides shook— it tickled him so to see the mischief he had done '.

The obsessed atoms are still flying in our atmosphere. Some of them have taken lodgings in the eyes and hearts of certain over-eager Orange clerics beyond the Tasman Sea, to whom reference is made in a preceding paragraph and in our -news columns. Even without the demon glass, these poor men's evil yellow eyes would look with suspicion and hate upon God made Man if they caught Him smiling- approval at a work of charity, however noble, if done for His dear love and in His sacred Name by a little Catholic Sister who gave up all to follow Him. But with the hard fragment of ' yellow • prejudice to still further distort their vision, the wicked hobgoblin in whose school they have learned the ungentle art of misjudgment and hate, has made them perform strange and fantastic tricks indeed before "high heaven. For he has added a new refinement of diablerie to his demon glass : he does not merely make it appear to diminish good and magnify evil ; but he even makes sweet charity—' the noblest of the blessed three '—appear to be tyranny, .persecution, cruelty, and all manner of abomination. It is as when the evil ogre of the fairy tale turns the beautiful young princess into a hideous toad or a deformed and loathsome poison-snake. Our news columns contain a wholly satisfying exposure of the latest of the long series of attempts to blacken the reputation of our noblest institutes of charity in Australia. Happily, the vast body of the public have not got fragments of the yellow demon mirror in their eyes. They can see normally. The work of.exposure has thus been in -every case complete, not alone as to the question of fact, -but also as regards its acceptance by the public. And now at last it seems as if the law is to step in and -shake salt on the yellow ' tale '. That is, after all, the most efiec-

tive way of dealing with this unchristian and unmanly clerical campaign of vilification of women whose soleoffending Is the : faith they profess and the good^ they do for Christ's sweet sake, without earthly fee or reward. Envy of such noble self-sacrifice is far easier than imitation. And rough-tongued calumny of the fee-faw-fum order seems rather a roundabout way for min-' isters of the Lord to lead their flocks to heaven by.-

Such methods, however, overreach themselves. No cause but Satan's is served by the methods of Hans Andersen's wicked goblin. And the prompt and deadly exposures of the calumnies of the little knot of Orange clergy have already produced a healthy reaction in Australia and added to t'be laurels of the pious and noble-hearted women whose good name the evil tales were invented to tarnish. Kin-gsley— himself a devourer of ' Rome '—tells in his ' Miscellanies,' vol i, pp. 235=6, how Protestantism is injured and ' Popery ' bene* fited by the tactics of the ' yellow plague ' :—

The time, we think, for calling Popery ill names is past. . .- The truth is, Protestantism may well cry : "• Save me from my friends ! "- We have attacked Kome. too often on shallow grounds, and, finding our arguments weak, have found it necessary to overstate them. We have got angry and caught up the first weapon which came to our hand, and have only cut our own fingers. . . We have been too proud to make ourselves acquainted with the very tenets which we exposed, and have made a merit of reading no Popish books «>ut such as we were sure would give us a handle for attack,, and not even then without the precaution of getting into a safe passion beforehand. V\e have dealt in exaggerations, in special pleadings, in vile and reckless imputation of motive, in suppressions of all palliating facts. We have outraged the common feelings of humanity by remaining blind to the virtues of noble and holy men, because they were Papists, as if a good deed was not good in Italy as well as in England. We have talked as if God had doomed to hopeless vileness in this world, and reprobation in the next, millions of Christian people, simply because they were 'born of Romish, and not of Protestant, mothers. And we have our reward : we have tared like the old woman who would not tell 'her children what a well was, for fear they should fall into one. We see educated and pious Englishmen joining the Romish communion ... and we have no talisman wherewith to disenchant them. Our medicines produce no effect on them, and all we can do is like quacks, to increase the dose. Of course, if ten 'boxes of Morrison s Pills have killed a man, it only proves that he ought to have taken twelve of them We arc lesting, but, as an Ulster Orangeman would say "it is in gocd Protestant earnest." '

We commend these words to the ' yellow ' clergy who conduct this unmanly and deplorable campaign against women. If they paste this extract of Kingley's inside the crown of their hats, it may possibly serve as a talisman to eject the ogre's vitrified yellow prejudice from their eyes, and enable them to see normally and judge like rational beings.