The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, DECEMBER 27, 1906. THE PASSING YEAR

New Zealand Tablet, 27 December 1906, Page 21

The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, DECEMBER 27, 1906. THE PASSING YEAR

tN a few days the curtain, will , drop, upon 1906. The year lias been in many respects a memorable one. In the field of religion and politics it has . been scored more or less Nj«f/PF deeply with sundry events — some of merely naf&L&f tional, some o£ international importance. F.or Xr>&P*) New Zealand, the event of the year has been **^ ' the passing of the late Premier ,-~Mr. -~{Soddon. 'There's hope,' says Hamlet, .'a' great man's?, t- emory may outlive his life half a year.' Nowadays, the public memory, like Fuller's purse, is so overcrowded that even big events easily drop out through its gaping mouth. The late Premier has, in a degree^ suffered the fate that befalls great men who live in strenuous and fast-moving limes. But as one who affected his generation, his name, is sure to live. The rugged greatness of the mountain range is not to be mentally grasped from the foot of its highest .peak, but from -the distant plain below. In an analogous way great men suffer, especially in days of crowded incident like ours, from the" foreshortening effect of the nearer standpoint,- and are set in their right'perspective only by the distant view. For New Zealand Catholics, another Incident of the dying year was the admitted collapse of the - Bible : in-schools .agitation. From its inception, the movement was like the disease called the calenture, which sometimes seizes sailors in the tropics, disturbs .their, imagination,- sets them mooning and dreaming of distant and longed-for scenes

— J but leaves them with flabby muscles and folded arms, * incapable of action. Phelps.will, have it -that DonJt Care came to a good end — ' at any rate,' says he, 'it came to some end.' The movement to , capture the public schools for: sectarian, purposes .came to the end that it deserved- And few there be that shed a . tear -„ or placed a wieath upon its grave. For, the normally constituted man would rather sit idly watching the rye-grass grow than be a party to an agitationthat for a generation limited- itself to words,' words, words,, and never allowed its energy to follow the normal path of discharge, Catholics are 'not in tlAs matter stricken with a moral calenture, and the year that is passing ' afay in the ewigkeit ' has been singularly fruitful in effort and sacrifice for the little ones of Christ's flock on this far-out rim of tfoeworld.

The American Continent has supplied us_ with the chief sensations of the year— earthquakes that ta,ke rank among the great. ones. of.. history, and ..the .crying scandals that focussed the eyes of the x world for a brief and shuddering period upon the methods ' of. the meat-packing- trusts of Chicago. . FQ>r ' Catholics, the most noted and melancholy feature of the year's brief history in Australia has been the injection of a spirit of vehement no-Popery fanaticism into the" political life of some of the States of the Commonweal th. m The effort to drive Catholics and tolerant Protestants out of public life has, however, happily failed, and the dream of anti-Catholic ascendancy remains — and, we trust, will ever , remain— the dream of the babbling -child that wanted the moon to play with and the stars to run away with. In Great Britain the long and bitter onslaught on Christian- eduoation has,- for the time at least,- failed ; and a measure of self-govern-ment promises an early ending of- the long misrule that sends the population fleeing from Ireland to this hour as from a blighted and pestilence-stricken land. In France the Lodge has, m Lhis closing month -of the year, placed the Chuich with her back to the wall to fight for her corporate existence in that unhappy country. The war against Christianity is being conducted there by 'a ring of aggressive atheists. As coarse and fierce and intolerant as the Tudor s, they have as little knowledge of the ' liberty ' and ' equality ' of which they mouth in the tribune and on the platform, as they have of the fourth dimension. The poet says that , «

' The man of abject soul in vain Shall -walk the Marathonian plain ; Or thrid the shadowy gloom That still invests the guardian pass Where stood, sublime, Lconidas, Devoted to the tomb.' To the small-souled mlers of the Third Republic the noble devotion and selfrsacrifice of tens of thousands of ' iunsalaried religious to the children and ' the sicft and

suffering poor made no more appeal than would the plain of Marathon to the pimple-headed globe-trotter.

On the contrary, such devotion was made a form of ~ high treason to a ' Republic that it is now proposed to make, like ils intoleranb rulers, atheistic root and hraiich. 'We must,' said Minister BJiand at" Amiens, --' get rid of Chris Lianily.' Bat "God fulfils Himself in many ways.' One of -these is" the Way of the- Cross. The Church in France is treading it with bleeding" feet to-day. If all things - ended -

1 Here upon tiAs bank and shoal of time '

she might compromise on faith or principle with ' her crucifiers. But she has chosen the only ' possible course open to her and faced the sacrifice. We await the issue with confidence that with her, as with her

Master and Exemplar, the Way of the Cross will be _the way to the victor's crown.