The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 1907. INFANT LIFE PROTECTION

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXV, Issue 37, 12 September 1907, Page 21

The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 1907. INFANT LIFE PROTECTION

s2§gj& • " §HE Roman iruatron Cornelia regarded numerous and healthy, children as the jewels of the home. The true .statesman looks upon them as the treasures o£ the nation. 1 Religion and patriotism alike commend the broad features of the effort which our Parliament is now making to stem the wastage of infant life in a period of.- .moral decadence and race suicide when every child is a valuable asset to the nation that is. to rise, above decrepitude to strength and safety. Our day has witnessed one of those recurrent and passing reversions to pagan >domestic ideals that usually characterise periods -of weakened religious .faith".- The neo-pagans cf the eighteenth " century made marriage a mere arrangement, reintroduced divorce, deprived " child-life of 'some of its most sacred . safeguards, and whipped Sisters of Charity through the streets of Paris. The pagans of the" French \Revolution have left numerous issue. For instance, in a medical work published a few yeai's ago in New Zealand, somie of the most conspicuous forms 'of charity to weakling children and the poor are treated as crimes against our nation and our race. And have not several infidtel American professors within the past three .years pub-_ licly advocated treating idiots, -imbeciles, and deficient children as advanced municipal corporations treat ownerless and wandering dogs, .with the sure but quiet euthanasia of choke-damp and the lethal chamber ? - • Allowing for differences of time and the restraining influence of the Christian atmosphere in our civilisation, the proposed euthanasia, and the widespread race-sui-

cide and infant-ldestructiqn of. our time » represent a spirit 'even more callous than that which led Agamemnon, Marius," Laceha, and Demetria'to slay their children • with . their own hands, and made, inhuman moth-" ers look on with dry eyes - while, their offspring were scourged to death before the '« statues of Diana. For in those evil times, law and. .social usage permitted those things, whereas in ours v the slaughter of the innocents is a crime against bjoth . law and Christian feeling and the known canons of . the ' moral law. ' It ' is?'-a' sin against the higher light. Plato and Aristotle, Solon, and Lycurgius, permitted— as in certain circumstances even enjoined— the" slaying of helpless innocents. And (says Lecky in his ' European Morals ') ' the" power of life and death, which in Rome was originally 'coii--ceded to -the father over his children, would appear tb^ involve an unlimited permission of infanticide.' True' humanity came in with the Church. She wrought a revolution in the old-time pagan ideals, placed a guard around the cradle, raised woman to her proper sphere of dignity in the. home, taught the world to regard the weak and. the poor and the suffering as representatives of" Christ, and -made the love of Him, t and the love of - man for - His dear sake, the principle of charity* - From the very dawn of Christianity, ;she gathered orphaned and exposed- children- into -homes. 'Her! beneficent work for the little waifs and strays and helpless and abandoned" children received a new - arid noble impulse when St. Vincent de Paul arose. The entire movement of charity in the- heart o c f the Church displays - all through history, says Lecky, •an anxiety not only for the life, but also for the - -moral -wellbeing, of the castaways of society, such as the most humane nations of antiquity had never readied.'" Women amd children, . and the poor, weak, diseased, and" .afr flictod 1 , may, well sing a paean -of thanksgiving- to Him who came to wipe away the tears from' the eyes' of those that mourn, and to lift the world out. . of the inhumanity to which the neo-pagans of our day would in part throw" it back, once more. '