Rejoicing in Evil

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXV, Issue 51, 19 December 1907, Page 9

Rejoicing in Evil

Religious passion has neither a head to think nor a heart to feel. Normal Christian thought and feeling find little satisfaction in the proscription, plunder, and persecution of the faith in France by the forces of aggressive official atheism in excelsis. Not so a nonCatholic religious organ which the publishers (in Melbourne) have sent to us ' free ', in the hope that some of its contents ' may be deemed worthy of space in (our) columns ', and ' not without interest to (our) readers '. This religious periodical takes little account of the blow that has been dealt at the more or less moribund Reformed creeds in France ; it has, apparently, only eyes to see, with satisfaction, the disabilities that have been inflicted on ' Romanism ' under the Third' Republic. It recks not of "wounds inflicted on its own spiritual kith and Irin, so long .as ' Romanism ' hasbeen hit by the same discharge of atheistic grape-shot. We are reminded of thecholeric old English farmer who saw a flock of rooks following his son's plough over the lea, and picking up the pink earth-worms that wrig-gled in the fresh-turned sod. The farmer., to whomi the rooks were *a pet aversion, seized his old musket, fired at the blue-black birds, and lodged a dozen pellets in. the legs of his son. Down fell the wounded youth. ' Oh, feyther ', exclaimed he as the musketeer drew near, ' didn't you see me ? ' ' Yes ', said the old man, ' I saw ye well enough ; but d'ye think I was a-goin' to miss the chance at the rooks ? ' The No-Popery feeling will not ' miss the chance at the rooks ', even though" its volley of 'bard, unsympathetic, hot-shot words wounds its own kin. Professing Christians, at least, ought to be above the hardness and lack of feeling which (with La Rochefoucauld) finds in neighbors' trials a something that is not altogether displeasing. But worse still is the feeling which indecently rejoices in the burning down of a neighbor's home, just because it affords a cheap opportunity cf airing one's sectarian linen or roasting one's sectarian." apples.