Notes

New Zealand Tablet, 3 December 1908, Page 22

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A Christmas Gilt To those who are cudgelling their brains to discover the most suitable Christmas gift for the Catholic relative, friend, or home, we commend a year's subscription to the New Zealand ' Tablet. It will serve as a tonic to the faith and fervor of the Catholic reader from New Year's Day to St. Sylvester's. HI Temper Father Hull, S.J., of the Bombay Examiner, has just been writing, in his usual illuminating way, on the subject of bad temper. He touches upon its various causes and manifestations in an eminently practical and sensible manner. One part of our brilliant contemporary's articles on the subject recalls to our minds the fact that the eminent English physician, Sir Lauder Brunton, preaches a doctrine that will, no doubt, be consoling to many — namely, that ill-temper is very often the result of disordered nerves, and that it can be, to a considerable extent, kept within reasonable bounds by the judicious doses of the proper medicines. When such cases came under his notice, Sir Lauder prescribes what he terms ' temper powders. ' These consist of doses of bicarbonate of potash with bromide of potassium, and (according to his prescription) they are to be taken when something happens to create what Mel. B. Spur used to call an * erratable temperature ' in the owner of the aforesaid disordered nerves. We have had no direct personal experience of Sir Lauder Brunton 's ' temper pill's.' But we are informed that these substitutes for ' soothing syrup ' are a relief to the 4 patient '—and probably a still greater relief to the c patient's * friends. Religion in the School ' Comparing ourselves,' recently said Cardinal Gibbons, of Baltimore (United States), ' with the Canadians, where religion enters the schoolrooms, . we have to hide our faces when told of our thousands and tens of thousands of divorces annually granted in the United States, whereas divorce is scarcely known in much of Canada. More exactly, taking an average of divorces granted in the United States and Canada during twenty years prior to 1886, in the United States 10,000 were annually granted, whereas in Canada only six.' And again in the same discourse : ' Catholics pay faithfully their share of this [the cost of the public school system], and yet over and above that they by themselves for conscience sake pay annually for the schooling, schools, books, etc., for 1,300,000 American Catholic children, whom they teach without any cost to the State. And what ■would that amount to according to the State's cost of operating schools in New York, as given above? As each child costs the

State of New York nearly 39 dollars annually, and as Catholics school 1,300,000 children free of" cost to the country, Catholics annually save the United States over 50,000,000 dollars. In other terms, they present our Government each year five battleships of the Dreadnought class.' ' The bearings of this observation lies in the application on it.' The 'little flock' of Catholics in New Zealand save the country some annually by the work that they do for J;he great cause of the Christian education of youth.' Reunion When the migrant swallows of a familiar poem returned, after a long absence, from the blue skies of Libya to their nests under the pleasant English eaves, a change they found there and many a change — faces and footsteps and all things strange. Greater still would be the changes which a home-comer would now find, after fifty years of absence, in the feeling of Established English Protestantism towards the Old Faith of Britain. The Oxford Movement wrought the greater part of the transformation. And the Oxford Movement is still far from being a spent force. And time's gentle anodyne, administered with its soothing hand, has eliminated most of the bitterness of the olden controversy and brought about rapprochements, at a hundred points, towards Catholic doctrine and ritual that, in other times would have led many a clergyman of the Establishment on hurdles to Tower Hill. It is, for instance, refreshing to find the Anglican bishops of the recent Lambeth Conference urging all members of their communion to ' take pains to study the doctrines and position of those who are separated from it,' ' to promote a cordial mutual understanding,' and to encourage ' private meetings of ministers and laymen of different Christian bodies for common study, discussion, and prayer.' A circular, now before us, has been issued by the Auckland Clergy Association, in furtherance of the above-quoted resolution of the Lambeth Conference. The following resolution was unanimously carried : — ' That, deeply conscious of the dangers of our unhappy divisions, which so seriously delay and obstruct the coming of Christ's Kingdom on earth, this meeting of the clergy of the Diocese of Auckland invites all Christian ministers in the Auckland Diocese to a Conference with a view to the formation of a Christian United Society, which shall afford to all who join it opportunities for common prayer, mutual study, and frank discussion of our differences. 1 ' Everywhere,' say the members of the Association in the course of a plea for unity, ' we see an overlapping of agencies, stupidly wasteful of both money and men, and a mutual distrust, the fruit of mutual ignorance. While the forces of our common Lord are too often waging fratricidal warfare, the forces opposed to vs — drink, gambling, impurity, complacent materialism, selfishness of individuals and of classes — are only too closely allied.' 'Too long,' add they, ' have we been afraid of the phantom looming through the fogs of prejudice.' Catholics, serene in the possession of the unity of their old and world-wide faith, welcome every effort on the part of their separated brethren to return to the unity which was rent by some of the nations of northern Europe during the religious revolution of the sixteenth century. It is pleasant to sec the clergy of the Reformed creeds uniting to undo this evil work of the Reformation.