Warning Wisdom

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXVII, Issue 15, 15 April 1909, Page 569

Warning Wisdom

; Don Quixote took lightly the blunt and friendly warnings, which his esquire and friend, Sancho Panza, gave him about the windmills of Montiel. So the Knight of the .Rueful Countenance set his lance in rest and went full tilt at the solid Avails and the whirling sails, and got mauled almost to death for his folly. «Full many a time did wise and foreseeing counsellors warn the authorities of the Church in France that they were leaving themselves without defence in the coming religious crisis by their failure to oppose to the anti-religious, press of the country a strong and able, and patriotic and aggressive Catholic press, and by their policy ,6f. v restiitg' > content with 'the.' puny local efforts of -pitiful, half-starved, ; nerveless, spineless, little diocesan Semaines lieligieuses devoid of both power or pence or influence. THe lesson of this blunder is, for the- fortieth time, rubbed in by a second edition of a timely and spirited - little work 'by Paul Bar bier, ■ L'Eglise de France et les Catholiques Frangais, which has just been published by Lethielleux, of .Paris. Every ono now realises that the lot of the Church in France might have been different if the clergy of, all ranks in that country ,had,~ like their confreres beyond the Rhine, sunk, r in 'the formation of a bold, virile, and able religious press, a good percentage of the millions expended on churches and colleges.that have .been now seized and plundered and sold by the' aggressive atheist rulers of the Third Republic. They are now endeavoring, under sore difficulties, to do what might, ten to thirty years ago, have been done with comparative ease. History has a trick, of ' repeating itself. And the history of the French persecution contains,' in this as in other respects, warnings which we in these countries cannot afford either to forget or^ to ignore. It is pleasant to see the star of hope shining through the" gloom of persecution. ' There are now,' Bays M. Barbier, ~' fewer . routine Catholics, fewer hypocrites, titan in any former , period. There are fewer egoists, fewer co-wardly spirits, , fewer half -believers, fewer formalists, for yhom religion ; was only an attitude or a pose. All this is a sign, not; of retrogression^ but of progress. Let the French clergy and laity march forward hand in hand to coming- battles ; , they will conquer.' So may it bel -