Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXVII, Issue 22, 3 June 1909, Page 849

Current Topics

Marion Crawford The last words of the great novelist convert, Marion Crawford, were : ' I enter serenely into eternity ' ; ' 1 die with Christ.' He was (says the Boston Pilot) ' a prodigious worker. The output of his pen for the past few years has been simply phenomenal. He chose a home iii one of the most beautiful spots of the world, overlooking the Bay of Naples, and there he led an active literary career that for intensity has scarcely heen surpassed even in this day of strenuous and feverish writing.' Calumny ' A man's reputation,' says Hazlitt in his Characteristics, 'is not in his own keeping, but lies at the mercy of the profligacy of others. Calumny requires no proof.' Its principal agents are the unconscionable or featherwitted gabblers who ' had it on good authority ' and pass it on to their gossips, just as the pickpocket passes the stolen watch or ' wipe ' to his ' pals ' in a crowd. How many pause to think that, in this matter, the receiver may be as bad as the thief? It was Sancho Panza who cautioned his neighbors not to spread ' at random, hab-nab, higgledy-piggledy,' whatever you hear, or whatever ' comes into your noddle.' Sydney Fog and Other Fogs A cable message from Sydney (N.S.W.) in Monday's daily papers deponeth as follows : ' There was a record fog last night, the city and harbor being enveloped from 10 p.m. till 10 o'clock this morning. Shipping traffic was at a standstill, and late visitors to the city and those down the harbor were unable to reach their homes. Many passengers on the Manly boats camped aboard all night.' ■ A fellow-feeling makes us wondrous kind. And a 1 fellow ' feeling his way, as best he may, through Sydney's little ' record fog ' can. sympathise with the people who have periodically to sit or grope in the shadows of fogs of great ' meteorological renown, such as those that blot out the landscape in Oregon, Nova Scotia, and California, or that which, in London, comes ' ' Creeping down The bridges, till the houses' walls Seem changed to shadows, and St. Paul's Looms like a bubble o'er the town.' Fog-swept Sydney can patch its passing grief over its motionless water-craft, with the thought that it might have been worse. A twelve hours' fog in the capital of the Mother State cost, probably, little worse than passing inconvenience to sundry passengers compelled to ' camp aboard all night ' under genial skies. An eight-hours' fog in London — one of the business-like kind — may cost the city anything from £50,000 to £100,000, even though it may not reach the bewildering density of what is known as the ' cotton-wool ' fog. ' Out West ' in America, they have, of course, the gold-medallists of all the fogs — the ' lick-creation ' fogs, even though these do not find a record in the meteorological fog-charts. There was, for instance, the fog described by a veracious chronicler who had to get three of his farm-hands to push him through it. And there was that other fog — solid as hay — on which the hens sat and laid their eggs. And yet another was so thick that wicked little boys made fog-balls of it and pelted them at passers-by. There are r evidently big possibilities in fog-dom. And Sydney may be thankful that it did not get a sample of those (tap-room) fogs from ' out West.' * Liberty' in France Every false pretence is the unwilling tribute which tho coward or the sinner or the tyrant pays to the good and true. Nearly every ' wrong inflicted in private or in public life has its native hideousness hidden by -some shibboleth-mask, some verbal false pretence — by some ' good, varchous raison,' as " Mr. Dooley ' puts it. ' The lion,' says Newman, ' rends his prey and gives no reason ; but man cannot persecute without assigning to himself a reason for his act. His very moral constitution forbids contentment with mere brute force.' The French persecution of religion is, most curiously of all, based upon' the transparent falsehood of ' liberty.' But it is liberty of the Cromwelliaii type-^-the sort of liberty which (as Carlyle remarks in his Past and Present) ' requires new definitions.' ' We are so used to fair play,' recently said the Rev. F. C. Kelley, of Chicago, after a sojourn in France, 'so satisfied with our kind of separation of Church and State,

and so free to be good without hindrance from the secular authority, that we do not exist elsewhere, and especially in France, which' so long has been considered a Catholic country. If I must explain the situation, I would say that in France to-day there is no basis, politically or religiously, foranything else tha.n oppression. Now, there may be a radical change to-morrow, but there will be confusion always. France is not a republic. It is an autocracy as strong as that in Russia, except that it represents the collective tyranny of the radical majority instead of a single ruler. It is too easy in France to take away the rights and liberties of those who disagree with tho ruling power. The law to-day protects spoliation aud robbery. The Government and its dependent officials vote and count the votes. I may be wrong, but I feel that things strange and terrible are in 'the air. Here property rights are violated and religion persecuted, and hero Cabinet Ministers are insulted in the streets. The Government trembles before striking functionaries, and finally retreats. Men talk of barricades and revolutions and of a republic which shall be run by trade unions composed of people who have no Christ. What more do you wanb? Months must see a change or the years — not more than five, perhaps — surely will see the end.' Power of the Catholic School The preacher is, at his best, a seer as well as a teacher. Some part of the seer's gift seems to have fallen upon the Rev. Frank De Witt Talmage, the great Presbyterian preacher of Philadelphia. And, like Amasa Thornton and others, he has read aright one of the signs of these times that ' tint to-morrow with prophetic ray. 5 In the San Francisco Monitor of April 17, he is reported to havo spoken in part as follows regarding the future triumphs that the Catholic Church is to achieve through her greater prac» tical sense of the perils and the possibilities of child life, and her responsibilities in its regard. ' If,' said he, ' tho years which the child passes before he reaches his twelfth milestone are the most important years of the human life, what are you and I, as parents, doing for the physical and mental and moral and spiritual training of our little children? Most of us are willing to confess that our little children are not receiving at home the religious training which they should. How 1 " are they to get that training? In our Sunday schools? Most of the children do not go to Sunday school. Indeed, half an hour a week of Bible study will never make strong Christian men and women out of qur children. Now lam going to say something you may not agree with me in, and which will shock some of you here present. The only Church which is dealing with the spiritual development of her little children aright is the Catholic Church. The Catholic priest says, " Let me mould the child up to twelve years of age, and I care not who has the child after that." And,- mark me, on account of the parochial school, the Catholic Church is to become the universal or the conquering Church of America's future. And when I say this lam not attacking the Catholic Church. Mr. Beecher used to say that some people had "two requisities for heaven: First, do you believe in Christ? Second, do you hate the Catholics?" Like Mr. Beecher, lam no bigot. I would infinitely prefer one of my children to be a Catholic rather than to have him go to no church at all. Indeed, I would prefer one of my boys to be a good Catholic rather than a poor Presbyterian, although I would prefer to have my children' good Presbyterians than good anything else. But whether I like the Catholics or no, one fact is certain, the Catholics -train their children for the Church. The result: The Catholics are simply going ahead by leaps and bounds. The coming universal creed of this land is the Catholic creed, unless we as a Church have the brains of the Catholic priest and put the chief emphasis of our spiritual work into moulding our children under twelve years of age for God.' ' Well said, Brother Talmage ! Our Deaf and Dumb In a well-known passage of his Hyperion, Longfellow tells of how great value to our race is the voice, the organ of the soul. ' The intellect of man,' writes he, ' sits enthroned visibly upon his forehead and in his jeye, and the heart of man is written upon his countenance. ' But the soul reveals itself, in the voice only; as God revealed Himself to the prophet of old in the still,- small voice, and in the voice from the burning bush. The soul of man is audible, not visible. A sound alone betrays the flowing of the eternal fountain, invisible to man.' Though, not theologically exact, Longfellow's words broadly indicate the bitterness and the far-reaching character of the affliction that condemns sundry little ones in every country to voicelessness and the lack of power of hearing the sounds that fall from the mouths, of those among whom they live.

The great avenue of knowledge and of human communication is thus closed to our deaf and. dumb ; closed, too, and sealed is the gateway of voice by which they, may reveal their souls to others. And in a double isolation they are set upon a lone Molokai of silence, apart in mind and soul from their fellows, among whom they live in external social contact. The little toddling mite of two or three years old has a foundation of ideas solidly laid and conveyed in language by his mother and others. But no mother's accents reach the imprisoned soul of the deafmute. Ideas pass into his mind, nutter about in it like wild birds that stray in by open door or window, and then, perhaps, depart, leaving little impression of their visit. There is little power of comparing them, assimilating them, stamping them with the impress of the deafmute's own mind, making them his own property, and labelling and pigeon-holing them for future use. The process of impressing ideas upon him is a task of patience and gentleness and charity beyond all bounds. And, for Catholic deaf-mutes, this noble work is carried out with conspicuous success by the Sisters of St. Dominic in the great Institute at Waratah (New South Wales), to which more detailed reference is made in the present issue. It is, we may add, the only Catholic Institute of the kind in Australasia, and its expansive charity holds the door wide open for the deaf and voiceless children of our faith in all these southern lands. In the circular accompanying their annual report, the management of the Institute say : ' Though not made generally manifest, a system of proselytism is going steadily on within the Commonwealth, powerful and earnest allio3 in this work being only too numerous. Each State has not only its institution for children, with a numerous and highly paid staff, but it has also its adult mission, fully equipped with men and women, zealous in their endeavors to provide religious services specially adapted to the peculiar wants and dispositions of the deaf and dumb ; likewise libraries, clubs, social gatherings, etc., while comparatively very little or no effort is being made by Catholics for the benefit of their similarly afflicted co-religionists. In the Government Institution of New South Wales alone between twelve and twenty Catholic deaf and dumb children are being edxicated at the present time, in spite of our unremitting efforts, by the limited means at our command, to have them sent here. The hierarchy and clergy of tho United States of America are now taking up the cause of the Catholio deaf mutes in their districts more earnestly than before. They are alarmed at the lately-publishel statistics, which go to show that during the past 100 years 11,000 deaf mutes, baptised Catholics, have been lost to the Faith. It would be incorrect to say they had fallen away from the Church, for the Faith infused into their souls at baptism was never fostered or nurtured, and they simply joined the ranks of the Episcopalians and other sects to rwhose care they were committed for instruction. We have only too reliable authority for believing that if the number of Catholic children at present in the different State Institutions of Australasia could be collected, the figures would certainly run into three places. As a beginning towards remedying this evil, we have hopes that a general appeal in all our churches, not only for funds, but also to rouse the zeal, sympathy, and charity of the people in the cause of the Catholic education of these sadly-afflicted children, may bring about a more widelyspread knowledge of their many wants and privations.' * Nine years ago it was our privilege to witness an exhibition illustrative of the methods so successfully followed in the Waratah institute for opening the world n i knowledge — and above all of religious faith and practice — to the darkened minds and souls of the deaf and dumb. We may here quote the final paragraph from a lengthy description of what we then saw : ' Undoubtedly the most striking feature in this interesting exhibition of deafmute education was the teaching of articulate speech. A number of usual words were written upon a blackboard by a deaf-mute assistant teacher. A line of little deafmutes swung round in front of them with military precision and smartness, and one by one pronounced the words with what was, in the circumstances, wonderful accuracy. Some of the little voices were hard and metallic, and the syllables came like the snapping of successive caps; others were soft and plaintive; one spoke with a strong hiatus, and with effort, yet plainly, the difficult word " pinafore." But there was no mistaking the meaning of the, poor afflicted little ones. We looked , around and saw tears in many an eye; and we thought of Dr. Marigold [who patiently trained the deaf-mute in one of Dickens's Christmas tales] ; and before our fancy there rose up the scene in which the Tender One stood before a tomb in Bethany and wept over human sorrow even when He was about to relieve it; and we felt that we could share in the happy

tears of the afflicted parents who had left their deaf-mute child with the nuns at Waratah, and when they came to see their little dumb darling, she flung her loving arms about their necks, and addressed them and her brother .in fair human speech: "Papa," and "Mamma," and "Willie." Well, there be great things done for God and neighbor on this hoary old earth; but few things greater than this and all that it imports. And is it a matter of wonder that the New South Wales Commissioners had their breath taken away by the splendid charity that they saw at Waratah', that they testified to their admiration in a practical and substantial way, and that they recommended that every Catholic deaf-mute child in the colony should be placed under the charge of the daughters of St. Dominic ?'