Our Aerial 'Scareships ' Atheism v. Religion in France

New Zealand Tablet, 12 August 1909, Page 1250

Our Aerial ' Scareships '

Atheism v. Religion in France

You can create a scare, as you can create a calumny, out of a trifle light as air. And the recent German scare in England found a curious echo in New Zealand, in connection with trifles still lighter than air — sundry hoax fir?- , balloons, to wit, that have lately been sailing through our midnight skies, and phantom ' airships ' (one of them manned by Teutons) that have been cavorting through the airy imaginations of half -awake and timid (or tipsy) people and of the practical jokers who, like the poor, are always with us. These periodical spasms of scare and ' nerves ' to which various countries are subject are the results of the modern ' peaceful ' international commerce which Cobden dreamed would cement the peoples of the world together. Instead, it has produced a disturbing effect. Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia, America, Japan, have all swarmed over their racial and national boundaries, in a fevered struggle for foreign markets, annexing territories here, creating spheres of influence there, going perilously near a world-war in a scramble for supremacy in the Far East, piling Ossas upon. Eelions of expenditure on navies, and evoking — over the sale^-of pots and pans and cotton nightcaps — a spirit of rivalry,' of suspicion, and of mutual hate which (as a recent author has well declared) ' throws civilisation back to the barbaric age.' We are indeed back to the menagerie theory of national life, and to the gospel of Force in its most repulsive form. Nevertheless, there are sundry things which England may well learn as the lesson of the recent scare. Some of them were set forth in a recent number of the Fortnightly Beview. ' More ditinctly,' it says, 'from the Continental events of the last few weeks than from our own naval crisis, we have learned that the one solid and overmastering fact of its kind in Europe is the fact of German preponderance. Nothing else on the Continent can compare for a moment with the combined massiveness and efficiency of German organisation ; and unless we can learn in time to imitate the mental and practical thoroughness of that great people, we shall give place in empire and in trade, as well as in sea power, to an abler and more virile race, seizing our prizes from us by the same relative energy which enabled us to wrest them from others.' « Germany's secret is organisation, education, concentration, a patriotism which burns with a flame akin to that of religious devotion, and -which has been cultivated to a point of intense and -self-sacrificing enthusiasm. Among the Great Powers there seems to be nothing quite on a par with the German patriotism of our time. Even in the Fatherland it has, perhaps, never been surpassed since the days When, in 1813, young Theodore Korner stirred the souls -of his countrymen to emancipate- themselves from a foreign yoke, and in his bivouac hut on the battlefield of Slecknitz, penned the spirit-stirring ode which moves the hearts of Germans to this hour. A translation of a single stanza will suffice to illustrate its spirit : * The land is roused, the stcrm breaks loose — What traitor hand no^' shrinks from use? Shame on the pale-faced wretch who cow'rs In chimney-nooks and .damsels' bow'rs; Shame on thee, craven, recreant sot! Our German maidens greet thee not; ( Our German carols joy thee not; Our German wine inspires thee not. On in the van ! Man to man ! Whoe'er a faulchion's hilt can span!'

The war of official atheism on religion in France goes on apace. As before, the vast horde of 962,000 public functionaries — whatever their conscientious convictions may be — know full well that attendance at any -sort of religious service spells certain dismissal. Quite lately (as we learn from Mr. Richard Davey in the liondon Tablet of June 26) the Minister of Marine ordered all religious emblems (prayerbooks, crucifixes, rosaries, etc.) to be taken from the men of the navy. No religious picture or emblem of any kind may be exhibited in the streets or on the wayside. A pretty little picture of the Annunciation — used for advertising purposes by a firm of artificial flower makers at Nice — was duly ' suppressed' by law and the manufacturers were ordered forthwith to remove it from railway stations and.other public places. The picture of Christ or of the ever Blessed Virgin — 'our tainted nature's solitary boast/, as a Bro>» testant poet styles her — is anathema maranatha- to 1 the French atheistic rulers. But (says Mr. Richard Davey, who knows France like a book, and whose article we are in small part summarising) 'an abominable figure of a nude woman, blatant, vulgar, and demoralising (it advertises some soap or other) is tolerated everywhere. It would therefore appear that, whilst a Catholic may not affix an image of the. Savior, or of the Virgin Mother, or of any saint, to the corner of his house, anyone who chooses may put up a picture so obscene that (as a writer in the Echo de Paris recently remarked) " it would scandalise a hippopotamus,'* for nothing could exceed the insidiousness of many of tho big advertisements exhibited at the present time all over France.' * When the pagan Roman Emperor Severus lay dying, he commended his two sons to the protection of the lawyer Papinianus, who shone among the men of his time for his eloquence and his integrity. The two sons (Caracalla and Geta) were made joint emperors of Rome after their father's death. But the ambitious Cafacalla had the life hacked • out of his brother and reigned alone. The murderer desired Papinianus to extenuate the foul deed of blood to the senate and the people of Rome. ' No, sir,' replied Papinianus, ' it is easier to commit a fratricide [murder of a brother J than to justify it.' Whereupon Caracalla had the head of his incorruptible guardian lopped off. The reply of the brave old lawyer might — with only a change to indicate the .nature of the crime — be applied ,to the latest effort of M. fßriand to justify the persecution, plunder, and expulsion of the' religious Orders from the hospitals and schools of France. It was easier to perpetrate than to extenuate "this high crime of French atheism dressed in a little brief authority. 'As to the nursing Orders,' says Mr. Davey in the article already quoted, ' the state of confusion in the hospitals is quite indescribable, and in a vast number of thfem the authorities have been obliged to expel the hastily summoned and quite incapable lay nurses and to implore the nuns whom they had recently turned away to return at once, "if only out of charity for the sick." Thus the Sisters have all returned to the hospitals at Lyons, Vichy, Nevers, Nice, St. Raphael, Brest, Cherbourg, and other places, and it is said they will soon be restored to most of the military and naval hospitals at Toulon, where the secular nurses have been found to be not only incapable, but drunken and immoral. The fact is, that in France tho nursing and teaching professions have been so long in the hands of the religious, that the average French layman or woman has never considered teaching or nursing as ' a profession worth entering. Thus the recruiting of teachers and nurses has, since the removal of the monks and nuns, become very difficult and the supply, ever since the secularisation, has continued to he below the demand. " I cannot see," said the other day to me a French gentleman' wht> is by no means a pious Catholic, "why on earth the-, Gpvern-_ ment wanted to trouble about them at all. They did^their work fairly well — at least, as well as the secular nurses who have succeeded them — and, after all, a Government which reaps an immense tax from authorised congregations of bad women (maisons de tolerance [houses of ill fame]) is not in a position to suppress houses of prayer and education, which evidently satisfied the parents and guardians of generations of children entrusted to the nuns." ' * It is, presumably, no mere coincidence, that a grave increase in juvenile crime and vice has rapidly followed the suppression of religion in the schools of France. The problem has recently been made the subject of a work by M. Duprat entitled La Criminalite dans V Adolescence., Somuch we learn from. America of June 26. The author shows'" that, in 1890, the number of criminals of sixteen to twenty years old was one-sixth of the total adult criminals. „ It is now one-fifth. ' And yet there is a steady decline in the ' proportion of these young people in the population— in 1900' there were, for instance, 4,045,000 young men of sixteen

to twenty years old; in 1905 their number had dropped to only 3,250,000. 'It must be added,' says the author, 'that the prosecution of youthful criminals is very frequently omitted in France. As a rule, persons of that age are not punished before they have been caught ten — nay, fifteen — times by the police.' In connection with this subject we might briefly refer to the testimony given by a correspondent, who writes from Osaka (Japan) in regard to the demoralisation produced in the Land of the Rising Sun )>y the materialistic teaching of the Imperial University of Tokyo. ' For these thirty years,' he writes, 'it has not ceased forcing materialism upon the nation. But the bitter fruits of the system have already begun to appear: widespread discontent, rampant corruption, dire despair; as testified by nine thousand suicides a year and innumerable scandals that unceasingly turn up in the world of politics, business, and education. Frightened by the evils of their own work, the Japanese statesmen seem to have come to admit tacitly that religion of some kind is, after all, perhaps, not so very antagonistic to education, at least for the common people, and that a certain dose of it might prove more effectual than materialism in curbing the wild passions of the human heart.'