Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, 28 July 1910, Page 1171

Current Topics

More Work for Mr. Morel We have many times drawn attention to the element of humbug and hypocrisy present in the anti-Congo agitation conducted by Mr. Morel, and the Congo Reform Association, inasmuch as occurrences just as serious as those charged against the Congo are continually happening in territories under British influence or control, and these gentlemen utter not a word of censure or condemnation. Two fresh and rather striking instances of the sort of thing of which we complain have recently been recorded. In our daily papers of May 31 the following brief cable appeared: * Sir Edward Grey is communicating with the United States in view of alleged ill-treatment of Putumayo Valley Indians by the Peruvian Amazon Rubber Company.’ The message was quite a mild one: no mention of ‘ atrocities ’nothing but ‘ alleged ill-treatment ’ —and nothing to indicate that the company named was a British company. Exchanges now to hand, however, give somewhat fuller particulars, which throw a very clear light on the situation. According to the statement in Home papers, ‘ correspondence has been published between the Aborigines’ Protection Society and Sir Edward Grey. The former wrote, on May 11, that nothing in the Congo equalled the horror of some of the acts alleged to have taken place in connection with enforced rubber collection by a British syndicate at Putumayo, in the Amazon Valley. The evidence was too revolting to be published. Sir Edward Grey, replying on May 19, says the question is engaging most serious attention, and the Government is communicating with the United States regarding the course to be pursued.’ These atrocities have apparently been going on for some, considerable time, but Mr. Morel had eyes only for the Congo. * The second instance is furnished by the British Protectorate of Southern Nigeria. We have already given in this column the official statistics showing the enormous amount of gin which is allowed to enter that unhappy country but the bare figures give not even a faint idea of the demoralisation and degradation which results. At the annual meeting in London on May 6 of the United Committee for the Prevention of the Demoralisation of the Native Races by the Liquor Traffic, Sir John Kennaway complained that the report of the Committee of Inquiry into the sale of strong drink in Southern Nigeria does not adequately represent the havoc wrought by the liquor trade amongst the natives. Upon the motion of the. Rev. Dr. Scott Lidgett, a resolution was passed, calling attention to the growth of gin-drinking in Southern Nigeria; the payment of fines in gin in six courts of the Brass district; the common use of gin as currency; the drunken orgies at festivals, plays, and funeral processions; and the custom of pawning children for gin. Well may the Catholic Times remark: ‘ Here, surely, is a case for the use by Mr, Morel of vehement language. The Congo which he has been watching so intently for years has never been reduced to this degraded state. There is no gin currency there, and the natives do not pawn their children in order to procure that intoxicating liquor. How is it that the condition of Southern Nigeria has escaped the vigilance of Mr. Morel and his fellow Reformers, and that their energies are dormant whilst the natives are suffering this fearful wrong ?’ The Church and Modernism A lady correspondent writes asking us to explain the attitude of the Church towards the Modernist movement, chiefly for the benefit of several non-Catholic residents in her district who are ‘earnest readers of the Tablet. The subject is a big one, and was thoroughly threshed out Some three years ago on the occasion of the publication of the Holy Father’s famous Encyclical on the question. It will probably suffice, therefore, for our correspondent’s purpose, if we give a brief, concise statement terms as plain and simple as possible, seeing that it is intended, not for theologians, but for ordinary lay folk. What is Modernism? At bottom, Modernism is simply a form of Agnosticism, the essential difference between Modernists of the Rev. R. J. Campbell type, and ‘ Modernists ’ like Huxley, Tyndall, Ingersoll, and McCabe, being that the latter have carried the agnostic principle to its full and logical conclusion. The root principle of Modernism is the limitation of the sphere of reason to the phenomena presented to our senses. According to the Modernists, we are only capable of knowing natural phenomenai.e., things that , appear—and in the manner in which they appear. We can know only what we perceive—what we see, hear, taste, smell, touch. Beyond these we cannot go. These things are visible facts, and, according to Modernism, they are the .only facts. The inner meaning lies behind them are unable to penetrate. Modernism admits that

beyond there is a vast realm—of reality, possibly, and of ruth but it declares that it is unknowable.

. If , we apply this principle to one or two cardinal docrinen on which Catholics and orthodox Protestants are appiiy agreed we shall get a clearer and more definite idea of the Modernist position. (1) Historic Christianity tells us that God made us, and that we know this truth with certainty because God has revealed it to the human race, speaking by His prophets and by His Son. Modernism says: You cannot know with certainty that God has made you, because you cannot go beyond the facts of vour experience in science and history. You have never‘had any scientific experience of God and if there are any historical records that seem to tell you about God, they are not, strictly speaking, true. The most that can be said is that in your heart you will find an aching need of something that you cannot find in all nature and this religious feeling, reaching out beyond the boundaries of science and history into the region of the Unknowable, unites itself to «°r • But even this religious sense cannot tell you whether God is the Creator of the world or not— whether you are His handiwork or not.’ (2) Historic Christianity says that Jesus Christ is God the Son, made man for us. Modernism tells us that there are two Christs. It says that the real Christ, the historic person, was a man like any other man. Since he was but a man, nothing that he said or did could rise above the human. Any revelations of supernatural truth said to have been made by him, and any stones of miracles wrought by him, are pure myths. They did not happen, because they could not happen. But (continues this incoherent theory) by the exercise of the religious sense or religious feeling before mentioned we have come to read into Christ’s character certain qualities' and powers—which, historically, were never there—and this histoncally-fictitious character Modernism will allow us to believe in under the designation of ‘ the Christ of faith.’ lo the plain man all this seems to be the merest foolery and jugglery with words; and so, in truth, it is. The essential point, for our present purpose, is that Modernism absolutely rejects the divinity of Christ in the sense in which ordinary Christians have always believed it. (3) Historic Christianity has always accepted the Scriptures as the inspired Word of God, and as therefore infallibly true. According to Modernism, however, the Bible is an entirely fallible book. The great. facts related in the Gospels—the Incarnation, Resurrection, Ascension, etc, —are not histoncally true. The divinity, of Jesus Christ cannot be established by an appeal to the Scriptures, for they themselves are inaccurate and historically false. Thus, under Modernist principles, the very foundations of Christianity are undermined. God is expressed in terms of mere religious feeling or pious sentiment Jesus of Nazareth stands out as a man like ourselves and no more and the Bible becomes a purely human record, in which the truth has been overlaid by vast accretions of myth and legend. * The principles and teachings of Modernism being thus both directly and indirectly in opposition to the teaching of Christianity, the Catholic Church, as the guardian of revelation and custodian of divine truth, could not do other than officially condemn it.. The Holy Father at first tried to reclaim the leading Modernists from their error by persuasion and admonition. But these proving unavailing, his Holiness issued (September 8, 1907) : the Encyclical Pascendi G-veQis, in which the whole Modernist heresy was definitely and finally condemned. The beneficial effect produced by the Encyclical has been remarkable. For its defence of Revelation, of Christ, and of the Bible, it was received with cordial approbation even in many non-Catholic quarters. Catholics have even greater reason to thank God for the timely pronouncement. As a result of the condemnation, several Modernist papers have had to cease publication; and within the fold of the Church, in a space of less than three years, this dangerous and insidious movement may be said to have been. completely killed. One or two other matters referred to by our correspondent will receive attention as soon as a suitable opportunity offers. Some Exploded Theories As we mentioned last week, it would not be difficult to compile a tolerably lengthy list of fanciful conceits and absurd hypotheses that have been, at one time or other, pawned off upon an unsuspecting public as absolute and proven truths which it were folly to question and crime to deny, A knowledge of the elements of logic would often save investigators into natural science from putting forward manifest absurdities as matters of scientific faith. Geologists and biologists, too, have hitherto been far too prone to fancy that their respective sciences could settle offhand questions which can be determined only by mathe- . matics and history. Lord Kelvin, Farge, Professor Tait Professor George H. Darwin (of the Cambridge University)’

have jointly and severally riddled the assumptions of Haeckel and others as to the countless boohs — ‘ milliards of thousands of years’which, they say, have elapsed since the days of the ‘ primitive primivity ’ when the first living creature crawled upon the globe. Huxley’s ‘ bathybius ’ —Nature’s ‘ grand store of protoplasm ’ — was to have solved the great puzzle of life upon this planet. Haeckel called it ‘the main support of the modern theory of evolution.’ But the ‘ bathybius ’ was also exploded and sent to its place after a brief existenceit was merely a harmless tit of inert and lifeless sulphate of lime. And the scientific world had a hearty laugh at what Mivart nicknamed • Huxley’s sea-mare’s nest.’ Spontaneous generation went the' same road. * It was a fundamental article of pseudoscientific faith once upon a time. But now there is obody outside the walls of a lunatic asylum so poor in intellect as to do it reverence. And who among biologists would now stand by Darwin’s once fashionable theory as to the exploits of natural selection and sexual selection? It, too, has received its quietus. » ’Another fantastic hypothesis built by geologists upon trifles light as air is the amazing antiquity of man upon the earth. The question is, of course, one that is to be settled by history and not by geology. Yet sundry geologists took the matter in hands, pressed their science beyond its legitimate boundaries, and drew the strangest and most unwarrantable conclusions from facts but partially or imperfectly or incorrectly observed. They argued left, they argued right, They also argued round about them, and displayed all the amazing credulity and the unscientific behaviour of the dilettante who enters upon an investigation with a preconceived notion which says : ‘ Taut pis pour les faits ’ —so much the worse for the facts I M. de Mortillet, for instance, discovers a few flint flakes in Spain and Portugal, and forthwith jumps to the conclusion that man has been a million years roaming over the face of this decrepit earth of ours. But Virchow and Evans and others proved conclusively that they were shaped, not by human hands, but by natual causes (solar heat, accidental percussion, etc.). A similar, though numerically milder, deduction was made from a single bone found in a cave in England. But the bone , turned out to be that of a bear, and not of a man! It reminds one of the * extremely rare ’ animal built up by Brown of Calaveras from a lot of fossil bones’ when ‘Jones then asked the chair for a suspension of the rules, Till he could prove that those same bones were one of his lost mules.’ In 1857 the now famous ‘ Neanderthal skull ’ was exhumed near Dusseldorf. It set the scientific world agog. A learned professor (Fuhlrott) wrote a learned book proving that the original owner of this venerable relic of primitive man must have been * gallivanting ’ over the surface of the earth 200,000 or 300,000 years ago. Finally, Dr. Mayer of Bonn came upon the scene, examined the ‘ fossil,’ and discovered that it was the cranium of a Cossack who had been killed in the Napoleonic campaign in 1814. ** ■ - The Calaveras skull, discovered some thirty years ago, was another ‘ striking proof ’of the antiquity of man. So said the text books. But the true story of the skull shows that it was (as a later investigation showed) a striking proof of the depravity, of Western humor.’ A storekeeper Angel's Camp’ runs the story— ‘having found an old Indian skull, buried it privately, as a joke, in the goldbearing gravel at the bottom of a shaft. Appalled by the success of his hoax, he never told anyone but a clergyman friend who now tells the world.’ Bret Harte’s geological address to that famous skull, about the time of its discovery, is well known. He made a shrewd guess at the real facts of the case when he wrote: Or has the professor slightly antedated By some thousand years thy advent on this planet Giving thee an air that’s somewhat better fitted . For cold-blooded creatures? - *«• In the concluding stanza the ‘pliocene’ skull is made to say: ‘Which my name is Bowers, and my crust was busted ailing down a shaft in Calaveras:County; But I’d take it kindly if you’d send the pieces Home to old Missouri!’

Here the poet saw nearer the truth than ' the pseudoscientific spinners of fantastic theories. , *

The Church and Slavery One of the wildest and weirdest of the statements against the Church made by our recent rationalist visitor was to the effect that ‘ slavery had existed for centuries in Europe without the Church so much as lifting a voice against it.’ To give even a brief summary of the work done by the Church in ameliorating the condition of the slaves, in ransoming those in servitude, and in inculcating and enforcing principles which ultimately did away with slavery altogether, would take more space than we have available: and for the present we content ourselves with quoting definite and specific instances in which the Church has raised her voice, strongly and strenuously, against this inhuman institution. As every reader of history knows, Mr. McCabe’s statement is utterly and hopelessly at loggerheads with the facts; and historic Christianity in other words, the Catholic Churchjustly claims the abolition of slavery as one of her greatest and most enduring triumphs. Right down the centuries both Councils and Popes have condemned and legislated against slavery. Here are a few typical utterances taken from the canons of various Councils. The third canon of the Council of Lyons, held about 566, excommunicates those who unjustly retain free persons in slavery. In the seventeenth canon of the Council of Rheims, held in 625, it is forbidden under the same penalty to pursue free persons in order to reduce them to slavery. In the twenty-seventh canon of the Council of London, held in 1102, the barbarous custom of dealing in men, like animals, is condemned as nefarium negotium — ‘ a detestable traffic’—and is strictly proscribed. In the seventh canon of the Council of Coblentz, held in 922, he who takes away a Christian to sell him is declared guilty of homicide—a remarkable declaration in which liberty is valued at as high a price as life itself. Arid a French Council, held about 616 at Boneuil, provided for the unfortunate who had been reduced to slavery, a sure means of quitting his unhappy condition. By virtue of an ancient law, one who had fallen into slavery—of which misfortune the poverty of the individual was a frequent cause —could not recover his liberty without the consent of his master, the idea being that the slave was, solely and merely, a piece of property. The Church, however, took a different view—if the slave was still in her eyes a property, he did not cease to be a man. At the Council mentioned it was expressly ordained that persons who had been sold by necessity should be able to return to their former condition by restoring the price which they had received. When we remember the zeal with which so many Christians devoted themselves to the work of ransoming the slaves, and the further fact that the property of the Church was always considered as well employed when it was used for the succor of these unfortunates, we shall understand the beneficent and far-reaching influence of this important regulation. Coming to our own times, in the historic contest in America on the question of slavery the Catholic Church ranged herself definitely on the side of abolition.

In addition to the work done by the Councils of the Church, the intervention of the Popes was even more frequently exercised for the purpose of checking and suppressing this degrading traffic. We quote only from one single Papal document—partly because that document is in itself an exceedingly memorable one, and partly because it contains an interesting summary of the action taken by several other occupants of the Holy See. .. The document is the famous Bull of Gregory XVI. In Supremo Apostolatus Fastigio published at Rome, November 3, 1839, expressly against the slave-trade. The following quotation alone is, of itself, an ample refutation of the McCabe calumny. His Holiness writes:—‘Raised to the supreme degree of the apostolical dignity, and filling, although without any merit on our part, the place of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who, by the excess of His charity, has deigned to become man, and die for the redemption of the world we consider that it belongs to our pastoral solicitude to exert all our efforts to prevent Christians from engaging in the trade in blacks or any other men, whoever they may be. . .. Thanks to the benefit of faith working by charity, things advanced so far that for many centuries there have been no slaves among the greater part of Christian nations. Yet (we say it with profound sorrow) men have since been found, even among Christians, who, shamefully, blinded by thedesire of sordid gain, have not hesitated to reduce into' slavery, in distant countries, Indiansnegroes, and other unfortunate races; or to assist in this scandalous crime, by instituting and organising a traffic in these unfortunate beings, who had been loaded with chains by others. A great number of the Roman Pontiffs, our predecessors of glorious memory, have not forgotten to stigmatise, throughout the extent of their jurisdiction, the conduct of these men as injurious to their salvation, and disgraceful to the Christian name; for they clearly saw that it was one of the causes which tended most powerfully to make infidel nations continue in their hatred to the true religion.’

His Holiness then summarises various of the Papal utterances. 1 This was the object of the apostolical letters of Paul 111., of the 29th of May, 1537, addressed to the Cardinal Archbishop of Toledo, under the ring of the fisherman, and other letters much more copious, of Urban VIII., of the 22nd of April, 1639, addressed to the collector of the rights of the Apostolic Chamber in Portugal—letters in which the most severe censures are cast upon those who venture to reduce the inhabitants of the East or "West Indies into slavery, buy, sell, give, or exchange them, separate them from their wives and children,, strip them of their property, take or send them into strange places, or deprive them of their liberty in any way; to retain them in slavery; or aid, counsel, succor, or favor those who do these things under any color or pretence whatever; or preach or teach that this is lawful, and, in fine, co-operate therewith in any way whatever. Benedict XIV. has since confirmed and renewed these pontifical ordinances before mentioned by new apostolical letters to the Bishops of Brazil and some other countries, dated the 20th of December, 1741, by means of which he calls forth the solicitude of the Bishops for the same purpose. A long time before another of our more ancient predecessors, Pius 11., whose pontificate saw the empire of the Portuguese extended in Guinea and in the country of the blacks, addressed letters, dated the 7th of October, 1482, to the Bishop of Ruvo, who was ready to depart for those countries: in these letters he -did not confine himself to giving to this prelate the means requisite for exercising the sacred ministry in those countries with the greatest fruit, but he took occasion very severely to blame the conduct of those. who reduced the neophytes into slavery. Finally, in our days, Pius VII., animated by the same spirit of charity and religion as his predecessors, zealously interposed his good offices with men of authority for the entire abolition of the slave trade among Christians.’ At one period of his career, at least, Mr. McCabe must have known something of Church history; and when —in the face of the foregoing weighty, comprehensive, and official utteranceshe asserts that the Church did not so much as raise its voice against slavery this ‘ apostle of culture ’ stands convicted of wilful and deliberate perversion of the truth.