Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, 2 January 1913, Page 21

Current Topics

The New Year At the beginning of a New Year, our thoughts naturally, stray towards the past. There must always be a touch of sadness in such a retrospect, as we compare our dwindling age with the undying youth of Nature. ‘ The golden shimmer and the fragrance and the fruitfulness are all there,’ but we cannot call back ‘the tender grace of a day that is done,’ and our capacity of enjoyment gradually grows less. Then too ‘ Tears from the depth of some divine despair Rise in the heart and gather to the eyes,’ as we recall the almost infinite opportunities we have lost. Yet from the unsealed spring of memory rise joys and blessings, human loves and human friendships, the intense sweetness of which is greater than the intense sadness of hopeless regrets. Nor would any of us desire to be forever broken on this wheel of time Vex not his ghost: 0, let him pass! he hates him That would upon the rack of this rough world Stretch him out longer. We all look for the time when after the despair of winter and the disappointment of summer God’s earth shall be refashioned and all things made new. Still ‘ if a man be not faithful to his past I know not how he shall be faithful to his future; for in casting away, his past he remains but half himself. It is the more manly and the more philosophic course to take up the burden of our past upon our own shoulders without flinching, to live with it as with something inalienably one’s own. It is the basis of Christian repentance not to ignore the guilty past: it is an element of Christian hope to retain our hold upoidthe old good things which God has promised to renew.’

A Feature of Irish Character Observers, friendly and unfriendly, of family life in Ireland have always been struck by its sweetness, simplicity, and purity, by the intense reverence for their parents on the part of children, the tender care for the afflicted, the unquestioning content and happy patience amidst constant troubles. And those who know the land and the people have no hesitation in attributing this luminous, and often heroic, practice of Christian virtues to the power and beauty of the Catholic religion, to a vivid sense of the supernatural. The ‘ other world ’ is real. The people have learnt ‘ To see a world in a grain of sand, And a heaven in a wild flower; Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And eternity in an hour.’ • *

As illustrating this fundamental feature of Irish character, the following story was told many years ago in Macmillan’s Magazine (February, 1898) by Father Ignatius Ryder, who for several years was chaplain to a large gaol in England. Some of his ‘ involuntary congregation ’ were Irish, mostly victims of circumstance. ‘I asked one of them,’ he writes, 1 whom I had often met in gaol, whether he had any but scamps in his family. He laughed at first, and then looked grave as he answered, ‘‘One, your Reverence, and she is a saint.” He then proceeded to tell me a story I knew, before, but had never associated with that family. It was of his cousin who had been early left a widow with a large family, including three girls, the eldest about thirteen. On her husband’s death she was penniless, and her brother, a well-to-do but hard and selfish, man, offered- to install her as landlady of a public-house belonging to him, which brought in a large income. She took a day or two to think it over, knowing that a' refusal meant the workhouse for herself and her family. Finally she made up her mind that to accept such a post in such a neighborhood would involve the probable ruin of her girls, and then quietly

entered the workhouse with her children. There I knew her well, and was able to defend her from the reproaches of those who did not understand the motive of what she had done.. Her wild cousin had understood the situation perfectly and cherished the memory of it as something the family might well be proud of.’ While on this subject, it is difficult to refrain from this other quotation: ‘I think I never fully realised before what so many persons have noticed, the wonderfully good manners of the Irish lower class. Of course, where the system of solitary confinement prevails, every visitor is sure to be at a premium and is welcome of the best. But what astonished me was not so much the kindliness, which might have been expected, but the dignity, nay, the courtliness of my reception. I remember once asking the stereotyped question of a middle-aged woman, “Is this the first time you have, been /in trouble?” She looked me full in the face and answered, “ It’s the lavings of trouble I am, your Reverence.” A splendid evasion, but the subject was at once lifted on to a higher plane where one might drink the larger air of humanity; and I thought of Reliquiae Danaum, or closer still, the proud claim of Constance, Here I and sorrows sit, Here is my throne, bid kings come bow to it.

The Coming Great Secular State To one who tries to read the signs of the times, it Seems evident enough that ere many years have passed and years pass quickly in the history of mankind—there will be a great struggle between the forces of Belief and Unbelief, Christianity and Secularism. In the world of thoughtwhich in the end determines the world of action—men are gradually, nay rapidly, taking sides for and against God, and His Son. The PseudoReformers of the 16th century busied themselves about the authority of Scripture, the divine institution of the Priesthood, the Sacrifice of the Mass, the Sacraments, Indulgences, and so on—all important matters, no doubt, but not the most important. It is far more important to know whether Christ be God or not: if He is God, the rest follows as a matter of course, for there can be no disputing His wishes. Therefore we Catholics welcome this narrowing of the. issues; it is always better to fight the real enemy and have done with it. So, too, men on the one side and the other aie beginning to see that the question of education is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, questions of the day: are the children to be trained for God or not? The secularist loudly claims that mere utilitarian knowledge is quite sufficient to build up a just moral character and lay a solid moral foundation for good citizenship in the'nation. The Catholic Church, guided by the accumulated knowledge of. centuries, and inspired _ by superhuman wisdom, is equally emphatic in declaring that mere intellectual instruction will not prevent crime, make men honest and chaste, or secure the sanctity of the home and the true prosperity of the State. Knowledge jg* one thing, virtue is another, and virtue will not stand' without religion. ‘ Quarry granite rock with razors or moor the vessel with a thread ofsilk ; then may you hope 'with such keen and delicate instruments as human knowledge and human reason to contend against those giants, the passions and the pride of man.’

* In view of these facts, we commend to our readers, and especially to Catholic mothers on whom the future of the children so much depends, these wise remarks of Dr. Barry at a meeting of the Catholic Women’s League, Birmingham, October 17. ‘Whilst on the one hand there seemed to be more freedom than there ever was, on the other hand there was certainly more influence brought to bear on the individual. Catholics as members of a great, and powerful society had protection against this change. It sheltered them, and. as far as could be, isolated them. But it was impossible they should be isolated altogether. If they did not receive the education which the Catholic ""Church desired, if they must mix with other people, if they must obey laws which they themselves had not made, then their isolation would in all sorts of ways be affected.

They would have to go out from the shelter; and let him assure them, there was hardly anyone so unprotected as a Catholic who came outside the shelter of the Church. If this were true of men, it was terribly, awfully true of women. If they found no. method to overcome the fascination of modern thought, they. would suffer to almost any extent, and they would be left so defenceless and helpless that a great secular State might do with them as it liked. ■ For a great secular State was coming. The time was at hand when, all over the greater part of the civilised world, if there should be any religious schools, they would have to defend themselves as in extremity. Catholics had to face a problem which was one of the most formidable that could be presented to a minority. The Catholic Women’s League was meant to make women think about social, public, and religious movements to make them understand what a changed world they lived in; to make them do something more than say the Rosary or read novels. They had to think. Goethe said: It is so easy to act, and so hard to think. Catholic women were slowly, reluctantly, beginning to look up and out, and to see that they had duties which must be fulfilled, which were not at all congenial, which required efforts of imagination they had not yet been trained to make, studies of science, the elements of which they had not yet learned, and patience and faith in looking at the facts of modern life. Until the last few years no efforts were made in any way in Catholic education, so far as England was concerned, to teach either boys or girls to think, or to look, or to watch. They had been brought up as though the cloister or the school were to be their home all through their lives. Catholic children had not been taught that there were great, imperative social duties which had to be fulfilled. If he had any influence on English Catholic women he -would ask them to wake up in the same way as the Catholic women of the Continent had done.’