Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, 30 October 1913, Page 21

Current Topics

Ignorance or Misrepresentation ? The Wairarapa Daily Times appears to be going out of its way of late to show its animus, and incident- • ally its ignorance, on questions in which Catholic interests or Catholic principles are involved. In a leader on the Bible-in-schools question in a recent issue it remarks: 'lt is interesting to note that the attitude of the Roman Catholic Church towards the movement is not the same in all countries. In New Zealand that Church is one of the most inveterate opponents of Bible teaching in the State schools. It holds, apparently, that the secular system should be maintained in its entirety.' It holds, of course, nothing of the sort; and the Wairarapa paper's statement is flagrantly untrue. The Catholic Church has no objection to religious instruction in the public schools provided it is given under conditions that are fair all round, and with adequate protection to rights of conscience; but it does object to Protestant Bible lessons given under a fraudulent conscience clause and at Catholic expense. Nine years ago the Catholic Bishops of New Zealand wrote in a manifesto published in all the leading dailies of the Dominion: 'We value God's Sacred Word. We use it in our schools. We would gladly welcome any change in the Education Act which would enable every child in the Colony to be well grounded in the doctrines of its faith, so long as this can be done without detriment or danger to the faith and the religious sentiments of the children of other creeds.' Bishop Cleary has taken precisely the same attitude : and again and again during the past twelve months in letters to the press and in public addresses has uttered such sentiments as these: Let the League abandon the several unjust and oppressive conditions under which it is now proposed to introduce such lessons into the public schools, and the more Bible they can teach to their children in the schools, the better pleased Catholics will be.' Either the Wairarapa Daily Times was aware of these utterances or it was not. If it was aware of them, it has, in writing as it has done, been guilty of deliberate misrepresentation. If the paper was not aware of these repeated public statements of the Catholic attitude, it is not competent to accurately and intelligently discuss the important question with which it attempted to deal. A Dunedin « Demonstration * The Bible-in-schools demonstration on Friday night —which, according to the preliminary locals and advertisements, was to have been of an ' impressive and educative' characterturned out a very* flat affair. The hall taken for the occasion—the Burns Hall—one of the smallest in Dunedin; and even its was not full. The best the Daily Times report could say of the gathering in respect to its numbers was that while Burns Hall was not filled, the attendance was not . small.' As Burns Hall is seated for about five hundred people, the public can judge for themselves as to how large the attendance was. The meeting was further robbed of any weight or interest which it might have had by the withdrawal of Dean Fitchett from the list of speakers on the ground of indisposition. A substitute chairman presided; and a substitute speaker had also to be found for the Rev. W. M. Grant, who ( also was an absentee through indisposition. Altogether it was a decidedly scratch team that gathered round Canon Garland; and, if it is not unkind to say so, it was a decidedly scratch performance which he and they achieved. Not the faintest attempt was made at refutation of the deadly evidence advanced by Mr Caughley against the League's scheme; and not an argument, nor even the semblance of an argument, was brought forward that merits the slightest notice from anybody. ■»

Out of the four speakers, three were Presbyterian ministers; and how completely they are departing, in the stand they are taking on this question, from the

true principles of Presbyterianism may be gathered from a recent utterance of that master mind of presentday Presbyterianism, Professor Denney. ; Dr. Denney, Professor of New Testament Language, Literature, and Theology, in the United Free Church College, Glasgow, since 1897, and author, of Gospel Questions and Answers, The Death of Christ, The Atonement and the Modern Mind, Jesus and the Gospel, etc., is universally recognised as the greatest living authority on questions affecting Presbyterian doctrine and polity. He contributes to the June issue of the Constructive Quarterly, a new ' Journal of the Faith, Work, and Thought of Christendom,' a striking article on ' The Constructive Task of Protestantism,' in which he deals incidentally with the question of religious education. Let our New Zealand ministers listen to what he has to say. We transcribe his words as we find them quoted in the Expository Times for August last: 'The confusion between the function, of the Church and the function of the State has much to do, Dr. Denney holds, with neglect of Christian education. Christian education is the one great task which Protestantism has conspicuously neglected, and with the most deplorable results. "In modern communities," he says, "education is the business of the State, but State education is inevitably determined by State ends. It neither is, nor can be, nor ever will be, Christian education, and the passive surrender of education by the Church is simply suicidal. Catholics are abundantly right when they emphasize the importance of the religious atmosphere, and maintain that Christianity can only be communicated by Christians; and until the Protestant churches recognise that faith is social, that it is the conviction and inspiration of a community which its immature members must breathe as continually and unconsciously as they do the air which fills their lungs, Protestant Christianity will suffer from a congenital weakness. A doctrine of the Church is wanted which, while it will secure the freedom of the spirit in all its relations to Christ, will recognize the fact that faith has to be naturalized —not indeed in the world, which is impossible, but in the Christian home and the Christian church, and that to educate its children into the freedom and fulness of faith is a primary and inalienable duty of the Church itself.'" That is what Bishop Cleary, and Catholic apologists generally, have always contended for; and if the Rev. R. E. Davies and his Presbyterian colleagues are to be true to the principles of their own Church, they must range themselves on the Catholic side in this question. Dr. Denney on Prohibition In this same article Dr. Denney has some wise words as to the proper attitude of the Church towards such vexed social questions as local option and prohibition. The social reformer, he remarks, often has an ideal of his own from which he criticises the actual existing Church. 'Even loyal members of the Church may be in need of enlightenment on this point. They are interested in various good causes, economical, social, political, and what not; and because the Church in some sense must be interested in all good causes, they would like to see it taking a more active part with them. They are eager to take it by force, and enlist it under their banner, as the multitudes would have taken Jesus by force and made Him a King; and when it is slow to move they are apt to denounce it as indifferent to evil and hostile to progress. What needs to be made plain is that while there are many cases in which the Church and, let us say for illustration,, the State, or trades unions, or political societies, may have the same ethical ends in view, the Church is not at liberty, as a spiritual society, to use all the means in pursuing these ends, which are appropriate and legitimate for others.' Dr. Denney takes temperance legislation as an example. Temperance is a great moral interest, but it does not . follow, he says, that the Church should directly promote any particular piece of temperance legislation, such as a high licence law, an abolition law, a local option law, or whatever it may be. It has its own motives and Weapons for fighting intemperance, and it doea not gain strength, it only

loses the consciousness of what it is, when it snatches at the weapons of the S-ate, and tries to wield them instead of its own. The Debate on the Education Question The debate on the Education Question between the Rev. Joseph Nicholson, Protestant minister, and Mr. T. C. Brennan, LL.B., representing the Catholic Federation of Victoria, duly eventuated on the 29th ult., and in point of attendance, of the tone and temper both of speakers and audience, and of the tense interest displayed by the immense gathering, was a complete success. Long before the hour appointed for the opening of the doors of the Auditorium, large numbers of people crowded in the vicinity, and by 7.30 the body of the great hall was filled. Before 8 o'clock every one of the 2500 seats was occupied. 'At five minutes to B,' says the Advocate, 'when Mr. Brennan went on to the platform, he was greeted with a loud outburst of cheering, which lasted for several moments. A few minutes afterwards Mr. Nicholson appeared, and was received with loud applause. At 8 o'clock sharp the chairman, Professor Harrison Moore, opened the proceedings in a short and graceful . speech. MiNicholson was again greeted with loud applause, but. it was noticeable that, for almost half an hour, he spoke to an absolutely silent house. There was some applause at intervals after that, but it was not until Mr. Brennan began that the enthusiasm of the meeting really asserted itself, and from that on, whichever the speaker it found vent in bursts of applause or occasional peals of laughter.' L * Each of the speakers was permitted fifty minutes for his opening speech, and twenty minutes was allowed for each reply. The proposition which. Mr. Nicholson had undertaken to affirm was as follows: 'That the Roman Catholic claims fur financial aid from the State Treasury towards their denominational schools are not 'just, and would be destructive of our State system.' As opening speaker, Mr. Nicholson had an obvious and very great advantage in that he was free to choose his own line of treatment and was in a position to open the discussion with a speech fully prepared. It is no mere partisan criticism to say that he utterly failed to rise to the level of his opportunity. His speech showed evidence, indeed, of careful preparation; but the ' preparation had been on lines that were ■ totally irrelevant to the issues. The second half of the proposition—that the recognition of Catholic claims would be destructive of the existing State system— never so much as touched upon. In support of the first half the principal 'evidence' advanced was a succession of decidedly disjointed and disconnected selections from the speaker's controversial rag-bag—most of the items having not even the most distant connection with the specific issue under discussion. There was a snippet from the syllabus of 1864 ; a patch about the alleged illiteracy in Spain and all other Catholic countries; and quotations—given in all seriousness as bein<* weighty and entitled to respect— such authorities as Father Crowley and 'Dr. Cook of Boston Father Crowley' was actually quoted as speaking from 'within the Roman Catholic Church,' Mr. Nicholson being evidently in blissful ignorance of the fact that when the particular book quoted ixom—Parochial Schools: The Curse of the Natio7i—wa,s written, the unfortunate Crowley had been for some time under formal sentence of excommunication. On the understanding that Crowley would go West and desist from his scandal-giving the excommunication was removed by Cardinal Martinelli; but after leaving Chicago the unfortunate man by his marriage with a woman of Schuyler, Neb., incurred ipso facto a fresh excommunication. He has now gone the limit, having recently allied himself to -that"* pole-cat of the American press,' the infamous, anti-Catholic journal, the Menace. _ And this is the man whom the Rev. Nicholson, in his ignorance and innocence, quotes in all good faith as a speaking from within

the Church! Dr. Joseph Cook, whose • Boston . Lectures _ had a certain vogue some years ago, was' an ultra-Protestant. He was a man of ability but where .Catholic matters are !"<>;" : ™»u „•>» _ i j —„„_„ "r" .vHvernea "« works are marked by extreme bigotry. He was quoted by Mr. Nicholson as having stated that seven out of ten of American Catholics are in favor of the public school system On such, a point Dr. Cook has about the same title to rank as an authority as Joseph Hocking or Marie Corelli As we have said, Mr. Nicholson's speech gave evidence' of careful preparation, and showed plenty of- ability or a kind; but fully nine-tenths of it was entirely away from the specific points at issue.. He concluded by ?h«f n n n S ? * l ', fifteen reasons for his contention that the Catholic claims are unjust, one half of them however being a mere duplication or repetition of the other half. For many of these reasons no evidence at all was advanced; lor the rest the 'evidence was for the most part of the rag-bag kind above 'indicated. * Mr. Brennan, whose speech had necessarily to Partake . largely of the character of a 'reply' to Mr Nicholson, was at a disadvantage in having to follow more or less closely the lines laid down by the opening speaker. This meant restricted time and opportunity for developing the fundamental principles governing the Catholic position, and it meant a so that he had to depend entirely on the inspiration of the moment for the form in which his argument and his defence were to be clothed. Nevertheless Mr Brennan made a splendidly effective vindication of the Catholic c aims; and the fact that his address had to be entirely extempore, so far from proving really a handicap only served to bring out his superior platform ability and his vastly superior knowledge of the whole subject under debate. His points were-made clearly cogently, and concisely; there were sufficiently frequent ouches of humor to keep the subject from being in the slightest degree dry or heavy; and the speaker's irauk and manly appeal to the sense of justice and spirit of fairness of his hearers could not fail to leave an excellent impression. We have space for only a couple of examples of the ready and effective way in which Mr. Brennan made his points. Dealing with the unrevoked commission given by our Saviour to the Church, he said: ' It was Christ Himself, if I may say so without irreverence, Who created the difficulty for us when He said, "Suffer the little children to come unto Me, and forbid them not, for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven"; and when He said on Pentecost: "Going, therefore, teach all nations, teaching them whatsoever. things I have commanded you." Did He refer there to nature studies and sloyd work ? The school is the place for teaching, and we are carrying out the Master's commands in what we are doing Now, I ask you, my Protestant friends, do you claim to be members of that Church which Christ founded on earth, or do you not? If you do not, then you should make yourselves right as soon as possible; if you do, then why do you not obey the commands of your Master V And referring to the alleged effect of denominational schools in destroying national unity, he said: 'The next matter which Mr. Nicholson dealt with had reference to national unity. I do not know exactly what he means, and whether he says that if we are to have a Catholic grant it will have any effect on our unity. If it is to have any effect, I presume it would _ have manifested itself ere now, because the Catholic schools are, here in Melbourne at all event's, in all their glory, and practically not one Catholic\ child is being educated in a State school. That beinn/ so, if the results would be evil, those results should have manifested themselves; but none have been shown, so far as I know. Besides, Mr. Nicholson is on unsafe ground. Having taken that position, he must go either backward or forward. If the effect of denominational schools is to endanger national unity, then that effect must apply where there are denominational secondary schools as much as in the case of denominational primary schools. Indeed, it would apply with more strength in the case of denominational secondary schools, because they are the natural nursery and

breeding-ground of the men and women who are to be the future leaders of the thought of our people. Does he, then, propose to strike a blow at Wesley College as a breeder of dissension and a breaker-up of our national unity lam afraid he will not have the learned head of Wesley with him in that crusade.' Of the personal impression made by Mr. Brennan, the Tribune writes: 'The Catholic spokesman, Mr. Brennan, covered himself and the Federation with glory. He manifested at times a rare gift of oratory, and did the fullest justice to the noble cause he was deputed to uphold. Ever brilliant and eloquent, he was humorous and grave in turn, and his clear, resonant voice rang pleasingly through the hall. He has lifted the status of the Catholic Federation considerably in the eyes of the general public, as well as in the esteem of the Catholic people of the State, of whom he has proved himself one of the Church's worthiest sons.' We heartily congratulate Mr. Brennan on his achievement, and the Catholic Federation on having so worthy and capable a champion. The fact that a great daily like the Melbourne Argus gave a full page report of the debate, and thus brought the Catholic facts and arguments into many thousands of non-Catholic homes, speaks for itself as to the high educational value of the discussion.