Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, 14 January 1915, Page 21

Current Topics

War Prophecies ‘ A number of papers have recently been printing a prophecy, supposed to have been uttered by tire saintly Cure jd’Ars, about the fortunes of the European War. We are told that the Prussians would invade France, but would suffer a great defeat on the feast of our Lady ’ and would ultimately be driven back to their own country. All this, of course, does nothing but give expression to our most ardent hopes, but at the same time Catholics cannot defend a prophecy which is so unauthenticated as this one. Father Thurston, S.J., has been examining the subject, and in a letter to the Tablet, October 3, 1914, notices the following points: (1) The work Vo.ix Frophetiqut.s (in which these prophecies are given) is absolutely worthless as an authority. (2) The two editions of that work now before me—the third (1871), p. 349, and the fourth (1872), vol. ii., pp. 171, 172 contain the passage about the Prussians returning to France and destroying everything, but not one word about ' the feast of our Lady, 1 which is the point upon which everything turns. If this date appears in the fifth edition, it is an addition a pres coup, and from that fact alone open to suspicion.

(3) The context of the passage makes it quite plain that the writer, who (in March, 1871) prophesied a decisive victory for the French, was thinking of the Prussians who were then in France, not of another German invasion to take place forty years later.

(4) There is, in any case, no trustworthy evidence for believing that the Cure d'Ars himself ever said what was attributed to him.

Objections to Miracles The question of miracles is always a live one, especially in these days when even Anglican professors of Divinity at Oxford feel no scruple in throwing doubts about the Gospel miracles. The objections usually urged against the occurrence of miracles are of three kinds : it is more reasonable to attribute the supposed miracle to unknown, but perfectly natural, causes than to any divine interference ; close examination of the testimonies for the occurrences of these facts shows that they are full of imposture and illusions and that they are consequently unworthy of credence ; in any case a miracle, if it takes place at all, is a supernatural fact, and as such belongs not to history but to faith, and is therefore incapable of historical proof. Father Joyce, S.J., Professor of Dogmatic Theology at St. Bueno’s College, N. Wales, has published a brochure on this subiect recently, and his reply to the third objection just mentioned is worth quoting: ‘ The argument is after all a mere sophism resting on an ambiguity in our use of the word supernatural. By “supernatural truths” we sometimes signify the truths which we know by revelation alone, which we are totally incapable of learning by direct observation. In this sense it is quite true that what is supernatural falls outside the scope of history, and Jiat supernatural truths cannot be established by historical evidence.

But in this sense a miracle is not a supernatural truth, it is an occurrence which falls under our senses and which not revelation but reason proclaims to lie due to a direct intervention of the First Cause. In its other meaning, supernatural denotes what is contrary to the normal order. of causes and effects which God has established in the universe. In this sense a miracle is supernatural. ' But the supernatural thus understood falls as much within the province of the historian as any other occurrence which men have witnessed, and which has influenced the course of human affairs. Moreover it is for him to note its miraculous character, and to point out that here the supreme providence of God intervened in a special manner. For it is the business of the historian not merely to be a chronicler of material happenings, but to attribute events to their causes.'

~~~ ln regard to the theories which. would explain the Gospel miracles or those of. Lourdes by reference to faith-healing and suggestion, Father Joyce writes '■ It may be safely said that virtually the whole medical profession is agreed that there is not a jot of positive evidence that suggestion, whether hypnotic or otherwise, can do anything- to remedy an_ organic lesion ; that, on the contrary, all the evidence hitherto produced goes to show that its curative effects are strictly limited to functional derangements.'

The other objection to miracles, namely, that they rest upon a mass of untrustworthy evidence was examined and .turned inside out a few years by G. K. Chesterton in his brilliant book, Orthodoxy. ' Somehow or other,' he writes, ' an extraordinary idea hasarisen that the disbelievers in miracles consider them coldly and fairly, while believers in miracles accept them only in connection with some dogma. The fact is quite the other way. The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them. The open, obvious, democratic thing is to believe an old apple-woman when she bears testimony to a miracle, just as you believe an old apple-woman when she bears testimony to a murder. The plain, popular course is to trust the peasant's word about the ghost exactly as far as you trust, the peasant's word about the landlord. Being a peasant he will probably have a great deal of healthy agnosticism about both. Still you could fill the British Museum with evidence uttered by the peasant, and given in favor of the ghost. If it comes to human testimony there is a chocking cataract of human testimony in favor of the supernatural. If you reject it, you can only mean one of two things. You reject the peasant's story about the ghost either because the man is a peasant or because the story is a ghost story. . ~ . It is we Christians who accept all actual evidence—it is you rationalists who refuse actual evidence, being constrained to do so by your creed. . . All argument against these plain facts is always argument in a circle. If I say, "Medieval documents attest certain miracles as much as they attest certain battles," they answer, "But medievals were superstitious" ; if I want to know in what way they were superstitious, the only ultimate answer is that they believed in the miracles.'

The Witness of Nature

When God fashioned the world we are told that He looked upon the work of His hands and saw that it was good. The beauty and the wonder of it all still remain. The heavens and the earth still proclaim the Majesty of God, and though modern science has closed the eyes of some of its votaries to the vision of the Creator, yet to an ever-increasing number the signs of His Presence have become more manifest.

If some arc not yet able to recognise the Maker in His works, and if great masses of men do not find and see Him in creation, it is because they have not the gift of reading the secret of nature, or because reared and buried in great cities they have few opportunities of coming into direct contact with the simple sights of nature. The poet Coleridge complained—■

' For I was reared

In the great city, pent mid cloisters dim, And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.'

lie wishes a brighter fate to his child :

' But thou, my babe, shalt wander like a breeze, By lakes and sandy shores ; beneath tho crags Of ancient mountains, and beneath the clouds, Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible Of that eternal language, which thy God Utters, who from eternity doth teach Himself in all, and all things in Himself.'

The .fault with many is that 'seeing they will not see, and hearing they will not understand.' Of such as these Wordsworth was thinking when he wrote: 4 The world is too much with us, late "and soon

Getting and spending we lay waste our powers, Little we see in Nature that is ours; • We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon ! The sea that bares her bosom to the moon ; The winds that will be howling at all hours, And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers; For this, for everything, we are out of tune; It moves us not.'

Before a man can draw near to God through the sights and sounds of Nature, his mind must be full of the spirit of reverence, and humility, his heart must be pure—it is the clean of heart who see God, —and his soul should be childlike in its eagerness to love and wonder, to listen and learn. ' Amen, 1 say to you, whosoever shall not receive the Kingdom of Heaven as a little child shall not enter into it.'