FALSE PROGRESS.

New Zealand Tablet, 30 October 1919, Page 23

FALSE PROGRESS.

There are those even who call themselves Catholics who find fault with the Church of God and dub her "reactionary and 'unprogressive" (says the Register, Toronto). 1 hey say the Church should keep up-to-date and adopt all the new fads of social and physical culture. They speak as it the secular world was always progressing in the right direction always. The fact of the matter is that sometimes the so-called progress of the-age is merely retrogression. Not only is nothing gained by some of the new fads and fancies of would-be reformers, but something of the old Tightness and effectiveness is lost. N Take the new fads in teaching, for instance; it is much to be doubted if the new curriculum will educate any minds as great as many of the eminently intellectual scholars and scientists of the old days. Why should the Church be always tagging, in the wake of cranks and adapting herself to the changeable fancies of the passing hour? Monsignor Bickerstaffe-Drew says:—"The Catholic Church, we hear folks say, must fit herself to the times. Must she ? Is it not rather true that God has already fitted her for all times, because she reflects His unvexed changelessness Who is eternal, and Time's master. 'They shall perish; but Thou remainest; and all of them shall grow old like a garment, but Thou art always the selfsame.' Shall a weary world, sick of vulgar novelty and noise, turn herself to a Church as novelty-crazed as she is, a Church whose hard brilliance shall coldly reflect, in a million facets, the million fancies of an age that, in place of the Church's perennial, tender, and sane charity for man (with a soul as well as a body), has taken up the mere hobby of philanthropy and can see nothing in man behind his troubled bones and blood?" Men may be improving in the sum of mechanical and scientific knowledge, but it is by no means certain that they are improving in power of intellect, or in holiness and knowledge of God.