Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, 27 November 1919, Page 14

Current Topics

Home-Rule for Scotland ■jqti Why should -a spiritual people, gifted with genius and imagination, lend themselves to the aggrandisement of ia mongrel race ;of materialists 1 and utilitarians ? Why .should Scottish statesmen and soldiers work and toil for England at the expense of their own country’s individuality and 'nationality ? The Gaels are waking up to the common sense answer to these questions. Not only in Ireland and in Wales, but also in Scotland the movement for independence is. growing apace. The soul of Scotland never died. In the old songs, in the old legends and traditions, it slumbered since Culloden. A people possessing the heritage of romance and song that is Scotland’s can never wholly be merged in a nation like England. In the Highlands, in the lands beyond the seas whither the Scots wandered, there have always been hearts that beat hotly for their nation’s right to her own individuality, and it only needed the war and the rustling of awakened nations all around her to arouse Scotland from her slumbers. The Scottish National Quarterly is doing great work for the revival, and the Gaels of Ireland and Wales are stretching forth hands of brotherhood to their kinsmen in Scotland. No doubt, too, what the Scottish people saw of British rule on certain recent occasions in their own country has not increased their love for their fetters. Poor John Bull! Is he going to find himself alone one of these days Will he call in vain when he wants more Gaelic “missile troops” to hurl at his enemies ? He had to go to Ireland for Beatty and to Scotland for Haig. Yet, he will have the Monds and the Ecksteins and the Speyers—until some fine day England—the real England—wakes up too and asks why she should be ruled by foreign financiers. And then the band will play! Is Deutschland uehe r alles any worse than Jewry richer alles ? Scotland, Wales, and Ireland will not have either. Why should England ? The fact that the following was published in the Glasgow Observer in last May is a fair indication of the feeling among the Gaels of Scotland: “We ask, then, this question: Ought not this nation to be proud indeed of its national heroes? Take them as they are, take them as one of them describes the others and as they describe him, and where shall we equal them ? Look where we may; in the Government, led by such a ‘worthy Prime Minister; in Parliament, with its galaxy of bought servitors, or its typical ‘ men of influence,’ the Bottomleys, Grant Mordens, Highams, and others of this type; at the Bench or the Bar, with a Rufus Isaacs as Lord Chief Justice and an F. E. Smith as Lord Chancellor; or, again, see the exploiters and profiteers, or the commercial 1 leaders like one Godfrey Isaacs, of Max-coni notoriety, whose oaths, disbelieved by a British jury, is yet no bander to a vote of confidence ’ by a body of shareholders, and what are we to think of this nation and its rulers and guides and heroes ? . IS IT FIT TO RULE INDIA, OR IRELAND, OR EGYPT, OR MALTA,. OR CYPRUS? IS IT FIT TO RULE ITSELF ? Is it not a blot on the map of the world, a danger to progress, a foe of freedom, and the very apotheosis of all that is meant by fraud and force and the power of Hell on earth ? ' The ‘ national heroes ’ may express one another’s infamies, and drag the national honor in the mud. But the Democracy except a handful, is silent, acquiescent, or approving. Consenting to tyranny in Ireland, in Egypt, and elsewhere, it finds itself exxslaved, conscx-ipted, and exploited, the victim of Hurinism, Junkerism, militarism, landlordism, capitalism, privilege and caste. ' A ; nation'gets the government it deserves, for the politics of a nation are the morals of the people at large.”

• A Plague Spot '7 1 " : 7 Among certain sections of Labor in this* country it has become fashionable to think that to'be anti--Christian is a sign of progress and intelligence. ; We would give some of our readers a shock if we disclosed into what circles this damnable notion has made its way. We will go no further than saying that we know that the conductors of a certain little paper 1 that is no longer in being found that to speak of God and of Christianity was like a red rag to a bull as far as some of the Labor elements that supported the paper in question were concerned. Again, one who went to gaol lor his principles told us that a letter written by him to a certain club in Wellington, and signedas an Irish Catholic would sign it—after an invocation of the blessing of God on his frends, caused certain persons in that club to ask him if he was a traitor. Lastly, it - is well known that no matter how honest and how able a Laborite is there is small chance of his coming into prominence as long as he openly stands for the sound principles of his religion. We have seen letters written by Labor > atheists in which Christ and everything sacred to a decent Christian of no matter what Church were spoken of in terms that made one pity the ignorance and shudder at the blasphemy of the poor deluded writers. We are well aware that official Labor is not identified with such a condition of hopeless rottenness, but nevertheless the plague is there and it is spreading daily. Good Christian Laborites deplore it more than any others; but they, are helpless to stem the tide, and they ask desperately what can be done to remedy the evil. Ignorance and the natural perversity of humanity are at its roots. Man is prone. to follow the devil rather than Christ. People will scoff at religion as superstition while they will give themselves heart and soul to any fakir or quack who preaches a new doctrine. The spirituality of God and of the angels they reject, but they will embrace the spiritism of the powers of evil without finding in it anything offensive to their peculiar ideas about logic and consistency. The word of the world’s greatest thinkers who testify to religion they will discredit at the bidding of a charlatan like McCabe or his master Haeckel. They will swallow the shallow stuff and the falsehoods of the R.P.A. publications and they will never go to the trouble to find out what, men who are really authorities have to say about such writings. If it were not so pitiful it would be too ludicrous. The great German biologist, Kohlbrugge, —and with him the first authorities of the daysay that Evolution is a problem of which we know nothing definite yet, but the reader of McCabe will tell you that ,it is a Gospel. Huxley felt bound in conscience to have his children brought up as Christians, but his poor uneducated dupes think he killed Christianity. Alfred Wallace, the co-founder of the Theory of Natural Selection, said that there had been absolutely no moral progress since the history of man began, but the illiteraH of Labor think they have discovered a new moral order capable of superseding Christ’s. Sheer ignorance, begotten of sheer pride and lack of humility, and fostered on the sort of “science” supplied by popular magazines and weekly papers, is the concomitant of the modern atheistical attitude; and here and there some puny little professor who attempts to achieve notoriety by being blasphemous, does his bit. to swell the tide. It is a noteworthy fact that while nearly all the leaders in science were believers, the unbelievers are those to whom greatness is attributed by prejudiced witnesses and not seldom by forgers, like Haeckel. Maxwell said to Colin MacKenzie: “Old chap, I have read up many queer religions: there is nothing like the old thing after all.” Pasteur and Bernhard gave eloquent testimony to the fact that the more they knew the more they believed. Bacon’s word remains true for ever: A little knowledge leads us from God, and a great deal will bring us back to Him. The difficulty of bringing, , i back to God the misguided disciples of Haeckel and ; McCabe is one that no man afford to shirk. , ‘

The :Need of an Antidote - - ■linn When the recent epidemic was raging amongst us most people spent a considerable sum of money on more or less effective prophylactics; and surely, granting the . preventives were efficacious, the expenditure - was wise. - There is another plague in our midst,’ and it argues ,? a want of intelligence and common sense on our part that as a body we are inclined to spend very little on antidotes. The plague is our environment which is decidedly hostile to a healthy Catholic tone and a breeding place for infidelity and irreligion. It is a truism to say that the English mind is a pagan mind nowadays. There are exceptions, of course ; but on the whole the attitude to religion may be gauged by the tone of our press and our literature. Judging from these, the standard is very low indeed. The average novel might as well be the work of a professed Pagan; many decent Pagans would be ashamed to put their names to some of the works of fiction exposed for sale in our book stores and read with avidity by our young people. The press exhibits a total disregard for the higher principles of Right and Wrong, with a very few exceptions. Utilitarianism is the guiding law of politicians, as it has been for centuries ; and the degradation of English public opinion was clearly proved the other day when President Wilson’s programmeto which the Allies had previously agreedwas described by an honest Pagan journalist as being a “new morality” to Englishmen. From our press, again, and from our novels, we are forced to conclude that the moral standard, the standard of social purity, is very low, and the national feeling very dead. We have only to keep our eyes open in the streets to see that material comfort, and the selfishness it begets, have taken firm hold of all classes. And as a consequence of the deterioration old-fashioned courtesy and good breeding are becoming rarer every day. It was against such an environment the Gaelic League set its face in Ireland when it called on the nation to revive old Irish customs and to shun the WestBritish contamination which was already tending to sap the vitality of the people, acting on them as surely as the inoculation of plague-germs. And we cannot do better than imitate the Gaelic League and make a great effort to arouse our people from their comatose state and make them realise what a heritage of Catholic education and ideals they are bartering for a mess of pottage. Our Catholic heritage is spiritual ; the English ideals are earthy and material : and so gross and so pervading is our environment that we must make a real effort if we are to revive a sound Catholic spirit among all our people. The Gaelic League succeeded in making Irishmen and women proud of their race; surely we have no less reason to be proud of our Catholic traditions. * Surely we would be nothing less than fools were we to lose our ideals for the sake of conformity with those around us. It is very easy to descend in the moral as well as in the intellectual order, and the natural tendency is to recede and fall back. To keep our position is comparatively easy in comparison with the labor entailed in regaining a single step once lost.

Fact lis descensus Aver nr, *ed rctroire f/radns, SU'perusque evadere ad auras, hoc opus, his labor est.

We therefore need an antidote. The antidote is close connection with Catholic principles and ideals. The place to seek them is in the works of Catholic writers, in the Catholic papery, through Catholic-schools, through lectures and preaching • and it is clear that unless we make it our business to seek them, out there we shall not find them. And, not finding them, we shall become more and more degenerate. . And a degenerate Catholic, or a degenerate Irishman, is not the companion we would recommend to anybody. For here the old saying is often verified : O-ptimi pessima corrnpiio —“the best when corrupted becomes the* worst.” Therefore it is a matter of duty to take such precautions as will arrest the plague and save us from infection. As we would spend money on germifuges and germicides, let us spend some on Catholic literature. Let us get a Catholic paper regularly; let us buy a

good Catholic book frequently • let us remember that there is nothing in the whole round world of which wo have such reason to he proud as the fact that we are Catholics, of the faith of the heroic martyrs: who were never yet conquered , in- the fight they ■ fought for that faith. Descent; from a line of kings is hut smoke -and dust compared with our lineage from the Irish martyrs. So let us remember them and how they appreciated" the faith. - u-. dot noi '

Divorce Some time ago our pious editors raised their hands in holy horror and told the world under heavy headlines how the Germans were advocating polygamy, which happened after all to he but one of the many lies and calumnies which pious editors in defiance 'of the Ten Commandments think they are justified in spreading about the enemy, and which they have no sort of qualm of conscience about allowing to go without retractation when it has been clearly proved that there was absolutely no foundation for the charges made. In the matter of polygamy we need not go to Germany at all if we want to find wickedness. We have plenty of it at home, and it is characteristic of the ideals of many among us that they have no word of blame for crimes of our own which they denounce our enemies for. Perhaps it may be said that polygamy among us is hidden and not advocated openly. Yet we remember a certain egregious venture into the domain of theology by Conan Doyle, and we also recall certain articles in one of the English Sunday papers on the subject of “Visiting Husbands” which were remarkably like open and unblushing advocacy of polygamy. We are constrained to think from our observation of the conduct of many critics that it is not what is wrong they detest, but only what is wrong in the enemy which is by no means a matter of congratulation for those who retain respect for the good name of the Empire. For true Christians divorce is the same as polygamy : it is in matter of fact tandem polygamy. As far as its culpability and its offensiveness in the sight of God are concerned, it is on a level with adultery and ordinary polygamy such as we denounced the Germans for advocating. The Christian law is: “What God has joined let no man put asunder” ; and the Christian interpretation of these words is that while life lasts the conjugal union of one man with one wife lasts also and no power on earth can break it. We know that the laws made by men have sanctioned the dissolution : but the laws of God cannot be abrogated by kings or parliaments, even if a whole bench of State theologians and reformers say that they can. Leo XIII. wrote: “When the Christian religion is rejected and repudiated, marriage sinks of necessity into the slavery of man’s vicious nature and vile passions, and finds but little protection in the help of natural goodness. A very torrent of evil has flowed from this source, not only into private families, but also into the .State.” And the Protestant historian Milman tells us that “throughout the Roman Empire there can be no doubt that this dissolution of those bonds which unite the family was the corroding plague of Roman society.” With reference to the state of things in America, where divorce has attained to such shameful proportions, Dr. S. Dilke, correspondent secretary of the “National League for the Protection of the Family,” says: “However humane in intent divorce may be, whatever the perils of incontinence without it,- we find no historical ground for the contention that easy divorce has increased social purity or happiness, but that restlessness, sexual laxity, temptation to other attachments,, corruption of home atmosphere, and selfishness instead of public rivell-being cause or accompany this social peril.” There can be no doubt in the mind of a, man of intelligence and honesty as to the evil effects of. divorce. No stronger condemnation of it can be written than that it is the fertile cause of the corruption of home life and a powerful disintegrating factor in the very heart of the State. No man will deny that divorce sometimes frees an innocent party from the companionship of a

Husband or wife with whom life has become impossible, but I the Church offers a remedy as ■ efficacious for individual security in the separation a vvensa et tihoro, by which she allows the parties to live wholly apart, without, however, allowing either of them to marry again while the other is alive. it may be said that such a restriction imposes hardship on the innocent party. It is this very pretext which affords to advocates of divorce their strongest appeal. But let us remember that the Christian religion does not guarantee that anyone shall be free from trial and hardship in this life or that the innocent. shall be preserved from suffering. To hold that is to have a totally wrong conception of the spirit of Christianity. Suffering must be as long as man is in this world, and, moreover, suffering is usually the lot of the just. Again, the suffering and hardship thus imposed through strict marriage laws is far better than the general corruption and dissolution of morals which result from any relaxation of the law. “What God hath joined let no man put asunder.” Even from a purely rationalistic point of view, divorce with all its vaunted freedom is an evil out of all proportion in comparison of the minor and rare hardships which are the result of the strict observance of that law of Christian marriage which is the sure foundation of the sanctity of the family and the welfare of society.