Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, 27 October 1921, Page 14

Current Topics

Our Danger Mr. Chesterton, in a recent number of the New "Wit 11 ens, refers to the ease with which sane persons may be branded as lunatics in England. That, is not where our shoo pinches: the danger in New Zealand is the case with which stupid persons may be made Cabinet Ministers. Still, when the standard is as low as it is hero one must make the best of a bad job. Whit can be done in a 'country where people are not afraid to admit that they have read an Otago Daily Times editorial about Ireland! Sane Women We read in an American paper a short time ago that the women of Holland have organised a Catholic league to deal with the evil of immodesty in female dress. The league not only binds its members not" to wear objectionable costumes but it visits shops and says things" to dealers who will not help by refusing to expose in their windows garments that do not come up to the standard of decency. Some day or other we may hope for a similar movement here, if the hard times brought upon us by Mr. Massey and his oversalaried men will not make plain dress a matter of necessity rather than of choice even before the remnant of a national conscience awakes. Indeed one is at times forced to think that only urgent need can ever produce the desired effect. Our Placemen have robbed the country of Christian principles and reduced the people to a pagan level. They, have brought youngNew Zealanders to believe in their blood relationship with the ape ; and who can blame the cousins of the ape if they ape the ape in more ways than in nakedness? The Propagation of Catholic Principles s We realise that the world is out of joint; we also realise that its sad condition is the result of a murderous war made possible by the dominance in most countries of the passions of avarice and hatred—fanned to flame by a prostitute press, such as we have only too many examples of in New Zealand. As lack of Christian principles is responsible for the war, there can be no real reconstruction until we begin to build anew on Christian foundations ; and this we can never do until the masses are taught Christianity. It is hopeless to expect that politicians who hold office only for the sake of profit, or that a venal press that has forgotten the meaning of the word truth will do anything to educate or uplift the people. Some other way must be found or else we must only reconcile ourselves to dreeing our weird with what patience we can. command. One way is to make the most of what means are already available: to support and encourage the Catholic Truth Society to help our schools and to defend their interests ; to support the Catholic newspapers and to get ethers to support themthese are things we all can do, and all of them count towards the result desired. In America Catholics have summer schools in which lectures on Catholic topics are given by priests and laymen ; in England the Catholic Evidence Guild goes into the highways and byways to teach the truth to the people; in Australia a similar movement was begun some years ago. Our enemies spare no expense to provide lecturers to tour the country and tell lies about us. Why ■■ should we not also have frequent public lecturers ' in. which the lies might be refuted and the truth set before a deceived and blinded people ? It would be well worth while appointing a national Catholic lecturer who would go systematically through New Zealand in order to tell the dupes of the parsons what the Catholic Church really is. Faith and Freedom . •>;•;-The Church is entrusted with the task of pre-serving-pure the deposit of revealed truth from generation to. generation. Therefore she must speak out in

defence of the truth as often as men, under no matter what guise, attack her and attempt to distort or annihilate truth. . “The Church,” says the Vatican Council, “having received with her apostolic office to teach, the obligation of preserving the legacy of the faith, has also the God-given right to condemn what is falsely called b science, ‘ lest any one be cheated by philosophy and vain l deceit,’ ” In loyalty to her Master the Church is bound to cry out from time to time, warning the scholars and thinkers of the age that their path is leading away from truth and towards error. They will denounce the Church for this they will call her reactionary and out-of-date, but as she is not a little Protestant conventicle she cannot fawn on, new-fangled theories and forget her divine mission; she must cry out Drrastis —“You have erred —even though you denounce me and crucify me, it is my duty to tell you ’ that'you have erred.” In truth, the Church does not interfere with science : as the Vatican Council says, it is what is falsely called science that calls for correction from her. When a forger, like Haeckel, wanders out of his province and gives false accounts of the origin of man, the Church speaks out —and in time is proved by further enquiries to be right; when one picked out of the gutter by the Church, tuwis to bite the hand that fed and clad him, and to do so elects to spread among the poor ignorant people of life and conduct, the Church will warn the faithful that the ravings of a MacCabe are not science. One may ask, Why does she not leave science to correct itself, why bother about it at all? Rarely does the Church interfere. As a rule she is called upon to act because scientists go outside their own sphere and deceive people by pretending that science is opposed to truths of vast importance for the order of Christian life. In such cases the Church has absolutely no choice: she is the guardian of truth and she must speak. But is not this restraint and hindrance ? It is, but it is the restraint of truth, which, every science must submit to. It is the restraint of the lighthouse which warns the mariner that he must not cross a reef : the restraint of the Ten Commandments that preserve life and property and decency; the restraint of the law which keeps motorists from killing people in the streets; the restraint of a guardrail that keeps people away from a precipice. It is a restraint that is no restraint on the seeker after truth, and only the man who seeks licence rather than truth finds it a restraint. Certainly the man who does not bother about faith at all has a greater apparent freedom than the man who does: for faith is. the foundation of -the moral law, and the man who knows no moral law does not- suffer from the limitations of a decent man. In every civilised State there is restraint for the sake of the greater freedom of all; and the more cultured and educated the State the greater the restraint. A man who knows the laws 'of good breeding, is more restrained at meals than one who does not know the use of a knife and fork ; the boy who is brought up well will feel, bound to close a door which he finds closed; the boy brought up badly will never close a door after him. -Thus, good manners, good morals, love for truth involve restraint, and no lover of truth and order complains of it. In matter of fact it is only in few cases the Church interferes, and as a rule it is when scientists leave “their last” and intrude on the- province of philosophy. Then the Church’s action is only the interference -of the lighthouse or the warning buoy: it actually makes the way clearer for those who take the warning. For there can be no contradiction between faith and reason, and the apparent conflict is due either to the doctrine being misunderstood and not interpreted in the. sense of the Church, or to. erroneous opinions that are mistaken for conclusions of reason. - (Vatican Council.)

False Progress Progress is the catch-cry and the watchword of politicians. It' is a word consecrated by journalists. It. is also a stone in the sling of the atheist and the Protestant bigot who go forth, to slay the Church of Christ. Onward and upward through the ages the best. and noblest men have striven ;in ; the wake of the

ideal of true Progress. Goethe made it his. motto in the great poem which John Morley made his inspiration :

k ■ '" Edel set der Mensch, Hulfreich und gilt] Demi das allein . ' Vnterscheidet Hub Von alien Wesen, Die wir hennen. The poetic dream of universal evolution, extending not only to the plant and animal kingdom but even to human thought, ethics, and truth itself, captured the restless world for nearly a century and gave a new meaning to the word Progress. For the dreamers there was no progress without evolution, and the dream became a dogma which was asserted and enforced with a bigotry that outdid the worst that was ever alleged against the Inquisitors of Spain. Evolution meant for people like the forger Haeckel the destruction of Christianity; and thence it was but a little step for the noisy demagogues who acquired their education from bad translations of foreign atheistical works to proclaim that apostasy from the faith was a sign of Progress," that the Church was reactionary and out-of-date, and that it was a monstrous .thing; to attempt to set bounds by moral or other laws to the activities of the mind or to the desires of the will of that noble creature Man. "Christianity was but a stage in the evolution of thought. We (that is the disciples of the forger and his dupes) are beyond all that now. Wherefore let us throw restraint and religion to the winds and break the Commandments as we will: Break up those tablets, said Nietzsche's Zarathustra." ' Now as the Catholic Church is the pillar and ground of Truth, it could not follow the lead of every forger and of every soap-box orator who thought he had a new revelation to make. The Church had the revelation of an infallible God to guard and it was not going to change its immutable dogmas at the behest of a charlatan who cried aloud in. the market-place—even though he cried in the name of Progress. The true meaning of Progress has been changed and a false interpretation given the word. Because the Church would not accept the false she was denounced as the enemy of the true: that sentence sums up the history of the attacks made on Catholics by all the atheists and ranters and bigots of the last hundred years. As St. Augustine says, there is some truth in every error! There is evolution in most things. The boy develops into-the man, the seed into the tree, mankind advances in civilisation, the stage-coach is replaced by the express, and the tallow candle by the electric light. Mistakes have made clearer our views on many philosophical topics; many doctrines of faith are better understood and better defined than they were years ago. It is certainly true that there is progress and evolution. But we have no right to conclude that there is evolution in everything and that nothing is fixed and stable. Just as axioms in Geometry are essentially fixed so too there are stable laws in all sciences and immutable truths in moral and dogmatic doctrines. The argument of the moderns against religion is a fair sample of their reasoning, powers. It amounts to this: We no longer use tallow candles, we no longer travel long distances in stage-coaches; therefore we cannot believe that Christ became Man or that He founded the Church as the custodian of unchangeable truth. Our political life and our social life have changed; therefore our religion ought to change. We have discovered electricity; therefore we need not believe in God. Divested of all their verbiage the writings and pleadings of the apostles of false progress have no more force than such silly arguments as the foregoing. True progress is only conceivable when the starting point is still kept in view. To say that because we have gone a long way from London there is no London is absurd, but not more absurd than to hold that progress consists in ever abandoning old views, and advancing towards new. True evolution is not a continuous remaking, but a continuance in growth, and growth of its nature implies continuity between the plant and the seed- the principles and the conclusions. To quote Goethe again,

the men of the day have read .a terrible deal * v. Sie haben schrec'klich vielgelesen, —!' . but they have thought correspondingly little. It is -the little thought that goes with the reading that is really the schrecklich thing. In the lines already quoted at the beginning of this article, Goethe describes the ideal man as follows— Noble let man be, V Helpful and good! Thus, and thus only From all below him Others can know him And "certainly one would be hard put to it to identify this ideal among the profiteering, sweating, grasping, over-reaching plutocracy, the lying politicians, the loose livers and the materialistic thinkers that are the product of what moderns call Progress. Goethe's lines fit the man-who is actuated by Christian principles always, but they certainly do not fit. those who have discarded Christian charity, Christian chastity, and Christian justice. The progress of to-day is the kind that has Set the maiden fancies wallowing in the troughs of Zolaism, leading Forward, forward, ay, and downward into the depths of the abysm.

It is mot a Progress of which any nation has reason to be proud, this vile fruit of godless schools and godless politics which now hangs rotten on the tree of civilisation and mockery of all the fine promises of all the fine reforms that the war was to inaugurate for us. Progress that means overstepping human reason and overthrowing the barriers of faith and morals the world may boast of ; and to her eternal glory be it said that this is precisely the Progress against-which the Church has set her face resolutely. - While she has always fostered real Progress and true civilisation, she has steadfastly opposed and condemned the denial of the truth, the apostasy from God and the retrogression towards low ideals and low standards of life for which our age is now notorious. No, thank God ! the ideas of the period are not those of the Catholic Church. She stands alone in the world to-day for real Progress, for the_gooch the true, the pure, the just, the sane, the wholesome, and for the supernatural virtues which alone can save the decadent world.