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New Zealand Tablet, Volume XLIX, Issue 49, 14 December 1922, Page 30

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How is it Done? People often ask how it happens that a single school of Brothers' boys can beat every school in ■ a city at football and athletics. In the same way there is room to wonder at the fact that we poor persecuted Catholics, in our poverty and with our very small population, can make of bazaars a success that Protestants could only vainly dream about. Thus, in hard times, and with the P.P. A. riding its boycotting steed to death, the Orphanage Bazaar broke all records for Dunedin, making a sum. of £BSOO. And at the same time the Catholic people of Lawrence held their bazaar and made over £I2OO. No doubt the pestilent attacks of the ex-parsons spurred not only our own people but also sincere non-Catholics to greater efforts. Dunedin has a great tradition for Catholc bazaars and Lawrence's effort was proportionately even more wonderful. . / Alice Meynell Alice Meynell, who died recently, was surely first among living-woman poets. Looking round it is hard to find one to compare with her. Some of the Irish girls have the fire and the lyric rapture, but not one of them has the classical perfection of the dead Catholic writer. Ray Edridge writes of her in the November Catholic World: When Alice Meynell writes a poem there is a sound in English letters like the clear ringing of her own "Chimes" in a night of clouds and wind: "A verse of bells takes wing, and flies with the cloud." It is a brief, infrequent sound, of quite unmistakable quality, which serves to emphasise the darkness and to contrast sharply with the voices of the wind. Compared to these eerie libertines, it has the reality and' the constraint of chimes, telling plainly of. time and of the Eternity that enfolds and ends it. One should be able to divine that thought and demonstrate the nature of this quality that makes her work* unique; So it might seem at first sight. But life defies analysis, and Mrs. Meynell's poems are preeminently living, things. Tier thought lives in their structure as the soul lives in the body, excelling, informing, but dependent, and the crude dissection of paraphrase leaves but a lifeless platitude. Christian Optimism The same fine Catholic review has the following editorial note: Jesus Christ was an optimist. And He was no fool. "He knew what was in man; He needed not that any man should tell Him." Unlike our comfortable pseudo-pessimists, He did sweat blood over the sins of mankind. Yet He believed in man. "He who thought most seriously of the disease held it to be curable. Those who thought less seriously of it, held it to be incurable," says the author of Ecce Homo. Someone has defined a true friend as "one who knows all about you and yet likes you." Our Saviour knows all about us, and yet He loves us. And, even more, He believes in us. No Christian is a .pessimist. "Confidence in the value of existence, and in the intrinsic victory of Virtue, is not optimism, but religion," says Chesterton. By "religion," he means Christian religion. A Buddhist with his Nirvana may be- a pessimist, so may a Shintoist or a Taoist or a Confucian, but we who believe in Christ, believe in the "value of existence," and the '"victory of virtue." . A Great Bishop v. ■"'• Once upon a time our dear and truly dreadful '■-- newspapers used to tell us that (except ourselves) ( there were no people under the sun to compare with our J beloved German, cousins. . - A little later -the same papers' changed their minds and called, their cousins

Huns and told most amusing and ridiculous lies about them. Whatever about the newspapers the fact is that the Germans are a great people, as they recently proved, and we have had no reason whatever to change our mind concerning the fact that there is no more genial, hospitable, intelligent people on earth than the Rhineland and Bavarian Germans. The best vacations we have ever had in our Lehrejahren were spent between Koeln and Muenchen, we. frankly confess that we hope to revisit the country before the Last Post is sounded over us. The German Catholic clergy are especially admirable, for their learning, thoroughness, kindliness, and charity. And the bishops as a body are beyond praise. Of one of the greatest of them W. H. K. writes in the London Tablet : ~ "The German diocese of Rottenburg, which, fifty years ago was ruled -by Bishop Hefele, the learned historian of the Councils of the Church, is still the See of a Bishop no less illustrious in the realms of literature, the venerable Dr. Paul Wilhelm von Keppler, who celebrated his seventieth birthday on September 28. Bishop Keppler has shepherded his immediate flock since November 11, 1898. And for many years past his widely read and voluminous writings have carried the influence of his teaching beyond the bounds of his own diocese—' so weit die deutsche 'lunge .Jdinc/t, und Gott im iHmmel Lieder singt.' Largely of a more popular character than, the great historical work of his predecessor, the writings comprise pictures of travels such as ' Im Morgenland,' in its fifteenth thousand ; ' his ' Wanderf ahrten und Wallfahrten im Orient,' in its twenty-fourth thousand ; many volumes of sermons and homilies ; ~ and such favorite spiritual works as ' Mehr Freude,' in its 175 th thousand, and its companion volume, ' Leidensschule,' in • its 60th thousand. Bishop Keppler's publishers, Messrs. Herder and Co., are appropriately bringing out a volume of selections fi\>m his work ' Aus Kunst und Leben/ Many of his readers will join in wishing the venerable Bishop, in the title words of his most popular work, ' Mehr Freude.'"