VALUABLE AID.

Auckland Star, Volume LXXI, Issue 217, 12 September 1940, Page 9

VALUABLE AID.

STUDY OF HISTORY. EFFECT OF CHRISTIANITY. History as a valuable aid to the study of modern affairs was stressed by Ms Honor Mr. J-is£ice O'Regan, in the course of an address delivered by him at the meeting of the Catholic Men's Luncheon Club to-day. Hβ said history was a subject from which we might derive with little labour a great deal of intensely interesting knowledge, because it tended to repeat itself. Hence many of to-day's problems could be solved by its aid. The study, however, should be approached in the proper spirit, and as the supernatural was the more important element in man it could never be eliminated from the question. Accordingly, the greatest fact was the rise and progress of Christianity, but it was impossible to consider Christianity apart from the Mosaic dispensation which preceded it. Indeed, Christianity was but the development of the message given to Abraham and the prophets. Free Republic. "Our Saviour Himself eaid He came not to destroy the Law but to fulfil it," said his Honor. "Contrary to all human experience, the Mosaic Commonwealth with its free republic, its prohibition of slavery and its periodical redistribution of land grew out of the night of Egyptian despotism. Compared with its contemporary civilisations, the Mosaic Commonwealth was conspicuous for ordered freedom and political righte." The Christian message, his Honor went on, was really the extension to mankind of that originally given the Hebrew race, and thus the Bible was the Magna Charta of mankind. The speaker was aware, of course, that there were many scholars—at the head of them Gibbon—who had endeavoured to eliminate the supernatural element from history. Before approaching Gibbon's masterpiece, "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," the man himself had to be considered. While β-till a university student Gibbon had become a Catholic as a result of reading Bossuet's "Variations." His father had] then threatened to disinherit him and had placed him under the tutelage of a non-Catholic clergyman. That clergyman did his work so thoroughly that he not only freed hi* protege from Catholicism but also eliminated every vestige of Christianity. Became a Sceptic. Thus Gibbon became a sceptic and as such wrote "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," with an incidental reference to the rise and progress of Christianity, which he attempted to explain by giving five merely human reasons. Nevertheless, Gibbon admitted . that Christianity had been responsible for the organised rescue and baptism of infants abandoned by their parents. As if such an action was possible without a supernatural element, said the speaker. "Imagine the man who would say that the sisters attending the lepers on a Pacific island were inspired by human motives only,*' said his Honor. He added that modern critics should remember that Christianity was the mother of Parliaments. Representative ' government was unknown in the ancient world, and so he held that the dictatorships with their slavery were a reversion to barbarism and were inevitably doomed to failure.