BLINDNESS.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume IV, Issue 173, 21 July 1876, Page 10

BLINDNESS.

Victor Hugo speaking lately at a meeting in Paris, said : " "We come here to celebrate the festival of peace and love. Of the Christian Easter we make the popular Easter." The speaker has exhibited himself to the world in the double role of poet and politician ; as a poet, whether writing in verse or prose, he ranks high ; as a politician he has proved himself to be alike wicked and ridiculous. ' We can understand how it may easily occur that men of , brilliant genius can take wroug views of people and things.

Jt is not difficult for them to throw the golden hues of iheir imagination around some character or some event, and looking at it thus embellished to see in it beauties which in no way belong to it ; thus it frequently happens that we find poets and men remarkable for their powers of mind deifying the unworthy, and esteeming as heroic that which is mean and worthless. But it appears to us not at all so easy to account for the deposition on their'part of that which is indeed beautiful and excellent. The idea of universal peace^and of brotherly love extending itself on all sides is no doubt a fine one, but to entertain it sincerely in sight of the present aspect of things, there would indeed be need of a glowing imagination. This in fact JyfW- Hugo possesses, and therefore perhaps he in good faith is of the belief that a reign of brotherhood is about to commence, and expand throughout the world. We cannot, then, censure him for holding so much of his creed ; what we find fault with is that he should confer upon his vain imaginings a beauty superior to that which truly exists in Clirit>tiuuity. It is to us, in common certainly with all Catholics, a mystery how any man capable of studying the religion of Christ can fail to recognise its exceeding excellence. Yet so it is : the " popular Easter " is preferred before the " Christian Easter." An impossible resurrection of the nations shuts out from sight the true resurrection of Christ, in which all hope dwells. The dry bones of the prophetic vision are declared to be about to arise, but the word of God, wherein life consists, is forbidden to be breathed amongst them. Yet Victor Hugo does not stand alone in his folly ; there are many who join with him, each in his own particular W|iy. There are many who would gladly persuade us that up to this we have all been in darkness, that the great deeds of the olden tia.es all went for nothing, that the great men, and heroes, and saints, who then were revered, lived and died in vain, not having beheld the glare of the present day. Some would even have us believe that the glorious voice of the Church of God has been an empty sound, but that the hour draws nigh when the " scrannel pipe" of some petty preacher will make itself heard with fruit where this, they say, has failed. All these have their part in the " popular Easter." Not only those who are actively engaged in warring against revealed religion, but they also, who believe themselves its warmest advocates, while they applaud anything that tends to weaken the influence ot the Church. They are in truth, whatever they may suppose, and wonderful is their blindness in not seeing that they are, but doing their best to pave the way for the advance of the opinions of which Victor Hugo is an apostle, and of that " popular Easter " when the nations shall arise, not to peace and brotherly-love, but to anarchy and license.