New Zealand Tablet. Fiat Justitia. FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 1876. A SIGN OF THE TIMES.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume IV, Issue 188, 3 November 1876, Page 10

New Zealand Tablet. Fiat Justitia. FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 1876. A SIGN OF THE TIMES.

— ++ — t Our attention has been forcibly attracted to the manner tjk which the non-Catholic Press has received the report of the difference said to have arisen between the noted "evangelists," Messrs. Moody and Sankey. Whether such a difference exists or not, it is not to our purpose to inquire ; nor do we care to examine into the matter, so far as to discover whether, in case of its existence, it denotes so complete a condition of hypocrisy on the part of the gentlemen alluded to, as certain editors appear to assume. We shall merely, en passant, observe that a falling-out on a question of business is not to us so suggestive of " picking and stealing, evil speaking, lying and slandering," as it seems to be to many of our contemporaries ; and, to our mind, there is nothing cheering in the fact (if fact it be), that persons supposed to be actuated by high motives turn-out deceivers and charlatans. Tabtufe is, to us, an execrable character ; nor do we r«*joic€ to behold him — le pauvre homme ! — multiplied upon the face of the earth. Our position as Catholics is unassailable : it is founded jan. the truth ; and as it cannot be lowered, even by the defalcation of its adherents, so neither can it be exalted by that of those who are opposed to it. Therefore, we feel no pleasure when we hear that men, whom we always knew to be mistaken, but who, we still believed, might probably be sincere, have proved to be false to the principles they professed. But what it concerns us now to discover is, what it is that has set so many pens a-going in exultation over the reported down-fall of two remarkable exponents of a certain creed styled, and believed by numerous persons to be, evangelical. Nor, if we mistake not, will it be necessary for us to seek far for the true cause. In reading the works of Catholic authors, it is not uncommon to meet with passages which confidently predict the true end of the so-called Reformation to be infidelity. However positive might be the creeds that men, calling themselves reformers, should set up, and however enthusiastic the adherence given to them by those who adopted, or who were educated in them, they would certainly end in entire negation of all religious truths. The religion known as Protestantism would last a certain space, but its duration was marked, and its extension limited. It would not only never become universal — of which, in Catholic minds, at no time was there any doubt — but it would never even be very widely extended ; and thus we Catholics have always been inclined merely to smile at the attempts of Protestants to pervert to their tenets the inhabitants of Catholic countries : our sorrowful forebodings having been reserved for infidelity, from which the real danger arises — that is, danger of destruction to souls, but not to the indestructible Church of God. The time seems vow to be close at hand when we shall see the foresight of the authors, to whom we allude, fully justified; day by day proofs are being multiplied that Protestantism, as a religion, has all but collapsed. Its appointed course is nearly run, and it is being rapidly merged in infidelity. The thin disguise of Christianity that at first clad its adherents is passing off ; and the period is not far distant at which once more the Catholic Church will stand on one side, and they who make no profession of a belief in Christ on the other ; and there will be no medium. It has been recognised by non-Catholic writers, as well as by Catholics, that the movement they call the Reformation was but means to an end. Protestantism, says Carlylb, has produced " German literature and the French Revolution ;" and he evidently expects it still to produce effects even more transcendental, but whether these effects may be qualified by the term Christian or not, let our readers judge ; and it is with the influence of the lief orniation upon the world's Christianity that we have at present to do. It is certainly very evident that the movement begun by Luther was not, as it purported to be, a bringing back of things to an original state of purity from which it was pretended that, in some way altogether incomprehensible, they had been corrupted, but a leading of them iuto a path which should conduct them to a termination quite other than that to which they had before tended, and the excellence of which is differently appraised, according as the men who judge of it are followers of Christ or not so. That new ter-

noination is the casting off of all the obligations of Christianity, the apotheosis of the human understanding and sentiments, and an unbridled license of thought and action ; and at this goal we are now arriving. We read the indications of this in many things ; in great matters (and likewise in small. Such an indication, of the lesser sort, is the attitude of the Press towards this Moody f and Sankey business, whether it be true or false. Why should writers in the newspapers conclude that their readers would be pleased by hearing that men supposed to be exemplary Christians were after all but cheats and humbugs %—% — We do not refer to Catholic readers, or to the Catholic press, in which we have seen no allusion to this matter. — Surely we are not at liberty to suppose that it is in itself a pleasant thing to convict men of hypocrisy, nor to believe that in the present instance the charm especially lies in this. No ; the fact is, it is a relief to these people to admit that a system, with which in their hearts they have no sympathy, has failed in its much vaunted representatives. They dislike it, and the slight belief they still accord to it is involuntary — an uncomfortable effect of long habit and early training — and they are anxious to shake it off altogether. They have been afforded an opportunity of further weakening it by the defalcation of these famous preachers and they seize on it with avidity. And hence it follows that the manner in which the non-Catholic press has taken up this, matter of Moody and Sankey, whether it be just or whether it be unjust, is a sign of the times.