Current Topics AT HOME AND ABROAD.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXVII, Issue 46, 16 November 1899, Page 1

Current Topics AT HOME AND ABROAD.

The synods and assemblies and so forth wanted : of our separated brethren are at one in, their A condemnation of the godless system of scheme. public instruction. But they are at sixes and sevens when it comes to a question of finding the remedy for its rank and evil-smelling godlessness. They have been for a long time searching Jerusalem with lamps for ' a scheme which shall meet with the general approval ' of the 1 Christian ' (that is Protestant) Churches, but thus far the search has been as fruitless as that for the philosopher's stone. The situation has its humorous as well as its serious side. To our mind one of the worst features of the deliberations of those non-Catholic assemblies upon the question of religious instruction in the State schools is their serene and thorough -paced and selfish ignoring of Catholic rights, the Catholic conscience, and the Catholic attitude in the matter. A droll feature in the crusade is alluded to in the synodal address of the Bishop of Nelson, who is evidently calmly unconscious of the humour of the situation : It is the elaborate plans of campaign drawn up by the Anglican synods of Auckland and Waiapu, and added to by the speaker, and bundled up and ticketed and pigeonholed and ready for that apparently far-off day when the nonCatholic denominations in the Colony shall at last have agreed upon a scheme which is to extract the poison out of the godless system of State instruction. There is one palpable remedy which seems to have quite escaped the notice of synods and assemblies and councils alike : to go and do as the Catholic body has done — to build and equip and maintain their own schools and teach the rising generation, according to their own idea, how to live and how to die. This is what Catholics have been doing for over a quarter of a century in New Zealand, while the synods have been a-synoding and the assemblies assembling and the councils a-councilling, and the net result of all their deliberations has been words, words, words — vox et prceterea nihil. Let the heavily-endowed Anglican and Presbyterian bodies for just two years make one-half of the relative sacrifice that their far poorer and less numerous Catholic fellow-colonists have done for so long, and the education difficulty will speedily solve itself. Meantime we offer for their comfort the plain following refreshing sample of the philosophy English. of plain speaking. It is from the columns of a non-Catholic paper, the Newcastle Herald (N.S.W.). Referring editorially to a statement of Cardinal Moran's in point, it goes on to say :—: — ' There is a common lament among Protestant denominations that a religious indifference has sprung up in their ranks. This is the result of the present secular system of education ; there is indifference at school, and the indifference is continued into manhood or womanhood. Who will deny the truth of Cardinal Moran's statement, proved as it is by ten thousand evidences everywhere we turn ? " Fear God and honour the king " was the old Conservative maxim, but the average Protestant youth fear no one in the sense that is desired, and honour neither their parents, their Queen, nor their country. Of course the youth will deny it, but they are not the best judges ; the best are their elders, who have seen the terrible sliding down that has distinguished the moral side since first the Education Act came into force. If children are not to be taught to fear God in childhood, how on earth are they to be taught when men and women ? The question is such a facer that it were simply preposterous to attempt to produce an argument against it. Boys and girls go to school, where the name of God is practically tabooed, and the devil given his work to do on every possible occasion, and the result is vicious men and women, steeped in selfishness, narrowness, uncharitableness, and dishonourableness. Fight the question

as we will, it is undeniable that Australians are much worse than they were a generation ago — there is a larger percentage of offences, there is an overwhelming increase in immorality, there is more flippancy, more disregard of the niceness that should distinguish conversation, and more brutality of thought and action. This is noticeable chiefly in the capitals, where the means exist to try and arrest it — the country's legislature. What the people in New South Wales really wanf to spur them to action is a Royal Commission appointed to examine, say, a thousand scholars or so, drawn at random from the different public schools of the colony. The writer forecasts that when the evidence those children would give under close examination was published to the world, parents generally would be so horrified that the reform of the system would become a primary question.' Man is by natural inclination or cultivated the game of and misdirected heredity a quarrelling and war. fighting animal. This is, perhaps, the reason why no story has such a fascination for the average ear as one of life-and-death struggles, gaping wounds and flowing blood, and dead men lying stark upon the trampled field. Apart from motives of high patriotism, the popular interest in war is part and parcel of the passion which brought people to the Coliseum long ago to see men 'butchered to make a Roman holiday' ; which fills the open squares to-day to see perilous balloon ascents ; which crowds the plaza de toros at a bull-fight, and strains the ropes at an exhibition of prize-fighting. It is, briefly, the morbid craving to see, or the hope of witnessing, hard blows and bruises or wounds or flowing blood or falls from the clouds or the goring of picadores and chulos or ' knock-out ' blows or at least the complete and satisfactory ' gruelling ' of a leaden-headed pugilist. The ' civilisation ' of a part of the masses of our population is, apparently, a veneer, more or less thick or thin, which covers over the spirit of the old arena of pagan times. The feeling which still brings men — and used to bring ' ladies ' — to encounters of this kind was wrought upon as follows in a handbill stuck on a house opposite the scene of the prize-fight between Johnson and Ryan. It ran as follows :—: — This is to gif Notes : Man and women may come into this house att 3d a pease too sea the fite betweene the Inglishe Man an Irishe Man whiche aceordinge to Accompts is to be a bloudy one — there be 3 Winders in three one paire Staires so that you well have a fine sighte of the Comboutants— and I have a ball coney for the Ladies at a shillinge a peace. * • * That is just it. The combat was to be a 'bloudy one. 1 And therein lay its chief attraction to the mob. The soldier looks to the military results of conflicts of armed men, the civil historian chiefly to their political aspects. But the man in the street and the war-poet twiddling the light guitar upon his cloudy perch have their eyes focussed — for the time at least — chiefly on the more direct and brutal work of bayonet and rifle-bullet and grape-shot and canister and bursting shell. And they like to see it well and thoroughly done. The military importance of the battle of Gettysburg, for instance, did not strike their fancy so forcibly as the fact that 44,000 men were ' laid out ' upon the field — including 40 per cent, of all the Confederate troops that went into action. In the same way the decisive series of battles that raged around Gravelotte appealed most forcibly to the public mind through the fact that 62,000 men in the prime of life sprinkled the dust with their blood up and about its woody slopes. The man in the crowd feels a grim satisfaction at the thought that every friendly bullet finds its billet somewhere beneath the epidermis of the enemy. Fortunately it doesn't. For the average soldier is nervous or excited or a bit — sometimes a good bit — ' funky ' in battle, and his hand and eye are unsteady, and his aim wild and high. Even now, when he gets within 350 yards of the enemy, Thomas Atkins is ordered to fix bayonets, not so much with a view to carving up the enemy with them as to dip the muzzles of the rifles and so make Tommy ' fire low and lay 'em out.' Every bullet its billet, indeed ! According to the, eminent statistician, Mulhall,

the British fired 15,000,000 shots, the French 29,000,000, and the Russians 45,000,000 in the Crimean War — total, 89,000,000. Well, the British lead is credited with the death of 21,000 Russians; the French with 51,000; and the Russian metal sent the life leaking out of 48,000 allies. It took the Russians 910 shots for every man they slew. The British managed things a little more economically — they killed an unspeakable Russo for every 700 shots they fired. The French did better practice still, and made a Russian soldier's funeral with 590 shots. The average for the campaign was a death for every 740 shots. They had better shooting machines in the FrancoGerman war, but it is doubtful if they used them to better account relatively to their greater killing capacity. The Germans fired off 30,000,000 musket cartridges and 363,000 rounds of artillery. They killed or mortally wounded 77,000 French troops. This was at the rate of 400 shots to every ' kill,' or, relatively, nearly twice the execution wrought in the Crimean campaign. Smokeless powder and small-bore magazine rifles and improved artillery and high explosive shells ought to enable Thomas Atkins to make bull's-eyes oftener in South Africa than ever in all his history, except, perhaps, at Omdurman. However, we shall see. * * * As a set-off, the cost of man-killing has increased enormously since the days of Inkerman — not to go back any farther. Engineering and invention have, in fact, made the phlebotomy of battle so expensive that it may ultimately work for good in the minds of the tax-payers when the question of declaring war is under consideration. In the old days of the Roman Empire, for instance, Julius Caesar could fit up a galley for a cost not exceeding £1000. A modern battle-ship absorbs a cool £1,000,000. If a galley were rammed and sent to the bottom, and, say, 400 lives swallowed up in the salt water, the cost per man sacrificed would be £2 10s. The loss of a battleship and a like number of men would cost the tax-payers £2,500 for every soul sent to Davy Jones's locker. The magazine rifles in use in South Africa are sufficiently formidable weapons, in all reason. The British Lee-Metford carries eight rounds, the Mauser (the Boer weapon) five, of those long pencil-shaped bullets which are capable of passing through seven ranks of men at short range. They do not simply perforate a bone. They set about their work in much more determined fashion. A medical authority says that ' the part is always pounded, fragments are frequently carried out through the wound of exit, which is commonly converted into a gaping orifice, the muscles are pulped, and, in fact, the limb mangled and damaged beyond repair.' And all this at a mile from the levelled muzzle which guided its flight. Thus far the combatants in South Africa are very roughly estimated to have inflicted on each other a total list of 7206 casualties (Including 2398 deaths), and the public are impatiently awaiting the big-scale slaughter that is expected to follow the arrival of the British reinforcements. The pecuniary value of the lives lost in this avoidable campaign is an item in the butcher's bill which few stop to consider. And yet it figures up largely in the reckoning. Many years ago, in his thirtyfifth annual report, the British Registrar-General estimated the value of a Norfolk agricultural labourer at the age of 25 years to be £246. The life-value of a Boer farmer or a British or New Zealand artisan is probably much higher than this, and the deaths upon the battle-fields of South Africa already represent probably a good round £1,000,000. Add to this the probably vastly greater percentage of deaths from sickness — that knock the starch so completely out of a soldier's patriotic ardour — and you come across a dire accompaniment of war to which no amount ot Press huzzaing and band-playing and smart tailoring and Press - censorship can ever reconcile Thomas Atkins, whether he hails from the Seven Dials or from the Australian bush or the genial shores of New Zealand. The Peculiar People have a short history Private judg- They are a modest twig or branch of the ment : Faith-healing trunk, and first sprouted in THE theory London in 1838 — the jear which, by the way, and witnessed the great riots at Broughton (Kent), THE practice, occasioned by a long-bearded, wild -eyed spouter named Thorn, who professed to be the Saviour and drew about himself a band of violent simpletons who worshipped him as the Son of the Most High. The Peculiar People hold fast by two chief tenets : ' the right of private judgment ' and the rejection of medical aid in cases of disease — but, strangely enough, not in surgical cases. When a Peculiar Person gets whooping-cough or typhoid fever or cholera morbus, his friends give the doctor a wide berth and place their whole trust in prayer, anointing with oil (an unconscious tribute to a Catholic and Apostolic practice of a different kind and intent), and patient and persevering nursing. We learn, however, from Truth that a split has arisen in the little camp of the Believers. Some weeks ago one of the elders had three children seriously ill. His anxiety to save the lives of his little ones led him to reconsider his ' private judgment ' as to his duty in the circumstances. He therefore abandoned the principles of his sect to the extent of summoning

a physician. Net result : He was adjudged guilty of rank heresy and deposed. A number of adherents of the Peculiar People have followed him, and one of two results will follow : Either the abandonment of the doctrine forbidding the employment of physicians, or the addition of yet another sect to the eight hundred and more jarring creeds that are torturing the atmosphere of England with their discordant cries. * * ♦ The incident is not worth recording except in so far as it throws a fresh flash of search-light upon the worthlessness of the principle which is supposed to underlie the whole superstructure of Protestantism. We refer to the principle of individual private judgment as applied to the interpretation of the Scriptures. The Reformers were entitled to hold the patent of this doctrine, for it was their very own, and (in American phrase) a brand noo idee. Before their time— as an obvious matter of history— there had always been a Church formally claiming and exercising the right to teach with authority. Till the Reformation there never was a dissentient voice against this principle of the living and authoritative teaching voice of the Church of Christ. Everybody agreed that • the Church ' was a divinely appointed religious teacher, however much they might differ as to which really was the Church. Heretical bodies tried from time to time in the early and middle ages to claim the authority of the true Church. They taught false doctrine, but they always held that the Church established by Christ had power to teach. And — to the best of their little power— they did teach, or tried to teach. The Arians, the Nestorians, aud the rest fancied that they were the true Church founded by the Saviour, and that the strange doctrines they taught were the genuine interpretation of the message which He left upon earth for men. But in the sixteenth century men cut themselves adrift from the pulsing centre of Catholic unity on quite a new principle. They did not claim to be the the witnesses appointed by Christ, the real Church established by Him, the legitimate continuation . of the society founded by Him. No. They struck out on a new line all their own. They claimed to have discovered an altogether new method of reading and interpreting the Scriptures. They fancied the new plan better than the old one of authority which all Christendom had unanimously accepted for the first fifteen hundred years of Christian history. They did not claim to be themselves (he Lord's witnesses ; but they did insist that they knew more ?nd better about it all than the witnesses He had appointed. That is just the length and breadth of it. • * • But, as a hard matter of fact, there has never been, there is not, and there never can be, in any Christian corporate body such a thing in actual and unrestrained practice as this boasted principle of private judgement. Luther's system was merely a scheme of theology which he had devised by his own reasoning and interpretation of Scripture. He exercised to the full the so-called ' right ' of private judgment. But, then, he promptly set about preventing anybody else doing the same by using the secular arm where necessary and compelling the acceptance of his religious theories at the point of the sword. Calvin, too, exercised the • right ' of private judgment. He set no limit upon himself, and at length formulated his system of theology. He then set about penalising the exercise of private judgment by anybody else. He made Geneva an inferno by his despotic rule ; he sent men to prison for adverse criticism of his sermons ; he banished them for daring to impugn his doctrines ; he made ' heresy ' (of which he was judge) a capital crime ; and he burned Servetus at the stake, with his books hung to his girdle, for a difference of opinion with him over a single point of theology. A similar course of suppression of private judgment was pursued by John Knox in Scotland, and by Henry VIII., Cranmer, Elizabeth, and the whole body of Reformers in England. Many English Puritans — who were Calvinists — fled from persecution in their own country and settled beyond the wide Atlantic in New England in order to enjoy their ' right of private judgment ' in peace. But they took particular care that, so far as in them lay, this ' right ' should be a close monopoly. They persecuted with uncommon vigour, and, says the Protestant writer Seebohm, ' under the rule of the Boston "saints" there was as little religious liberty as at Geneva.' The same remarks hold true of Norway, Sweden, etc. * * * Sects of later growth have denied to their adherents the exercise of private judgment as persistently in practice as they have asserted the • right ' in theory. They profess to listen to no living authority. But, as a matter of fact, each and all of them have their unwritten law, their traditional interpretations — in other words, their living code and teaching — from which they will permit no radical departure. Their • view ' of Scripture is very carefully laid down. The inspired Writings are to be looked at in this light and no other. Their followers may interpret the Bible in their own fashion, but — they must not find therein anything which clashes with the living traditions of their body. Any departure from these— especially in the direction of ' Romanism ' — would raise the whole sect up in arms against the ' innovator.' And thus we have the deposition of an elder among the Peculiar People ; and heresy

trials (as in the case of Dr. Briggs and Rev. Mr. Ferguson) among our Presbyterian friends-; and so on. We do not blame them for this, except in so far as they are inconsistent in proclaiming a right and at the same time refusing the exercise of it to its logical extent. For by the nature of things there never has been and there never can be a living organised religious body held together by such a perpetually shifting principle as that of private judgment as applied to the interpretation of the Scriptures. We say a ' living organised body,' and not merely a collection of human particles flung together nap-hazard, without any bond of union or relation to a common centre, or power of united action. The non-Catholic denominations are organised corporate bodies only by virtue of that living code of teaching which they, in theory, repudiate, and which is, nevertheless, a practical condemnation of the principle of private judgment and a tacit, though unacknowledged, appreciation of the great Catholic doctrine of the teaching authority of the Church of Christ.