Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXVIII, Issue 1, 4 January 1900, Page 1

Current Topics

AT HOME AND ABROAD.

In his History of the Church 0/ England, the the Anglican bishop, Dr. Short, laments the jubilee practically complete lack, in the Established year. Church, of ' ecclesiastical law for the restraint

of vice.' No such complaint can be laid at the door of the Catholic Church, even though the ancient rigour of her penitentiary code has been time and again relaxed to suit the lessening virility of eider-down eras that have well-nigh forgotten the moral and disciplinary value of pain and discomfort. An equal — perhaps even more notable —slackening of the reins of ecclesiastical discipline forms one of the most conspicuous features in the history of practically every form of Christianity that took its rise in the great religious revolution of the sixteenth century. This is especially notable in the Calvinistic Churches of Geneva and Scotland, which at one time regulated — with appropriate penalties — almost every public and private relation of their adherents, from articles of faith down to articles of dress, and from blind-man's-buff to the use of curling-tongs. The decay of the sturdy vigour of the early days of the Catholic Church set in with the middle age 1 ;. It was probably due as much to a weakening sense of the enormity of sin as to the slow encroachment of the gospel of comfort and the natural dislike of the average specimen of humanity to either take the cross upon his shoulders or to drag it at his heels. Before the twelfth century the long and thorny penitential practices of the early days of the Church had — to meet the relaxed conditions of the time — to be commuted into pilgrimages and other good works of a still less strenuous nature, such as prayers, fastings, almsdeeds, etc. Another substitute for the sharp rigours of the old-time discipline was the plenary indulgences such as were granted to crusaders, to those who took up arms for the defence of the Church against its enemies, to those who went on pilgrimages to the Holy Places, and to those who fulfilled the conditions requisite for the gaining of the jubilee.

The Catholic jubilee is in a sense analogous to the jubilee of the Jews in so far as it is ' a year of remission ' — but it is a remission to those who are truly penitent, and fulfil the proper conditions, of the guilt and of the temporal and eternal consequences of sin. The first jubilee year was a.d. 1300. It was proclaimed by Pope Boniface VIII. This great churchman and pacificator ordained at the same time that every hundredth year thereafter -should be likewise a year of jubilee. In 1343 Clement VI. reduced the interval to 50 years ; Urban VI. to 33; and Paul 11. (in 1470) to 25. From the days of Pope Sixtus IV. (1471-1484) the 25th year jubilee has been interrupted only once. That was in the troubled days of Pius IX., in 1850. We are now fairly launched in the jubilee that marks the close of the present century. It was proclaimed on ' last Christmas Eve at the close of the solemn ceremonies which accompany the opening of the Porta Santa or Holy Door of Jubilee which stands walled-up on the right hand side of the great vestibule of St. Peter's in Rome. This door is never opened except for a universal jubilee. On Christmas Eve the vestibule — which measures 468 feet in length, 66 in height, and 50 in width — was turned into a temporary chapel, and the jambs and lintels of the Porta Santa were cleared of masonry, in the presence of a great throng who had the privilege of securing tickets for the reserved space extending from the great bronze door to Cornacchini's statue of Charlemagne. The remainder of the ceremony is thus described by Cardinal Wiseman : • After preliminary prayers from Scripture singularly apt, the Pope goes down from his throne, and, armed with a silver hammer [this year it is a massive golden hammer, presented by the Catholic hierarchy ot the world] strikes the wall on the doorway, which, having been cut round from its jambs and lintel, falls at once inwards and is cleared away in a moment by the San Pietrini. The Pope, then, bare-headed and torch in hand, first enters the door, and is followed by his

cardinals and his other attendants to the high altar, where the first vespers of Christmas Day are chanted as usual. The other doors of the church are then flung open and the great queen of churches is filled.'

Sir Arthur Helps foundered his literary the big reputation by loading his books far beyond battalions, the Plimsoll-mark with weighty reflections on all sorts of subjects, from grave to gay, from lively to severe. A good example in point is furnished by th^ heavy moralising in which he indulged when one fine day in 1859 he computed, after a vast deal of figuring, that the armies of Europe numbered no fewer than 2,000,000 fighting men. It is unnecessary to repeat his observations, or any of them, here. We will merely remark that his estimate was below the mark, and that the craze for vast armaments soon got so strong a grip upon the Continental military mind that within 30 years Europe had become a vast armed camp, with 50 per cent, more men on a mere peace footing than it could raise on a war footing in the troubled days of 1859. According to Mulhall, the standing armies of 12 principal European countries as far back as 1851 were, in time of peace, 2,195,000. By 1859 the number had considerably increased, owing to the war in the Crimea, the troubles in India and China, and the threatening aspect of affairs in the Italian peninsula. In 1889 — just 30 years after the publication of Sir Arthur's scandalised reflections — the peace strength of the same countries had risen to 2,975,000 men. On a war footing they could muster a grand aggregate of 8.266,000 wisps of cannon-fodder. In the same year the 18 countries ol Europe had a total of 3,352,000 men under arms as a State insurance against war, and in the event of hostilities could call out no fewer than 9,366,000 soldiers with sufficient knowledge of the business to drill at least after a fashion and pull a trigger somehow.

It seems to be generally understood that this mania for bloated armaments is one of the follies peculiar to our century. Forty-eight years before Christ, some 23,000 men changed the world's history at Pharsalia; 31,000 altered the map of Europe at Oe"cy in 1346 ; it took about 100,000 men to decide the fate of Waterloo in 1815 ; and in 1870 close on half-a-million men fought on each side at Gravelotte, and the line of battle straggled over hill and dale and forest for more than 30 miles. So far good. But were not great armaments known to antiquity as well — in the days of lance and spear and bow and moving phalanx and flying rabble ? The hero of the Chinese novel, the Flowery Scroll — which Sir John Bowring gave to us in an English dress — leads thousands and slaughters by the halfmillion ; but if the chroniclers of old are more reliable in their figures then Abderahman commanded 300,000 men at the battle of Tours in a.d. 720 ; Darius 750,000 in his war with Alexander, B.C. 332 ; and Xerxes no fewer than 1,800,000 when he set forth to wipe Greece out of the little map of the world as it was known 480 years before the Saviour's infant eyes first saw the world's light at Bethlehem. Where is the modern craze for bloated battalions to end ? Perhaps as it did with Xerxes and Darius. Who knows? But there are military experts who think we shall soon see an end of it all. Lord Wolseley said in 189 1 : — ' Give me 20,000 fanatics, and I am by no means sure that I could not take them through the Continent, regardless of any numbers that might be put upon the field against them.' He explained, with a laugh : 'Of course this is nonsense if you take it too literally. But you have no conception of the terror which 20,000 resolute men, who always go forward and never turn back, would have in the hearts of armies many times their number.' Which reminds us of what Marat said to Barbaroux just a hundred years before, in 1791 : ' Give me two hundred Neapolitans armed with daggers, and only a muff on their left arms for a buckler, and with them I will overrun France and accomplish the Revolution. 1 'There is,' says Lord Wolseley, ' a great deal of hollowness about modern armies. The real soul of the army consists of comparatively few.' Some 20,000% of these 'comparatively few,' properly trained and led, might concetv*

ably cause as great a scare as 20,000 fanatics and do a vast deal more execution on their way. Such, in effect, would seem to be the opinion of Captain Otto Berndt — an Austrian staffofficer—in his recent work, Figures and War. He is not overthusiastic as to the value of those stupendously vast agglomerates of armed men. ' Perhaps,' he says, ' some Alexander or Buonaparte may arise who, at the head of a small army of picked men, may fall upon that heavy and unwarlike mass, and may disperse them in all directions. Then nations may perhaps revert to the system of armies small in number but composed of trained men, and perhaps they will let those men have the exclusive privilege of a trade which, after all, is not congenial to peaceful citizens.' A consummation devoutly to be wished for !

The duties of a priest, especially in large catholic centres of population and in periods of deadly army epidemics, constitute an apprenticeship to chaplains, courage which is likely to serve him for the term of his natural life. Men with such a schooling ought — other things being equal — to make ideal military chaplains, gifted with a valuable stock of pluck that would stand them and their charges in good stead amidst the thousand chances and perils of the camp and the battle-field. The Dublin Fusiliers seem to have such a man in Father Matthews. His portrait tells nothing of his story, but a glance at the merry round face and twinkling eye reminds you of Alfred Percival Graves' lines on ' Father O'Flynn ':—: — And though quite avoidin' all foolish frivolity, Still, at all seasons of innocent jollity. Where was the play-boy could claim an equality At comicality, Father, wid you ? We should be surprised if Father Matthews has not 'a wonderful way ' with him in dealing with the ' boys.' ' Mr. Dooley' maintains that bravery depends altogether on how a man's blood is pumped. Lavater and the physiognomists and the phrenologists and the novelists as well have a theory of quite a different kind. And if they are not very much at sea, the square, firm chin and the massive maxillaries which adorn the counterfeit presentment of the Irish chaplain ought to indicate the possession of a good supply of strong determination and of the courage which looks without winking into the barrel of a levelled hostile Mauser at point-blank range. At any rate, we were not surprised to know that the chaplain of the ' old Dubs ' was out at the front with his men on that wild and blundering night when the boulders came thundering down the slopes of Nicholson's Nek and set the baggage mules all crazy. The Daily Chronicle has the following remarks in point :— If a Roman Catholic chaplain, and not a Protestant chaplain was included in the Boers' great take of prisoners this week, the easy contrast need imply no disparagement of the absentee. The special desire entertained by Roman Catholics for ' benefit of clergy ' at the hour of death renders superfluous any other consideration as to the forwardness or backwardness of the army chaplains of the two creeds. All the same, the pluck of the Roman Catholic chaplains has become a serviceable tradition among the troops ; and Father Matthews, when we went out with the capitulated battalions, was only following the example set by Bishop Brindle, D.S 0., by Father Bellord, who was wounded at Tel-el-Kebir, and by Father Collins, who, when found in the front rank at the same fight, had to plead that his horse had bolted and borne him there. ♦ My horse brought me here,' said Father Collins when a superior officer demanded what brought him to the firing-line at Tel-cl-Kebir. But Tel-el-Kebir, Atbara, Omdurman, El Caney, Gravelotte, or Fredericksburg — it is all the same : the Catholic chaplain generally contrives to find himself where the bullets sing and the stricken men go down.

In the United States, as in Great Britain, the record o* the Catholic army chaplain has been a glorious one. Just now some American papers have been making ' odorous comparisons ' between the patriotism and self-sacrifice of the Catholic chaplains and the selfishness of a number of their non-Catholic confreres who, when ordered to the Philippines, have resigned or applied for and secured their retirement, or otherwise pleaded excuses for staying near their am fireside. One can well understand and excuse all this in a married clergy, who are held to home by ties that are or ought to be stronger and more intimate than those that bind them to country. Catholic chaplains have nothing to stand between them and the highest and noblest deeds of self-immolation. They can afford to be less squeamish than the married clergy about the earthquakes and the fever-jungles of the Philippines and the bullets of Aguinaldo and Aguinaldo's men. An American contemporary of November 25 says : ' Rev. W. D. McKinnon, the Catholic priest who served in the Philippines with the California Volunteers, and who is now a chaplain in the army, has offered a contrast to the action ot these clergymen by applying for duty in the islands again, but he is the only chaplain now in this country who has done so.' The Daily Chronicle has guessed aright the chief reason why the Catholic ' boys ' like to have their chaplain near at hand when

the bullets sing and the jagged fragments of shell dance and scream about them. Never, perhaps, was the value of the Catholic chaplain more enthusiastically appreciated by the military authorities than during the great American Civil War of the sixties. ' The war,' says an American author, 'had in it nothing more remarkable than the religious devotion of the Irish Catholic soldier whenever he was within reach of a chaplain. The practice of their faith, whether before battle or in retreat, in camp or in bivouac, exalted them into heroes. The regiment that, in some hollow of the field, knelt down to receive, bare-headed, the benediction of their priest, next moment rushed into the fray with a wilder cheer and a more impetuous rush. That benediction nerved, not unmanned, those gallant men, as the enemy discovered to their cost.' In the face of death a clear conscience often creates a hero where a bad one ' makes cowards of us all.'

A clear conscience undoubtedly contributed to make such splendid heroes of the pious but ill-armed band of Zouaves who fought for Pope Pius IX. under Major O'Reilly at Spoleto and under General Lamoriciere at Castelfidardo. And apart from the national love of 'a rale purty bit of a fight,' the presence of their priests upon the field played a great part in producing the wonderful elan and magnificent dash which characterised the Old Irish Volunteers and Meagher's Irish Brigade and the Ninth Connecticut and the famous Sixtyninth New York and ' Billy Wilson's Zouaves ' and the other Irish regiments on both sides during the course of the great American struggle of the sixties. The sabre-cuts of General Rosecrans and his men were none the lighter nor their charge less gallant because they made the sign of the cross and invoked the blessing of heaven before setting foot in stirrup. When a battle was impending the Irish-Catholic soldiers prepared for eventualities by approaching the Sacraments, and their chaplains were kept busy day and night. Here is what an American officer had to say of one of the Irish regiments :—: — • Their chaplain — a plucky fellow, sir, I can tell you — had extraordinary influence over them ; indeed he was better, sir, I do believe, than any provost-marshal. They would go to Mass regularly, and frequently to confession. 'Tis rather a curious thing I'm going to tell you ; but it's true, sir. When I saw those Irishmen going to confession, and kneeling down to receive the priest's blessing, I used to laugh in my sleeve at the whole thing. The fact is — you will pardon me? — I thought it all so much damned tomfoolery and humbug. That was at first, sir. But I found the most pious of them the very bravest — and that astonished me more than anything. Sir, I saw these men tried in every way that men could be tried, and I never saw anything superior to them. Why, sir, if I wanted to storm the gates of hell, I didn't want any finer or braver fellows than those Irishmen. I tell you, sir, I hated the " blarney " before the war ; but now I feel like meeting a brother when I meet an Iribhman. I saw them in battle, sir ; but I also saw them sick and dying in the hospital, and how their religion gave them courage to meet death with cheerful resignation. Well, sir,' — and the great grim war-beaten soldier softly laughed as he added — ' lam a Catholic now, and I no longer scoff at a priest's blessing, or consider confession a humbug. I can understand the difference now, I assure you.'

It is just a matter of association of ideas. plague and And Pick's and Feinaigle's and Grey's and tobacco Otto's and Loisette's memory systems have smoke. accustomed people to find strange and sometimes incongruous associations between ideas that have apparently no possible memorial link between them. We are reminded of this by a double announcement that appeared in a Dunedin daily a few days ago to the effect that the plague had reached Melbourne and Sydney, and that the Emperor Menelik of Abyssinia had become an honorary member of the French Anti-tobacco Society. The association of plague and tobacco may be sufficiently evident to the nonsmoker. To the smoker they are poles asunder. And yet there is not a mere imaginary or sentimental, but a historic link connecting the two at one part of their history. We learn of it from the garrulous pages of good old Sam Pepys' Diary. He tells us how the 'almighty weed ' was used as a preventive against the infection of the great plague which swept down upon London in May, 1665, and in six months of terror carried off 100,000 people. Underdate of June 7of that year we find the following entry in the famous Diary :—

The hottest day that ever I felt in my life. This day, much against my will, I did in Drury Lane see two or three houses marked with a red cross upon the doors, and ' Lord have mercy upon us ! ' writ there ; which was a sad sight to me, being the first of the kind that, to my remembrance, I ever saw. It put me into an ill conception of myself and my smell, so that I was forced to buy some roll tobacco and chew, which took away the apprehension.

It was the old idea that tobacco was a valuable medicine— before the weed became better known. So during the continuance of the plague, nurses, dead-cart men, frightened citizens of every class, and physicians loaded the pestilent

atmosphere with tobacco-fumes, and the sanction of the medical art of the day gave a vogue to the weed which is one of the chief causes of its popularity in English-speaking countries to the present day. The supposed medicinal value of tobacco long remained a tradition in Great Britain. In Defoe's tale of Robinson Crusoe we are told that it is ' a cure both for soul and body,' and that ' the Brazilians take no physic but their tobacco for almost all distempers.' The Gentleman's Magazine for January, 1788, while condemning its excessive use, recommends it as a 'stimulant,' and declares it 'a valuable article in medicine.' Mauyat, in his Faithful yaco&yattributes the stoical indifference of Indians under torture to the soothing influence of tobacco-burning.

The fascination of what Ben Jonson calls * the most sovereign and precious weed ' is, and is likely ever to remain, a mystery to the uninitiated who, like ourselves, only retain a far-off and fading memory of a few stolen pulls of rank ' pigtail " which, to use Dickens's words, would ' quell an elephant in six whiffs/ and which left us as if we ' lay in a ground-swell on the Bay of Biscay.' And yet the fascination is undoubtedly there. It has been celebrated a thousand times in prose and verse, but, curiously enough, it has found, thus far, none to analyse it as De Quincey analysed the lurid charm of the opium habit, or as another writer — a far-off imitator — did for hachish -eating in a bizarre little book. The Anatomy of Tobacco by ' Leolinus Siluriensis ' is a well-meant attempt, but it does not 'fill the bill.' Charles Lamb was 'a fierce smoker of tobacco.' So was Thackeray — he calls it ' sublime ' and entitles it • the great unbosomer of secrets.' Cowper, Guizot, Victor Hugo, Thomas Buckle, Cruikshank, Byron, were all strong devotees or slaves of the weed, and all sounded its praises in vague generalities in prose or verse. Dickens toyed with it. Tennyson never sang — as Lamb did — the glories of ' Bacchus' black servant, Negro fine.' But he loved his Virginian and drew it in long, contemplative whiffs out of a ' common day,' and once left Venice in disgust because they had no tobacco there to suit his exacting taste. So, at least, he told Earl Russell. The famous French caricaturist, Gavarni, was an inveterate smoker. When in his sixty-fifth year (in 1866) he lay on his death-bed, he is stated to have made this verbal will to an old friend : ' I leave you my wife and my pipe. Take care of my pipe.'

On the other hand, Voltaire, Rousseau, Mirabeau,all waged war on tobacco. Charles Fourier, the noted French socialist, roundly declared that ' the nation that smokes perishes.' The French writer and critic Stendhal (Marie Henri Beyle) denounced it as an enervating habit. Swinburne once ' got off ' the following at the Arts Club, London :—: — James the First was a knave, a tyrant, a fool, a liar, a coward. But I love him. I worship him, because he slit the throat of that blackguard Raleigh, who invented this filthy smoking. Ruskin has unmeasured scorn for those who ' pollute the pure air of the morning with cigar-smoke.' The late Mr. Gladstone avoided the touch of the weed as he did the plague. And in his Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes gives the following bit of friendly advice to budding youths who fancy manhood is incomplete without the adornment of a pipe :—: — I do not advise you, young man, to consecrate the flower of your life to painting the bowl of a pipe ; for, let me assure you, the stain of a reverie-breeding narcotic may strike deeper than you think, for I have seen the green leaf of early promise grow brown before its time under such nicotian regimen, and thought the umbered meerschaum was dearly bought at the cost, of a brain enfeebled and a will enslaved. With the Wahhabee Arabs idolatry is the greatest crime. Smoking comes next in the order of enormity. So, at least, Palgrave tells us in the second volume of his Journey through Central and Southern Arabia. The Abyssinians gave up the smoking habit during the successful missions which were preached in that country by the Portuguese Jesuits in the seventeenth century. They have not since resumed it. And hence Menelik's adhesion to the principles of the French AntiTobacco Society. * * * We may appropriately conclude this random bit of tobaccotalk with the following quaint moral lyric on the weed. It was written by Thomas Jenner — a friend, by the way, of Samuel Pepys— and was published in 1631 in one of Jenner's works, entitled the Soules Solace : — This Indian weed — now wither'd quite, Though green at noon — cut down at night, Shows thy deo:y, All flesh is hayThus think and smoke tobacco. The pipe so lily white and weak Doth thus thy mortal state bespeak, Thou art c'en such Gone with a touch — Thus think and smoke tobacco.

And when the smoke ascends on high Then dost thou see the vanity Of worldly stuff Gone with a puff 1 — Thus think and smoke tobacco. And when the pipe grows foul within, Think of thy soul begrimed with sin ; For then the fire It does require ! — Thus think and Bmoke tobaoco. And seest thou the aßhes cast away, Then to thyself thou mayest say That to the dust Return thou must : — Thus think and smoke tobacco.