Manipulated Arguments.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXX, Issue 8, 20 February 1902, Page 1

Manipulated Arguments.

Manipulated Byron had a splendid contempt for the frowsy writers of his time who ' perverted the prophets' and had ' iust enough of learning to misquote.' Misquotation is one of the ungentle arts which the Catholic apologist is called upon to denounce with painful frequency. It is the great weapon of the assailant of the Catholic Church. Even men of the calibre of Dr. Salmon have fallen under the spell, and his book on The Infallibility of the Church is fairly peppered over with misquotations, garblings, and misrepresentations of the writings of Catholic theologians. In a recent controversy we exposed the scandalous dishonesty of no fewer than fourteen alleged •quotations' from Catholic sources. Another sweeping exposure has recently been made in the Month and the Edinburgh Catholic Herald of the fraudulent nature of a series of alleged 4 extracts' which were supposed to prove that the Jesuits teach the doctrine which was really introduced by Luther that * the end justifies the means.' The further discussion of the subject before a committee formed by the Referee at the instance of a Jesuit Father will be watched with interest. It will be calculated to give unusual publicity and, perhaps, something like finality to the exposure of this hoary slander.

One ' reference ' in support of this calumny was given by the untrustworthy Littledale and Cartwright to a work by a little-known Jesuit writer, Wagemann, who was alleged to have laid down the monstrous doctrine in plain, set terms in the words ' Finis determinat probitatem actus.' It was, of course, suspected that the alleged quotation was, as usual, a secondhand one. In the latest issue of the Month to hand this suspicion has been verified. Littledale and Cartwright evidently drew the phrase from a violently anti-Jesuit work published at Celle, near Hanover, in 1874, entitled Doctrina Moralis Jesuitarum (The Moral Teaching of the Jesuits). It was written by a declared enemy of the Jesuits — who signed himself ' Old Catholic ' — and consisted of the usual collection of ' faked ' and mutilated ' extracts ' from the works of Jesuit writers. Among these is the phrase 'Finis determinat moralitatem actus ' — ' the end determines the moral character of an act.' But the anti-Jesuit writer had enough honesty left to state that the phrase is to be found only in the index, that it lays down no doctrine of any kind, but merely refers the reader to a portion of the work where the subject is formally discussed. Littledale and Cartwright coolly suppressed this vital information, and the result has been a wholesale and scandalous misrepresentation of Wagemann's actual teaching. They are clearly themselves firm believers in the principle that 1 the end justifies the means.' A copy of Wagemann's rather rare book states the doctrine, in the place to which the reader is referred, in the following words :—: — ' The goodness or badness of actions is chiefly to be sought under three heads : namely, the object [or action itself], the end, and the circumstances. For an object to be good, it is required that these three should be all good ; for it to be bad, it is sufficient that any one of them be bad, according to the principle — bonum est ex Integra causa, malutn ex singulis defectibus. . . . All employment of an evil means is evil ; but, on the other hand, it does not follow that all employment of a good means is actually good.' This is, of coarse, the ordinary teaching of Catholic theologians. And thus another stock ' quotation ' of the antiCatholic controversialist gets its charge of dynamite.