A Great Work.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXX, Issue 11, 13 March 1902, Page 29

A Great Work.

A great Catholic work by one priest is thus described in an address delivered the other day in London by Very Rev. Canon Mclntj re on the ' Social Action of the Catholic Church ' :—: — ' Let a man go to the readingroom of the British Museum. Lot him visit its sacred quarter, the region where its theological books are placed. He will lind an immense Catholic work, the collection of the Abbe Migne, lording it over that whole region, reducing to insignificance the feeble Protestant forces which hang upon its skirts. Protestantism is duly represented, indeed „ the librarian knows his business too well to suffer it to be otherwise. All the varieties of Protestantism are there. But how are ail these divided against one another, and how, though they were all united, are they dwarfed by the Catholic leviathan, their neighbor. Majestic in its blue and gold unity, this fills shelf alter shelf and compartment after compartment. Everything is there in that immense collection ; religion, philosophy, history, biography, arts, sciences, bibliography, gossip. The work embraces the whole range of human interests ; like one of the great middle-age cathedrals, it is in itself a study for a life. Like the net in Scripture it drags everything to hand, bad and good, lay and ecclesiastical, sacred and profane, so that it be but a matter of human Goncern. Wideembracing as the power whose product it is, yet that vast and varied library of Catholic writings contains only the books edited by one priest ; and, stupendous as it is, it is only a faint reflex of the countless treasures of human life contained within the pale of the Catholic Church.'