Used their Money Well

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXI, Issue 34, 20 August 1903, Page 18

Used their Money Well

There are men whom money owns as well as men who own money. The former are the bond-servants of their money-bags of • almighty gold.' ' Shame and woe to us, if we our wealth obey ; The horse doth with the horseman run away.'

But those "who own money may make their wealth a blessing by knowing what to do with it. The late Cardinal Vaughan was one of these. He spent princely sums upon the spread of religion, the cause of charity, the beautifying of his noble Cathedral of Westminster, and, though endowed with a substantial family patrimony, his whole estate at his death has been valued at the modest pittance of £743 4s. Many an Australian workman has 1 cut up ' financially better than this gentle Prince of the Church. Like Cardinal Vaughan, the late Archbishop Eyre, of Glasgow, was the scion of a wealthy family. He inherited a big slice of the funds of the Eyre family. Out of these family shekels he built and bestowed upon the Glasgow archdiocese an ecclesiastical seminary which cost him, in round figures, about £40,000. And for over thirty years he gave to the Catholic Church, in Glasgow his incomparable services absolutely without fee, reward, or return of any kind, even for the most necessary household expenses. And all the time (said one who knew him well) he disbursed from his private) means ' a stream of benefactions which God and His angels and the recipients may know of, but of which the world knows nothing and shall never know.'

The Catholic ecclesiastic does not pile the shekels high and hug them to his breast till death relaxes his grip. He usually dies with about as much as suffices to decently coffin and inter his lifeless clay. Many of our readers will recall Archdeacon Slattery, of ' the free and flashing sword.' Great sums passed through his hands during the long years of his missionary career at Geelong and elsewhere in Victoria. He died recently, penniless, and Geelong is marked all over with monuments of his unselfish zeal and generous charity. Dean Donaghy, of Melbourne, poured the greater part of his life-long income into the noble pile of St. Patrick's Cathedral. The rest found its way into the hands of the poor. He died possessed of eighteen pence. This circumstance led a Melbourne non-Catholic paper to remark that Dean Donaghy always owned eighteen pence, more or less, but that as soon as he found he had more he parted with the surplus to the first poor man he met. All this has an important bearing on the editorial remarks made by us recently regarding a certain bantam quarterly that appears in Westport.