'Loyalty'

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXV, Issue 16, 18 April 1907, Page 9

'Loyalty'

' What name ', asl<s Vinet (the Swiss Protestant - theologian and literary critic) ' shall he given to the citizen wfoo braves the law ? The word <is easily found ; he is seditious, rebellious, in the eves of the law. But laws themselves are sometimes rebellious to the eternal principles of righteousness '. Such, for instance, is~T>he law which has made the celebration- of the Mass a crime (' delit de Messe ') in lodge-ridden France. It is not truly a law, but an aot of tyranny against <the individual conscience, and an 'outrage upon the eternal rights of God. The rights of conscience are no mere civil grant. They are rights of the Creator; against which no man and no human organisation have any rights. They are rights of the spiritual order, which is anterior and superior to the civil order. They cannot be surren-. dered. They canncrt be taken away. Every Government is bound to respect them, by the very law which justifies its own existence. Such so-called laws are (to' quote Vinet' & words) 'rebellious to the eternal principles of righteousness '. They are ' ultra VHres '. Reasoned and proper defiance of them is a meritorious act ; fear, in the conflict .between Christ and 'anti-Christ, one must rather obey God than man. That is the answer to the Paris ' Matin ' and its echoes in London and the echoes of its echoes in New Zealand, which affect much pious indignation, with the hierarchy and clergy of France because they have not sufficient l loyalty ' to fall in like dumb dojrs with the orousions of the atheistic campaign for the banishment of Christ from that • machine, '-ruled land. Artemus Ward,'advised Lincoln to fill his Cabinet with showmen— 1 they haifr't got any principles.', said Artemus in explanation. On a/, somqwhat similar principle, Waldeck-Rousseau, Combes, and Clemenceau have packeS their Qabinets wholly with the enemies of religion, partly with the foes of social order. The result of their handiwork is . before the world— in the grand battue to banish Christ and Christian, principles from the land. * But in all that revolting campaign against religion, there- is nothing more revolting than the hypocritical cant (manufactured for export only) aboat ' liberty, equality, fraternity '— and -' loyalty ' to ' law '. '