'Superstition'

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXVI, Issue 23, 11 June 1908, Page 22

'Superstition '

A Northern contempotary rails in a superior way *at what it is pleased to term the ' superstition ' of believers in the old verities of the Christian faith. When we find a secular contemporary flailing ' superstition ', we forthwith turn to its advertising columns. And there we usually find enough dynamite to knock its ' superior ; sort of homily into smithereens. The -case under consideration here proves to be no exception to the general rule". In two columns we find the paper making itself thrice the sounding-board of ' superstition \ the platform of the fortune-teller, the ' astromathematician ', and the ' clairvoyant ' medical impostor. It rather discounts the verdict of a paper when, side by side with its loftily-expressed scorn of ' superstition ' in religion, we -find it making itself the medium of propagating some of the worst" and most fraudulent forms of superstition. - Butler tells us ' how ' Augustus having, b oversight, Put on his left shoe 'fore his^right, Had like to have been slain that day By soldiers mutiny 'ng for pay '. ' People who have ,not entirely lost the sense of humor can afford a merry laugh at the opera-bouffe ' philosophy ' that denounce the Augustan superstition in one column, and sells it at six shillings an inch in the next. Our secular contemporaries that flail ' superstition ' should, for sweet consistency's sake,' eliminate it from their advertising columns. • :