The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 4, 1909. CATHOLIC EDUCATIONAL SACRIFICES

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXVII, Issue 5, 4 February 1909, Page 181

The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 4, 1909. CATHOLIC EDUCATIONAL SACRIFICES

fN the course of his sermon at tho opening of tho Father Lewis memorial school at Blenheim on last Sunday, the Archbishop of Wellington laid his finger upon what is, perhaps, the most impressive external fact in the religious life of this Dominion. He pointed out that not alone do Catholics pay their fair quota of the heavy cost of a secular system of public instruction which they cannot in conscience accept; but (added his Grace), although only one-seventh of the pojmlation, we have created and maintained a system of religious education, that the absence of this system would represent a State payment of about £40,000 per annum, and that, during the pasl twenty-five years, we have saved the pockets of the taxpayers of Now Zealand to the tune of about one million sterling. In other words, New Zealand is, in a very real sense, practically exploiting the Catholic conscience, to tho great profit of the general taxpayer. It is one of the glories of the Catholic Church that she has never lowered her code of personal and domestic virtue; neither has she half-masted her ideal that religion is an intimate and essential part of education properly so-called. ' "We needs must love the highest when we see it, Not Launcelot, nor another ' — God, ' the highest ' permeating education, and ' not Launcelot or another, 5 not the dried husks of religion, nor yet the secular idea which drives out the Creator from His own and turns the school into a sort of agnostic academy. "Whatever others may do or omit doing for Christ's little ones, we have our mission in this regard, and it behoves us to set our "hands thereto and never slack or faint by the way. Antonio Stradivari's violins are worth to-day many times their weight in. gold; for the famous maker put heart and brain and hand into his work, — he is well represented as saying fti the poem : — . ' If my hand slacked, I should rob God — since He is fullest good — Leaving a blank instead of violins.'

So should we, but vastly more, if our hands slacked in this noble cause of religious education. And therein all can aid, and the hand that does its due service, however small, contributes to that harmony of development which fits tho child for his destined placo in tho kingdom of heaven.

A few years ago a prominent New York Protestant clergyman, the Rev. W. Montaguo Geor, D.D., -warmly advocated the Catholic solution of the education difficulty in the course of a 'letter to the Sun. 'Here,' said he m this connection, ' is the opportunity for Protestants of all kinds to cry aloud : * This would be playing into the hands of the Roman Catholics. It is what they havo l)een demanding for many years past." Granted; but would it not be playing into their hands nearly as much as we are noAv doing by allowing them a substantial monopoly of t3ie whole field of Christian education, and of all the blessings which are sure to flow from the noble self-sacrifice they are making rather than wantonly expose their children ~to tlie inroads of unbelief? If the writer is nob greatly mistaken, unless our affairs take a turn for the better in the sight of Him Whose parting commission to His Church Avas "Peed My lambs!" . . . for the rehabilitation of our institutions, we shall ho flying, as frightened doves to the windows, to the Roman Catholic Church, which, in troublous days, will stand for law and order and for the highest morality.'