Notes

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXVII, Issue 5, 4 February 1909, Page 182

Notes

The. Secular System: A Disscussion The attention of our readers is directed to pages 170173, on which appear two further instalments of the series of articles on - The Secular Phase of our Education System ' which the editor of this paper is contributing to the Otci(jo Daily Times. A misconception as to. the late Bishop Mor an's action in. regard to the secularising of the public schools of this Dominion found expression in a recent issue of the Otayo Daily Times. It will be dealt with at tho proper time in the course of the series of articles referred to above. Value of Confession ' During over sixty years,' said the late Lord Russell j*£-Eillowen in a letter to the London Times, ' I have made certainly more than 1700 confessions, to hundreds of different confessors, and in various countries, and I have never discovered herein any trace of wrong or harnf. In addition to my belief in a priest's power of absolution, which as a Catholic, I hold, I have found that the duties incident to every confession of making a careful examination of my conscience, an express and vigorous mental act of sorrow and a firm resolution to avoid sin, most useful; and though theso mental acts may be made without intending confession, the habit of confession certainly causes many of them, which would otherwise not be made. My experience of confession have, so far as man can judge, been those of ray mother, sisters, wife, and daughters, and of many female friends, and I have always noticed in myself and others that, devoutness and regular attendance at confession and at holy Communion, which it ordinarily precedes, ebb and flow together.' Coquelin . * A brief cable, message in last week's daily papers announced the passing of Coquolin the elder, the famous French actor and monologue entertainer. Coquelin left a deep impress upon the French theatrical life of his day, with which he was associated from 1861 till the past year. Our acquaintance with him was entirely connected with his triumphs as a monologue entertainer in the middle eighties. Coquelin was a practical Catholic, and one of the pieces which Avon him' warm applause was a poem, written and recited by him, and entitled ' Si le bon Dieu n'existait pas ' (' If the Good God did not exist '). la terms calculated to reach the heart of the humblest, he pictured the anarchy and chaos that society would fall into if it lost faith in the great Creator and Judge. One of his verse-on dings finds a rather lurid moral in the * apacheism ' that, for a good while past, has been giving anxious nights to the atheist rulers of the Third Republic : 'Ca contrarierait les gendarmes si le bon Dieu n'existait .pas ' — ■it would be rough on the police if there were no GoQd .God.' Converts Some time ago we announced the conversion cf a learned Protestant missionary who had spent a considerable

part of his life and work in the city of Mexico. A recent issue of the $.2?. Review contains the following further information from the same city : 'At the San Lorenzo Church for English-speaking Catholics on November 26, the Apostolic Delegate to Mexico conferred the Sacrament of Confirmation on a large class of candidates, -amongst whom woro "twenty-six converts who have been received into 'the Catholic Church since the foundation of San Lorenzo parish four years ago.' Explains Many Things 'Mr. J. E. C. Bodley, the English author, and Mr. J. N. Brodhead, the special correspondent in France of the Sacred Heart Beview, have,' says the Casket* (Antigonish), ' told us that the French Government keeps its grip on the people by giving some office or another, great or small — -and Frenchmen are so frugal in their habits that scai*cely any salary- "is too small to live on — to a member or a relative of almost every family in the country. Mr. Bodley once put tho number of officials directly in the pay of tho State at 800,000. Edward Drumont, in " a recent "number of the Libre Parole, gives the exact figures. Or January 1, 1906, they were 703,566; on January 1 1907, 870,559; on January 1, 1908, 913,192.- And he sees no reason why the number should not exceed the million by January 1, 1909. And this with a decreasing population.' Another Blunder Some time ago we devoted an editorial article — which, by the way, has gone the rounds of the Catholic noivspaper press in the English-speaking world — to the ludicrous blunders that occur at times in non-Catholic re^portors' descriptions of the ecclesiastical- functions of the Church. They are a joy-giving race, and their malapropisms are ever perpetrated with the utmost good faith and the kindliest intention. The Glasgow Observer adds to our list another gem of purest ray serene. Our gifted contemporary takes it from one of Kensit's ' penny dreadfuls,' entitled St. Mary's Convent, a Thrilling Tale of Nunnery Life. It is down to the customary level of illiteracy of that class of Rawhead-and-Bloody-Bones fiction. But its very first page is relieved by a description of a monastery in Spain where, in the evening, ' the Mass for the dead was performed with all its accompanying ceremonial of incense and requiems.' ' Why spend threepence a week,' asks the Observer, ' on Punch, whon a penny will purchase a " Kensit Special"?'