The Earthquake Again

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXVII, Issue 6, 11 February 1909, Page 209

The Earthquake Again

An Auckland correspondent sends us a cutting from some unstated paper. It contains a brief paragraph m which a preacher is reported to have described the recent earthquakes in Sicily and Calabria as a ' visitation ' upon the hapless people of those regions for tlieir sin of adherence to the ' superstitions' of ' Rome.' Of course the Almighty might now, as in the past, employ natural forces for the punishment of sinners. But, in the first place, it is rather a large assumption that belief in the teachings and principles of the Catholic Church is a sin at all, much less the sort of sin that demands a big earthquake for its punishment. In the second place, if the Almighty were to punish ' Romish' belief in this or any such way, it is rather hard to understand how that belief came unscathed through the ages, and how it is still the numerically greatest in its adherents, and the most powerful religious influence "upon the face of our planet. Again: it is by no means clear that the preacher aforesaid is on buttonholing terms with the Almighty, and in the secret of His intimate councils. Moreover, there is this rather obvious explanation of it all: that the Sicilians and the Calabrians built their cities and towns upon a quaky area, where the thin, mobile surface of the earth is more than usually subject to the bangs and bumps of the great - seismic forces that are at work below, People who go to war must not be surprised if a bullet finds a billet in thorn now and then; those' who wont to Hamburg a few yoars ago know that they took cholera risks; people who build housos in earthquake areas, whether in Tarawera or Messina, must not be surprised if the quakes quake under them now and then.- And Providonce must not be lightly expected to save them by a special interposition from the risks Avhicb, they run. Thore are other and more human© and more merciful lossons to be derived from the groafr Sicilian-Calabrian calamity tlTan th<3 making a peg of it upon which to hang a string of question-begging attacks upon the oldest and groatost Christian faith. How curiously, in this matter of public calamities, history repeats itself! Among" the pagan Roman populace in the days when Christianity was omptying the temples of Jove and Minerva and tho rest of the Olympians, every catastrophe that occurred was pronounced by tho preachers and tho populace of the day to be duo to the presence of the Nazareno enemies of the gods. 'If thovTiber asconds to the walls,' said the contemporary Tertullian (Apol., xl.), 'or if the Nile docs not overflow the fields, if the heaven rofuses its rain, if the earth quakes, if famine and pestilence desolate the land, immediately the cry is raised: " The Christians to

the lions!"' In" a later day, St. Cyprian could write in the same strain in his letter against Demetrian, andArnobius in the first book of his Apologia. "St. Augustine (de'Civitate Dei, ii., 3) could write that the following saying became a proverb among the pagans of Rome in his "time (the fifth century): ' There is no rain; tlie Christians -are the cause.'- And Locky.tolls us in his History of European Morals (12th cd., vol. ii., p. 408) that 'in three or four instances the persecution of the Christians may~ be distinctly traced to, the ' -produced in, the paganmind by earthquakes. It is a curious. cpmment on the enlightenment of our time to find clergymen echoing from the Christian pulpit against Catholics'in the calamities of to-day practically the same crude illogicalities \that were hurled by pagans at our fathers in the faitli during the catastrophes of fifteen to eighteen centuries ago. And yet •' the world do move.' ' ~~