The New Zealand TABLET THURSDAY, JANUARY 18, 1912. II. THE ALLEGED PERSONAL AND CIVIC SHORTCOMINGS OF CATHOLICS*

New Zealand Tablet, 18 January 1912, Page 29

The New Zealand TABLET THURSDAY, JANUARY 18, 1912. 11. THE ALLEGED PERSONAL AND CIVIC SHORTCOMINGS OF CATHOLICS*

* HE Revs. J. J. North and Boys will, of M |P[j course, continue to hold their own opinion ; jr? Ijjc) i that Catholics are largely, criminal and they themselves paragons of morality, and the former reverend gentleman will say that ■' the blame of Catholic criminality lies with the Confessional. But the Rev. - Canon Sr Humble, a Church of England minister, owing in great part to the habit of the people going to Confession and the low tone of morals in —— . is, I fear, to be greatly attributed to the impossibility * Reprinted from a Reply to the Rev. Messrs. Boys and North by the VtA Rev, P. J. Power, Hawera. '• t *

of having recourse to this sacramental ordinance.’ And the historian, ; Lecky, ■ though a Rationalist, and the Protestant historian, Froude, though an enemy of Ireland, use very similar words. Here is another - assertion of one of the reverend gentlemen: ‘ Forbidden to think on the greatest, subjects, the intellects (of Catholics) 1 seem to atrophy.* I am reminded very forcibly of a sarcasm of G. K. Chesterton. He has written A Book for Beginners, containing sentences ready made for men like Horton and Joseph Hocking, in England, and J. J. North and the Rev. Mr. Boys, in New Zealand. This is one of the sentences (l quote from memory): ‘ Adhesion to the doctrines of the Roman Church cramps and atrophys the intellect, witness M. Hilaire Belloc and the Abbe Liszt.’ The point of the sarcasm lies in the fact that Belloc is one ‘ of the three smartest men in England,’ and is a most devout Catholic; and Liszt, the great prophet and Master in Music, was a Catholic in Orders. Poor Mr. North has been badly caught by the sarcasm. « And emboldened by what he takes to be a censure on the Church by Chesterton, who himself is another of the ‘ thre^smartest men in Engand,’ he goes on to say that The first result gf Romanism on a spirited young Englishman is the destruction, of his freedom of thought.’ * But men who . make use of their intellects, and who make faith an act of the - intellect, and thus bring their thoughts to bear upon the most sublime and lofty truths, discover for their own delight that the enforcement of the Creed and the acceptance of mysteries which cannot be proved by experiment, instead of destroying freedom of thought, only secure for man the authority and the right to think. There is such a thing as the suicide of thought; and the human intellect is free to destroy itself; and, for its own protection, both science and religion must enforce certain truths upon it. No man can remain in the science class who persists in ■denying; that two and two make four; and no man can remain a Catholic who denies the possibility of miracles, or that faith makes evident things that are hidden from the five senses. ‘ I have a right in all matters to think for myself,’- will soon become the parent of ‘I have no right to think at all.’ And the motorist who looks upon the danger signals as an intolerable check upon his freedom will soon ride from some mountain spur into eternity. - 1

* Catholic doctrine and discipline may be walls,’ writes Mr. Chesterton, ‘ but they are the walls of a playground. We might fancy some children playing on the flat grassy top of some small island in the sea. So long as there was a wall round the cliff’s edge, they could fling themselves into every frantic game, and make the -place the noisiest of nurseries. But the walls were knocked down, leaving the naked peril of the precipice. They did not ' fall over; but when their friends returned to them, they were all huddled in terror in the centre of the island; and their song had ceased.’ In his chapter on The Paradoxes of Christianity,’ he has in mind the same idea that Newman expressed in his, Difficulties of Anglicans,’ where he shows that the Church left the world the easy task, or, as we should say, the line of least resistance, and faced the uphill fight, herself meeting and overcoming not only the hatred and opposition of the world, but even the greater forces of the very human nature she would regenerate. She had to face dangerous ideas, and that freedom might be exercised without the danger of the suicide of • thought, she had to be most careful in expressing and defining these ideas. ‘ It is exactly this which explains what is inexplicable to all the modern critics of the history of Christianity. I mean the monstrous wars about small points of theology, the earthquakes of emotion about a gesture or a word. It wat» only a matter of an inch ; but an inch is everything when you are balancing. The Church .could not afford to swerve a hair’s breadth on some things if she was to continue her great and daring experiment, of the irregular equilibrium. Once let one idea become less powerful and some other idea, would become too powerful:; It was no flock of sheep ; the Christian ; shepherd was leading, but a herd of bulls and tigers, of terrible

ideals and devouring doctrines, each one of them strong enough to turn to a false religion and lay waste* the world. Remember that the Church went in specifically for dangerous ideas ; she was a lion-tamer. ’ ■ The idea of, birth through a Holy Spirit, of the death of a divine being, of the forgiveness of sins, or the fulfilment of prophecies, are ideas which/any one can see, need : but a touch to turn them into something blasphemous or ferocious. - A, sentence phrased wrong about the nature of symbolism would have broken - all the best statues in Europe, ; A slip in the definitions might stop all the dances; might wither all the Christmas'trees or break all the Easter eggs. Doctrines had to be defined within strict limits, even in order that man might enjoy general human liberties. The Church had to be careful, if only that the world might be careless. This is the thrilling romance of Orthodoxy. It is easy to be a madman: it,is easy to be a heretic. It is always easy to let the age have its head, the difficult thing is to keep one’s own. It is always easy to be a modernist; as it is easy to be a snob. But to have avoided them, all has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect.’ ■ , _’*: - / „ , But, objects Mr. North, the verdict of the great social forces is written in the decay of Catholic lands.’ But it is not the duty of the Catholic Church to make men or nations wealthy and powerful. Is' there not in a great Book some rather pointed reference" to a rich' man, a camel, and the eye of a needle ? Does not that same Book chronicle the sad commentary of the Master V How hard it is for those who have riches to enter the kingdom of Heaven.’ And is there not in it, too, some account of the Great Temptation, when an offer of all the kingdoms of the earth 'and their glory was made to that same Master if He would only fall down before Satan ? Ah ! yes. Even as many clergymen are falling down in abject adoration before the world spirit to-day. There are people who think that ideas are better than money, and that happiness is more desirable than commercial gi eat ness; and the nations that certain reverend gentlemen - think decadent and near their end laugh with a loud and vigorous laugh at these gentlemen’s cheap vulgarity. That one, at least, of these nations has a soul above money and a mind attuned by God to lofty ideas, let these beautiful words ©f Father Sheehan, the great Irish novelist, testify: —‘Celticism is the cry of the spirit, heard of old in our lonely woods and forests, and along our lakes \ and meres, until the southern Celticism, called Catholicism, breathed upon us, and substituted a more subtle spiritualism for its pagan predecessor. .... . The Celts may be- anything else; but they can never be Positivists. Things must have a soul before they can believe . in them and love them. He must make poetry out of arithmetic. He accepts your circles and parallel lines in Euclid but he stretches the parallel lines into infinite space; and he expands your circles until they encompass infinity. “ Tell US a s^or,,, \ say the -children with eager eyes. Tell us a story, , says, the old man crouching over the red embers of his peat fire. It is the Celtic impulse to get away at any cost from the unendurable present, and to bury the imagination in an ideal past. It must idealise. I doubt if there be a word more detestable m the ears of a true Celt than that ominous word, j modern progress.” His home is the mountain in its deepest defiles and recesses, or some lonely cavern where the sea has bitten into the land on the wild western coasts, and where only the walrus and the penguin come. His music is the lonely dirge of the winds that sweep across moorland, or hurry up the glaciered ravines 'of the hills, or rival the deep diapason of the sea, along the ..tortured seaboard. Hisliterature is written in fire and tears the fire and tears of the many martyrdoms, of the past; in the fire and tears of many a hardfought battle in Flanders and Austria and Italy; in the fire and tears of persecution ; in the fire and tears of conquests, unavailable, alas! for Ireland. To these ' his face has ; ever turned. The .past is his worship, his religion, his love. He dare not look forward. And . then, after a dreary prospect of future changes for

Ireland, the old poet turns his mind to the mountaineer watching his she-goats on Slieve Mis, and dreaming of mountain spirits and river • gnomes, n or communing with the supernatural beings that form his religion and command his worship; or the fisherman in his coracle on the high seas, who sees sunken cities beneath the waves, and spirits beckoning to him from the high escarpments of his rock-bound coast, or hears at eventide the tolling of a mysterious - bell that is rocked at every swing of the tide. “Good heavens!’’ cried the old man, forgetting- himself; “ why will you obtrude the unspeakable vulgarities of modern life in such, sacrosanct solitudes ? Why cannot you leave us alone—- to live in our beloved silences, far away, far, far away from the whirr and tumult of your hells and factories, your weaving and spinning, and gathering and spending? We do not trouble you. Why do you trouble us? The things we love are our realities, although you are officious enough to try to teach us otherwise. v Leave us to our dreams- of beauty and holiness while we live. And when we die, let us dream that we pass out to the unknown seas whilst we lie still and solemn in magic and crape-bound barques and are watched over by weeping queens.’’ ’ Yes, the filthy lucre and the unspeakable vulgarities of modern life are the standards by which they would test the worth of a nation of poets and of saints; and when these children of God and of nature don’t sink down to the level of their standard, they turn their Pecksniffian noses into the air and protest to God that they are not like the rest of men. Let them have their butter fat and their barrels of bone manure, so long as I can have my patch of scenery and my sunlit clouds ; but let them .not damn me with Pharasaical anathemas because I have a soul above grease*. * ’ . But let no one think that these ideals are a bar to human progress. . Poetical people may be contributing far more to the prosperity of a nation than those who confound prosperous men with rich men, and national greatness with the roar of commerce. I know I shall be cried down when I pin my faith to the fact that it is the manliness of a nation’s men, and not the tonnage of its ships that makes that nation great, but I can possess my soul in patience, for I know that the world has had to admit 1 this in every past generation, arid will have to admit it in every generation that is to come. The greatness of a country,’ writes the great American thinker, Emerson, ‘ is not so much in the number of its citizens, nor the size of its cities, nor in the abundance of its crops, but in the sort of man which that nation turns out.’ To these let me add the words of Father Robert Kane, perhaps the greatest modern Irish thinker. » However elaborate a civilisation might be, however full in its resources, forceful in its means, widespread in its influence, and magnificent in its gifts, yet its inmost strength was sapped, its very life was doomed, unless there was in the character of its citizens- a grit that would not melt in the > heat of effiminate hours, nor be crushed under the rough tread of dangerous days. Better far for a nation, better for its actual good and for its ultimate success; that it had a more poor prosperity, but a manlier race of men, than that it should have a prosperity richer than ever crowned a nation’s efforts, but a race of men who had neither grit to be pure nor grit to be brave, neither grit to suffer nor grit to drudge, who were bloated in peace and worthless in war.’ * Apply this test of grit and virility.to the Irish; or let Chesterton, perhaps the greatest modern English thinker, apply it for you, and 'you will behold a combination of spirituality and practical success in ’ this most Catholic people, more. inspiring than the- worship of filthy lucre, and the jingoistic panegyrics so dear to the Church’s enemies. Chesterton, who has. been made a defender of the faith of Catholics by their virility of character, which,, he says, must have come from their religion, refers in Authority and the Adventurer, to ‘an imaginary triad of ordinary antiChristian arguments. ~.. . U First, for instance, that Jesus was a gentle creature, sheepish and un-

worldly, a mere ineffectual appeal to the world; second, that Christianity arose and flourished in the dark ages of ignorance, and that to these the Church would drag us back; third, that the people, stilFstrofigly religious, or, if you will, superstitious;such people as' the Irish are weak, unpractical; and behind the times, v; VS When I looked into them, I found, not that the conclusions (drawn from these facts) were unphilosophical, but simply that the facts were not facts. . . It is constantly said of the Irish that they are impractical,i> But, if we refrain for a moment from looking at what; is said about them, and look at what is done about; them, we shall see that the Irish are not only practical, but quite painfully successful, . , No other group in th© British Empire has done so much with such con-, ditions. The Nationalists were the only minority that ever succeeded in twisting the whole British Parliament sharply out of its path. The Irish peasants are the only poor men in these islands who have forced their masters to disgorge.’ ‘ ; -i * Now, after the abolition of the Veto, we can say that these same Irish peasants who had ; killed in Ire-? land that curse of landlordism which in England has killed the peasantry, and which, by converting the farms into sheepwalks, has left- England, as we have learnt from the * strike, in constant dread of starvation through want of those supplies which sheepwalks will not produce, has at length brought hope to the masses of England by removing the incubus of the House of Lords from the breasts of the people. And,’ continues Mr. Chesterton, when I came to Jook at the actual Irish character, the case was the same. Irishmen are best at the specially hard professions—the trades of iron, the lawyer and the soldier. . ' . But, I want to ask, and to ask with an earnestness amounting, to urgency, what is this incomparable energy which appears first in one walking the earth like a living judgment, and this energy which can die with ■ a ' dying j civilisation and yet force it to a resurrection from the dead— this energy which last of all can - inflame a bankrupt „ peasantry , with so . fixed a faith .in justice that they get what they ask,, while others go empty away so that the most helpless island of the Empire can actually help itself?’ He found his answer: it was psychic ; it came from God ; and it brought him to the faith. In the latest number of The Eye-Witness, a weekly review published and edited by Messrs. Belloc, and Chesterton, there ,is a very remarkable ‘ Open Letter to an Idiot,’ from which I quote: — ‘Finally, Idiot, write down and pin up on your wall the following memoranda : . ... (2) Your Country (England) is not the wealthiest country in the world. (7) The Irish people are not sensibly inferior to your--self in the higher faculties of the mind,, and are demonstrably your superiors in wit, organising power, the aptitude for self-government, lucidity of thought, and a knowledge of the modern world. Also they are getting rich.’ Thus, the-silly objections that are urged; against the Church arc brushed aside by men of generous aspirations and of large and cultivated minds. Their eulogy of Catholicism will increase, my dear brethren, your gratitude to God for. the gift of, faith, and will encourage you to. live by faith ; and will suggest to you, my dear non-Catholic friends, the grace and the beauty of the dear Old Mother Church of Christendom. But it will, not succeed in silencing the bigots, for these will still continue to use any weapon,against the Church, even as Mr. Chesterton says, ‘ the swords that cut their own fingers, and the firebrands that burn their own homes.’ ) - *' , t