Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, 18 September 1913, Page 21

Current Topics

A Debate on the Education Question Through the incautiousness of a reverend bigot of Melbourne the Catholic Federation in that city have been given a splendid opportunity for vindicating and ventilating the justice of the Catholic claims in regard to the education question, and they have very promptly taken advantage of it. The Eev. Joseph Nicholson, who is perennially attacking the Catholic Church,* • offered in a letter to the press to debate with a representative of the Cathojic Federation the •' equity ' — he expressed it —of the educational claim made by the Catholic people. The Federation at once called upon him to state in exact terms the proposition which he was prepared to affirm, whereupon Mr. Nicholson replied with an affirmation embodying not one but two propositions in the following words That the Roman Catholic claims for financial aid from the State Treasury towards their denominational schools are not just, and would be destructive of our State system.' Obviously, the second proposition is an entirely new one, having no necessary connection with the original statement, since the Catholic claim might, be absolutely just and might at the same time be destructive of a particular existing State system. The Federation therefore asked Mr. Nicholson to adhe- 1 e to his original challenge to debate the ' equity ' of the Catholic claim; and, on receiving a refusal from that gentleman; the Federation offered to debate his original proposition in the follow - . ing slightly altered form: ' That the Catholic claims for financial aid from the State Treasury towards their schools are (a) not just, and (b) would be destructive of a State system of education.' After much backing and filling on the part of Mr. Nicholson, who evinced a marked unwillingness to face the music, the Federation, rather than allow him to escape from his rash . challenge, agreed to debate it exactly as stated by him in the terms above quoted, and we understand the debate is now definitely arranged. Six representatives of the Federation have been appointed on the joint committee to arrange details; and a representative has 'been selected to defend the Catholic position who. is well qualified to do the subject justice. Given a ■thoroughly capable and impartial chairman, an instructive and Valuable discussion will eventuate; and we await the result with much interest and with every confidence. More Misrepresentation In a letter to one of the Wellington papers the other day Mr. A. R. Atkinson declared that after his recent experiences nothing that Canon Garland could do would surprise him; and there are a . good . many others in the community who have arrived at the same state of mind in regard to the actions and methods of the reverend gentleman. His latest exhibition of unscrupulous ' slimness ' occurred in connection with the recent Bible-in-schools deputation to the Prime Minister. Mr. Massey asked for information as to the form of the question which the League desired to be submitted to the electors if a referendum were granted, whereupon Canon Garland replied: ' The best answer he could give was that in the question should be included the principle that every child should have the opportunity of reading Bible lessons, that every child should have the right of being taught the faith of his fathers, and that that decision should be in the hands of his parents.' The answer is a shamefully perverted statement of the facts of the ' Australian ' "system and , of the League's officially printed demands. The card :*\ which is being officially circulated by the League for signature by its supporters states the ' Objective' of the League to be the ' system of religious instruction in State schools prevailing in Australia'—the system, it is added, as it exists in New South Wales, Tasmania, Western Australia, and Queensland. The Education Acts of these States, as has been again and again pointed out, provide not for the mere reading of Bible

lessons by the children but for the giving of 'religious teaching' or 'religious instruction' by the teachers the children are examined in the subject matter of the lessons administered by the teachers, and are awarded marks according to the degree of knowledge displayed; and one of the most experienced of ; the New South Wales inspectors has reported that it is only in those cases in which the teachers 'dwell with judicious force and impressiveness on such points of religion and morals as the lessons inculcate,' that they are of any benefit to the children. As an official League.pamphlet shows, the lessons are, in cases observed and reported by the Rev. A. Don, given ' in the manner of a first class Bible class teacher.' It may suit Canon Garland, for his present purpose, to pretend that all that is asked for is that the Bible- lessons should be read by the children, while the teacher, stands away in a corner and looks on; but the deception is not likely to go down with members of Parliament or with intelligent electors who have taken the slightest interest in the general press discussion which has taken place on the subject. More .«Popery ' Some of the members of the Auckland Presbytery appear to be extraordinarily and somewhat unintelligibly sensitive on the subject of 'Popery.' According to a paragraph in the daily papers a suggestion that some of the verses of the well-known hymn ' Abide with me' should be deleted was put before that body by Mr. W. J. Rees last week. The hymn, written by Mr. 11. F. Lyte and very happily set to music by Dr. Monk, was probably, he said, the most popular of evening hymns. As written it consisted of five verses of great, beauty, but when the Church Hymnary and Church Praise had been issued by the Presbyterian Church it had been found that an unwarrantable addition had been made by some person.' Mr. Rees urged that some action should be taken with a view to preventing the verses from appearing in any future edition of the Hymnals, and urged that their use should be discountenanced at the present. The matter, it is gravely added, is to be considered. ' - * The verse which is specially taken exception to runs thus: :" ' Hold Thou Thy cross before my closing eyes, Shine through the gloom,' and point me to the skies; Heaven's, morning breaks, and earth's vain shadows flee; In life and death, O Lord, abide with me!' That invocation and aspiration would seem harmless enough, but it appears that the reference to the crucifix as the symbol of . salvation is regarded as savoring of 'Ritualism' and of 'Rome.' As the Presbytery are to 'consider' the matter we commend to their favorable notice the method adopted by the Rev. S. Baring-Gould of disposing of a similar objection urged against one of his compositions. This author submitted to his Bishop, for episcopal approval, the manuscript of his now well-known hymn ' Onward, Christian Soldiers'; and when the Bishop read the lines ' Onward, Christian soldiers, Marching as to war, " With the Cross of Jesus Going on before,' he immediately took exception to this undisguised reference to the crucifix. Whereupon the author at once re-wrote the lines, and asked his . Lordship how this would do: 'Onward, Christian soldiers, • Marching as to war, With the Cross of Jesus ~ ' . Left behind the door.' The Bishop hurriedly withdrew his objection, and the verse was printed as originally written.

«Our Protestant Faith ' and How it is Defended ;■:.■■.'.: Under the title of ' Our Protestant Faith,' our Presbyterian contemporary, the Outlook, is reprinting, for the edification and building up of its readers, a series of Sunday evening addresses which were delivered by the Rev. J. Stephens Roose, M.A., at the Presbyterian Church, Upper Tooting, England, and which have since been publisned in volume form. We have read the series so far as it has yet appeared ; and so far as the references to Catholic doctrines and practices are concerned these addresses surpass, in point of shallowness, inaccuracy, and lack of first-hand and scholarly acquaintance with the subject, almost anything that we have ever read. It is amazing that an educated minister should preach or write such superficial stuff; and it is deplorable that honest and well-meaning Protestants, such as the Outlook and its readers must be presumed to be, 1 should be '.' built up on such wishynvashy and even poisonous pabulum. * For these addresses are not merely unscholarly and inaccurate are characterised by the grossest and most shameless garbling and misquotation. As an illustration in point, let us take the address on ' The Open Bible' as it appears in the Outlook of July 1. At the outset we are met with the following ' gem of purest ray serene'-: 'lf a Roman Catholic has a Bible in his house, and if he presumes to read it "without a license"—a thing very difficult to obtain, by the way,—the officers of the Roman Catholic Church will decline to pronounce the absolution of his sins until he has handed the dangerous Book, the Bible, to the priest in charge of the church which he usually attends. •Thus a man who keeps or reads the Bible is regarded as a wrongdoer, and, as a rule, before Mother Church will receive him into her bosom once more, he will have to go through some prescribed form of penance.' Passing by this nonsensical and flagrant falsehood, we come upon the following shocking and disgraceful piece of garbling. ' A striking admission,' this preacher has the hardihood to say, is made by Cardinal Wiseman in his Lectures on the Principal Doctrines and Practices of the Catholic Church. Speaking from his own experience of those who "have abandoned the Catholic Church and become members of some Protestant Communion," he says: "They all without exception give me but one argument. The history in every single ■case is simply this: that the individual by some chance or other, probably through the ministry of some pious person, became possessed of the Word of God, of the Bible." And he goes on to say that in reading it the reader finds nothing about transubstantiation or auricular confession, purgatory, or the worshipping of images, and that, having heard the arguments of the priest, the man still persists in reading the Bible, with the result that "he abandons the communion of the Church of Rome." This admission is a most damaging one to the position taken up by Rome in the matter. Romanists maintain that the Bible is the Word of God, that in the Bible they find the bases of their faith and doctrine; yet those who read the Bible for themselves are led to abandon the Church of Rome and give up, what they .term, the holy Catholic faith * It will bo noted that the foregoing plainly states or suggests the following ideas:—(l) That Cardinal Wiseman declared that he had had personal experience of numbers of cases in which Catholics had become Protestants (2) that in the passage cited he is stating the results of his own personal experience, and is stating them as an ascertained fact; and (3) that Cardinal Wiseman knew and admitted that those who read the Bible for themselves are led to abandon the Church of Rome and to give up the Holy Catholic faith.' Every one of these three statements or insinuations is absolutely and utterly false. The truth is, as we shall show, (1) that Cardinal Wiseman never uttered a syllable to suggest that he was speaking from his own experience,' but expressly declared that he was giving the story as told in the very few books that have been written by those who have become converts to Protes-

tantism; (2) that in the passage quoted he was giving, not facts known to himself, but merely the alleged history of such conversions as supplied in the books written by the ' converts'; and (3) that so far from saying or admitting that the reading of the Bible has caused many Catholics to become Protestants, his whole contentionwhich is developed at length on the very page from which this preacher's extract is taken—that it was not the reading of the Bible, but a much more fundamental principle, which led the individual to Protestantism. , * I In order to establish our first two points it is only necessary to quote the words of Wiseman leading up to the passage partially cited by this reverend garbler. The passage occurs in the first of Wiseman's Lectures on the Principal Doctrines and Practices of the Catholic Churchy p. 19. We quote from p. 18 the sentences immediately preceding the mutilated extract given by the Tooting clergyman, from which Wiseman's meaning will be perfectly clear. After referring to the works written by men of talent and erudition who had become converts to the Catholic Church in recent years, he goes on to say: ' But I liave also read similar works on the other side, purporting to give the grounds upon which several individuals have abandoned the Catholic Church, and become members of some Protestant communion. It is, indeed, very seldom that men. of any considerable ability, or at all known to the public for their learning, have written such treatises; but, still, such as they are, they have been, in general, widely disseminated. It has been considered important to throw them, in a cheap form, among the public, and particularly among the lower orders, that they may see examples of conversion from the Catholic religion. Now, I have read many of these, and, have noted that, instead of the rich variety of motives which have brought learned men to the Catholic Church, there is a sad meagreness of reasoning in them; indeed, that they all, without exception, give me but one argument. The history in every case is simply this.' Then follows the passage quoted in garbled form by the Presbyterian preacher. The italics in the foregoing are ours, and the sentences so marked indicate quite clearly that in what follows Wiseman is quoting in substance, though not in words, the story of these ' conversions' as given in the ' converts' own books. When he says, ' The history, in every case, is simply this,' he plainly means ' the history as given in the books— by themselves—to which I have referred.' Even the passage cited by this English minister it had been correctly quoteditself contains sufficient to show that Wiseman was merely giving the story of such conversions as ' commonly expressed ' by the converts themselves. We give the passage as it stands in Wiseman's work: ' The history, in every case, is simply this: that the individual—by some chance or other, probably through the ministry of some pious —became possessed of the word of God, of the Bible; that he perused this Book : that he could not find in it transubstantiation or auricular confession ; that he could not discover in it one word of purgatory, or of worshipping images. He perhaps goes to the priest, and tells him that he cannot find these doctrines in the Bible; his priest argues with him, and endeavors to convince him that he should shut up the book that is leading him astray ; he perseveres, he abandons the communion of the Church of Rome- is, as it is commonly expressed, the errors of that Church—and becomes a Protestant.' The italicised words' as it is commonly expressed' —were deliberately and dishonestly omitted so as to fasten on Cardinal Wiseman a ' damaging admission ' Which he never made, and in order to put into the mouth of an honored dignitary of the Church the cheap and>* tawdry sentiments of a devotee of Exeter Hall. ' * .',v : :- : ' <S (3) So far from admitting that those who read the Bible for themselves are led to abandon the Church of Rome,' Wiseman's whole contention is that it was not reading of the . Bible at 'all that led the particular individuals referred to to Protestantism. We take up the quotation at the very point

where it was so dishonestly dropped by this anything but scrupulous controversialist. After the * words ‘and becomes a Protestant,’ Wiseman continues: ‘ Now, in all this, the man was a Protestant from the beginning ; he started with the principle that whatever is not in that book cannot be true in religion or an article of faith —and that is the principle of Protestantism. He took Protestantism, therefore, for granted before he began to examine the Catholic doctrine. He set out with the supposition that whatever is not in the Bible is no part of God’s truth he does not find certain things in the Bible; and concludes that, therefore, the religion that holds these is not the true religion of Christ. The work was done before; it is not an instance of conversion; it is only a case of one who has lately, and perhaps unconsciously to his own mind, had his breast filled with Protestant principles, coming openly to declare them.’ The man who could lift a passage out of its context and by wilful suppression make it convey a meaning directly opposite to that intended by the author is absolutely without conscience. We have only to add that our copy 'of Wiseman’s work is at the Outlook Editor’s service if he has any doubts as to the genuineness of our quotations, or as to the disgraceful fraud which has been perpetrated upon him and upon his readers by this Tooting exponent of ‘our Protestant faith.’