Notes

New Zealand Tablet, 3 June 1915, Page 34

Notes

« The Priest and the Battlefield ' We have received inquiries from several correspondents as to where they may obtain that most excellent publication, The Priest and the Battlefield, which is being reproduced in our columns. Most of our Catholic booksellers are likely to have a supply of the pamphlet. Failing these, it can always be obtained by application to the Manager, Australian Catholic Truth Society, 312 Lonsdale street, Melbourne. A Soldier's Camel Ride In view of the time spent by our troops in Egypt, the following racy description of a ride on a camel, contributed to the Manchester Guardian by a soldier in Cairo, will not be without interest to New Zealand readers. This soldier may or may not be able to ride, but he can certainly write. ' Before a camel gets down it makes a noise like a sitz bath being dragged along Oxford road at the rate of about four miles an hour. Then it folds its legs under it like a four-fold two-foot rule, and then you start. It's your turn now. You get on its back and its legs unbend, and you clutch and think of all the bad deeds you have ever done, and then open your eves expecting to find the Pyramids far beneath you. The motion when it starts is that of riding astride the banner in a Good Templars' procession, and when the beggar runs it's like being astride the banner in a Bad Templars' procession. It's when a came! gets down that one really begins to see life. Have you ever trodden on a loose stair rod? That is the second sensation. The first is like one you get when you come across the top stair from above in the dark, when you don't know it's there, and the last makes you remember the day the hammock rope broke.' President Wilson as Chadband President Wilson, addressing a Maryland conference of the Methodist Church in the first week of April,

gave utterance to his first public expression • regarding the war. All the world "appreciates genuine religion, in which practice comes within some sort of measurable distance of profession, but nobody has any respect for cant; and the American President's preachment is the very quintessence of cant. Here it is, as reported by the London Telegraph's New York correspondent. These are days,' said President Wilson, 'of very great perplexity, when a great, cloud of trouble hangs and broods over the greater part of the world. It seems as if great, blind material forces had been released, which had for long been held in leash and restraint, and yet, underneath that, you can see the strong impulses of great ideals. It would be impossible for men to go through what men are going through on the battlefields of Europe—to ge through the present dark night of their terrible struggleif it were not that they saw, or thought that they saw, a broadening of the light where the morning sun should come up, and' believed that they were standing, each on his side of the contest, for some eternalprinciple of right. 'Then all about them, all about us, there sits the silent, waiting tribunal which is going to utter the ultimate judgment upon this struggle, .the great tribunal of the opinion of the world, and I fancy I see —I hope that I see, I pray that it may tie that 1. do truly see—great spiritual forces lying waiting for the outcome of this thing to assert themselves, and asserting them-. selves even now, to enlighten our judgment and steady our spirits. 'No man is wise enough to pronounce judgment, but we can all hold our spirits in readiness to accept the truth when it dawns en us, and is revealed to us in the outcome of this titanic struggle. You will see that it is only in such general terms that one can speak in the midst of the confused world, because, as I have already said, no man has the key to this confusion, no man can see the outcome, but every man can keep bis own spirit, prepared to contribute to the net result when the outcome displays itself.' * All of which may be summed up thus: 'Dearly beloved brethren, let us- walk in the wise and prudent footsteps of our dear brother, .Mr. Facing-both-ways. Let us sit, calmly but carefully, on the fence; and when at last the final decision shall have shown us on which side it is safest for us to alight, let us continue, dear brethren, with full hearts, to say beautiful things about the great mo"al and spiritual issues that have been vindicated in this titanic struggle.', And this is the successor of Washington and Abraham Lincoln !