“MATERIALISTIC MODERNISM.”

New Zealand Tablet, 10 April 1919, Page 13

“MATERIALISTIC MODERNISM.”

"Materialistic Modernism,” remarks Dr. 'Ralph Adams Cram, in his recent book on The Sins of the fathers, is the product of those peoples that rejected Catholic religion, sacramental philosophy, beauty of every sort, and art in all its forms,” Germany, England, and the United States being, in his opinion, the worst offenders. He continues: - The inevitable result of the rejection of the Sacraments and of sacramental philosophy was the severance of matter and spirit ; the breaking of the old intimacy and the living union, and the placing of religion and all other spiritual things in one category, of all the material phases of life in another. The division was not avowed, indeed, particularly during the Puritan regime; it was part of the system that religion and life should be more aggressively at one than at any time since the earlier theocracy of the Hebrews. Under the Commonwealth in England, the Puritan tyranny in New England, and the capitalistic autocracy in Great Britain, it was practically impossible to draw a line between Church and State; superficially it seemed as if the identity, or rather co-operation, was more perfect than at any time during the Catholic Middle Ages. Certainly the abuses of power, the gross infractions of,liberty, the negation of even rudimentary justice in legislation, in law and in society, that followed from this apparent union, were more aggravated and intolei able. As a matter of fact, however, the alliance was only between a formal and public religion and the equally formal machinery of government; it did not extend to the individual, and here, in his domestic,' social, business and political relations, the severance was almost complete. The typical figure in Protestantism is Luther, preaching a lofty doctrine of personal union with God, and conniving at bigamy, adultery, and the massacre of starving peasants ; and the pious iron-master or mill magnate of Bradford or Leeds, zealously supporting his favorite form of Evangelicalism, pouring out his money for the support of missions to heathen countries or for the abolition of slavery, enforcing the strictest Sabbatarianism in his own household—and fighting in Parliament and through the press for the right to continue to employ little children of six years old in his mines, crawling on all fours, half naked, dragging carts of coal by ropes around their tender bodies, or to profit, by the threat of starvation, through mill hands whose wages were a miserable pittance, insufficient to keep body and soul together, and who were forbidden under penalty of the law to combine with one another for self-protection.” Dr. Cram charges non-Catholic historians, theologians and scholars of the past 300 years with leading the people into the grave error that the Reformation and its consequences were "godly acts that formed the everlasting corner-stone of modern civilisation” (says America), A general return to the “sacramental philosophy of the Middle Ages, he holds, is the modern world’s only hope of salvation. That means, of course, though Dr. Cram does not expressly ’say so, Catholicism, pure and simple.