The Problem of Complete Wage Justice John A. Ryan, S.T.D. 623 France, Germany, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Progress of the War. With Our Readers Price-25 cents; $3 per Year THE OFFICE OF THE CATHOLIC WORLD, NEW YORK 120-122 West 60th Street London-KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & CO, Ltd., 68 Carter Lane ENTERED AT NEW YORK POST-OFFICE AS SECOND-CLASS MATTER Church in America, but also by many prominent leaders among Protestants. For example, the Protestant Episcopal Bishop Anderson of Chicago, in his diocesan magazine, speaking of the Protestant missionary propaganda in South America, seems in full and hearty accord with us when he says: "It looks as though the Latin people and the Latin Church must travel together. Perhaps we can help them by administering to our own people in their midst and trying to set them a good example. Perhaps in this way we can help them to be better Catholics. To try to convert them from Catholicism is to hurt them. The converted Catholic does not make a good Protestant." * T must be apparent then to anyone who can appreciate the value of cold logic, that those engaged in seeking to make the perversion of the poor Italians a play to the galleries, are pursuing methods either foolish or immoral. To the plain, common-sense man of the street" they must furnish a fertile source of amusement if the matter were not so weighted with eternally tragic possibilities, for he sees the bald inconsistency of such methods. If the uplifters were really sincere in their professed purpose of spreading the kingdom of God upon earth, they would use every means at their command to bring back the stray sheep of their own flock before attempting to deceive and to pervert the Italians. The problem of Church attendance is becoming a more and more serious one for the Protestant denominations. It is well to remember the old adage-charity begins at home. Many consistent and sincere Protestants have publicly deplored and condemned in terms as strong as our own this unworthy method, abhorrent surely to the soul of every honest man. JE have received at times inquiries as to why the Church has condemned Maeterlinck's writings. Some, complaining of the severity and even injustice, as they think, of the Church's ruling, maintain that Maeterlinck is a poet who has had no serious intention of attacking religion. It is difficult to see how anyone who has read Maeterlinck, even in a cursory way, can entertain such an opinion. The following extract from the New York Evening Post, in a review of Macdonald Clark's Maurice Maeterlinck, will make very clear just how anti-Christian and even anti-theistic Maeterlinck really is: "Somebody once said that a philosophic system only needed a poet to transform it into a religion. Maeterlinck has played this part for modern skepticism. Deeply religious in spirit himself, he has given to pragmatism, that doctrine of the fluidity of all human values, an atmosphere of sacredness, of mystery, and, finally, of pathos, which might well win men to worship at an altar that serves no deity but empty air. In Maurice Maeterlinck, that author, analyzing the Belgian's moral ideas, reaches very much this conclusion. Maeterlinck deeply feels, Clark maintains, the mystery of life...... But when Maeterlinck seeks for explanations he is the skeptical scientist. A personal God does not exist for him, nor a just fate, but only fatality running counter to justice. There is nothing eternal except man's groping forward to some better state, dimly foreshadowed. Even moral law ceases to be a constant quantity, and there remains only the intention and desire of doing right, or what one recognizes as the better course. And finally there is instinct, the subconscious, which transcends all other human forces in power, surpasses conscious morality, and will-power, and, as in animals, really moulds our lives. "Here, in a way, although Clark does not make the point, is where Maeterlinck's mysticism and rationalism meet on common ground. To the Belgian poet instinct is the underlying principle, scientific and moral, of life. Hence his pointing to the social order of the bees as a model to man, who is governed by the caprice of individual will. Hence also the feeling in all his plays of the futility of an individual's struggle against his own instinct or the instinct of the universe. Here, if anywhere, you feel that Maeterlinck reconciles the injustice of life, of Cordelia done to death by the wicked sisters, with our sense of eternal right. Some mysterious instinct of life is working towards a fulfillment which the finite mind of the victim cannot see. As the bees build their hive and make their honey according to an eternal instinct, little caring about the fate of the just or unjust bee, so mankind goes on, in fact so the whole universe goes on, to some unforeseen, undiscerned but perfectly welldefined end. This, Maeterlinck would say, this being conscious that one is a molecule of the mighty cosmic energy, is our great consolation for having been born." BY SIR BERTRAM C. A. WINDLE, M.D., SC.D., LL.D., F.R.S., K.S.G., President of University College, Cork. AINT or sinner, some rule of life we must have, even if we are wholly unconscious of the fact. A spiritual director will help us to map out a course of action which will assist us to shake off some little of the dust of this dusty world, and a doctor will lay down for us a dietary which will help us to elude, for a time at least, the insidious onsets of the gout. Even if we take no formal steps, spiritual or corporeal, some rule of life we must achieve for ourselves. We must, for example, make up our minds whether we are to open our ears and our purse to tales of misery, or are to join ourselves with those whose rule of life it is to keep that which they have for themselves. What is true of each of us is none the less true of each and every race-even more true; for each race must make up its mind definitely as to which rule it will follow. And at the moment there is still doubt and indecision in this matter. "The moral problem that confronts Europe to-day is: What sort of righteousness are we, individually and collectively, to pursue? Is the new righteousness to be realized in a return to the old brutality? Shall the last values be as the first? Must ethical process conform to natural process as exemplified by the life of any animal that secures dominancy at the expense of the weaker members of its kind? "1 As to the Christian ideals little need be said, since we know very well what they are and know this most especially, that practically all of them are in direct opposition to what we may call the 1R. R. Marett, Presidential Address to Folk-Lore Society, 1915. Folk-Lore, vol. xxvii., pp. 1-14. Copyright. 1916. THE MISSIONARY SOCIETY OF ST. PAUL THE APOSTLE VOL. CIII.-37 |