Strangers often asked, when they came to see the beautiful Catholic Church adjoining Stanway Hall why it was dedicated to the virgin martyr St. Christina.
THE SCEPTICISM OF THE AGE.
The strong current of scepticism which set in during the eighteenth century extends into the nineteenth. Among the lower strata of society, among the dwellings of the poor—long the last refuge of religion—and especially among the factories and workshops, this scepticism has made various inroads on the ancient foundations of faith. By the sulphurous glare of the ominous flashes which momentarily relieve the clouded European horizon, we often catch glimpses of the horrors that are steadily accumulating in the lowest social depths. A powerful Christian current, whose volume has as usual increased with persecution, runs evidently by the side of this scepticism, but the latter, nevertheless, preponderates, and it is therefore not surprising that the barometric mean of our civilization should be such a low one.
The frivolous scepticism of the Voltairean school, now almost extinct in the French army, still survives among a majority of the political and military leaders of the other Latin nations, as, for instance, in Spain and Piedmont. For this reason the noble Spanish people, in spite of their hereditary virtues and high spirit, are still accursed with mediocre party leaders, while statesmen like the pious and chivalrous Valdegamas are only too rare. In Piedmont, unbelief, leagued with Italian cunning and rapacity, has during the last years borne blossoms which may well make us blush for our boasted civilization. "The proclamation of Cialdini and Pinelli" (one of which calls the Pope a clerical vampire and vicegerent of Satan), observed Nicotera, speaking in the National Assembly of the conduct of these generals in Naples and Sicily, "would disgrace a Gengis-Khan and an Attila!" "Such acts," exclaimed Aversano, alluding to the same subject in the Italian Parliament, "must disgrace the whole nation in the eyes of the world!" "It is literally true," said Lapena, President of the Assizes at Santa Maria, "that in this second half of the nineteenth century a horde of cannibals exists in our beautiful Italy!"
Other nations may perhaps thank God with the Pharisee in Scripture that they are not like the Italians. But if they have not gone to the length of fusillading defenceless priests (the case of Gennaro d'Orso, Gazette du Midi, February 1, 1861)—if they have never trodden under foot the crucifix—if their mercenaries have never raised blasphemous hands against the consecrated Host (Giornale di Roma, January 24, 1861)—in short, if other European nations have not yet been guilty of such atrocities as the Italians, very few have much cause to pride themselves upon their godliness and piety. Even in Germany, the fanaticism of infidelity has brought men close to the boundary-line which divides a false civilization from barbarism, and in some cases this line has already been crossed. At Mannheim the cry, "Kill the priests, and throw them into the Rhine!" was raised in 1865. In many parts of Southern Germany, the members of certain religious orders have been grossly ill-treated by an ignorant and brutal populace. "It is but too true," says the Archbishop of Freiburg, in his pastoral of May 7, 1868, "that the servants of the church are often exposed to insult and violence."
Ascending from the levels of ordinary life into the higher regions of civilization, science, and art, we discover that the scepticism of the last century has made more progress among our philosophers and poets. It is especially among the former that this scepticism seems to have gained ground, for materialism ranks lower in the scale of intelligence than the deification of the human mind. This return to the atomic theory of Epicurus is calculated rather to stupefy than to enlighten, for Humboldt remarks that a multiplicity of elementary principles is not to be met with even among the savages. Materialism is utterly incapable of elevating the heart, and destroys therefore a branch of civilization quite as essential as intellectual culture itself. Where all this tends to, how it brutalizes man and degrades him below the animal, how it obliterates every distinction between good and evil, how it robs our accountability of all meaning, how it makes the savage state with its attendant ignorance and barbarism our normal condition, has been forcibly pointed out in Haeffner's admirable treatise on The Results of Materialism. "The materialist," says Haeffner, "virtually tells man: You are wrong to set yourself in aristocratic pride over the other brutes; you are wrong to claim descent from a nobler race than the myriads of worms and grains of sand that lie at your feet; you are wrong to build your dwelling above the stalls of the animals: descend, therefore, from your grand height, and embrace the cattle in the fields, greet the trees and grasses as equals, and extend your hand in fellowship to the dust whose kindred you are."
As in modern philosophy, so the scepticism of the preceding century is equally manifest in modern poetry. "No department of human activity," observes a profound thinker of the present day, "is so feeble and occupies so low a moral standpoint as poetry, through which all the demoralization of the eighteenth century has been transmitted." It is a sort of confessional, from which we publish to the world our own effeminacy and degradation—not to regret and repent, but to defend and make parade of them. What we feel ashamed to say in simple prose, we proclaim boldly and complacently in rhyme. If a poet soars now and then to virtue, it is generally only virtue in the ancient heathen sense. Hence it comes that, when a political storm impends in the sultry atmosphere of the Old World, the night-birds and owls of anarchy fill the air with their cries. In times of peace they luxuriate in our modern political economism with the law of demand and supply, by whose agency human labor has been reduced to a mere commodity. In literature they preach the evangel of materialism under the flimsy guise of so-called popularized science, and even the school has been perverted into an institution whose sole object seems to be to supply labor for the white slave mart.
Those who desire to behold the fruits which spring from this unchristian culture of material interests should go to England for an illustration. Though the Anglican sect is the state religion, infidelity has made nowhere greater progress than in that country. Its principal church, St. Paul's, London, gives no evidences of Christianity. The interior does not address itself like Paul to the Areopagus, but like the Areopagus to Paul, for it inculcates an unadulterated heathenism. The first monument that arrests the attention of the visitor is dedicated to the pagan Fama, who consoles Britannia for the loss of her heroic sons. The next monument belongs to the heathen goddess of Victory, who crowns a Pasenby; while a Minerva calls the attention of budding warriors to La Marchand's death at Salamanca. Then come a Neptune with open arms, Egyptian sphinxes, the East India Company seal. When the principal religious edifice of a nation is thus turned into a heathen temple, the people themselves must become heathenized, and this we find to be so here. In Liverpool 40, in Manchester 51, in Lambeth 61, in Sheffield 62 per cent. profess no religion at all. So says the London Times of May 4, 1860. In the city of London thousands and tens of thousands know no more of Christianity than the veriest pagans. In the parish of St. Clement Danes, on the Strand, the rector discovered an irreligiousness incredible to believe (Quarterly Review, April, 1861). For generations hundreds and thousands of coal miners have lived in utter ignorance of such a book as the Bible. In answer to the question whether he had ever heard of Jesus Christ, one of them replied: "No, for I have never worked in any of his mines." Innumerable facts attest that civilization retrogrades in a ratio with this deplorable religious ignorance. "Among all the states of Europe," remarked Fox in the House of Commons (Feb. 26, 1850), "England is the one where education has been most neglected." The justice of this observation is fully sustained by the report presented in May of the same year by the board of school trustees of Lancashire: "Nearly half the people of this great nation," say they, "can neither read nor write, and a large part of the remainder possesses only the most indispensable education." Out of 11,782 children, 5,805 could barely spell, and only 2,026 could read with fluency. Out of 14,000 teachers, male and female, 7,000 were found grossly incompetent for their positions. Among the troops sent to the Crimea, no more than one soldier in every five was able to write a letter home.