PREACHERS ON THE RAMPAGE.[[171]]
Men who are by no means optimists are apt unconsciously to allow themselves to get a dim impression that the world is becoming better, more kindly, more charitable, and that we are approximating a time when, by the pure influences of increased material appliances and “well-regulated human nature,” the hatreds and strifes both of nations and sects will have measurably ceased. The delusion is a pleasant one, but it is none the less a delusion, and will not endure the slightest contact with the sharp edge of fact. In this nineteenth century, notwithstanding the peace society, more human beings have lost their lives by war than in any other since the advent of our Lord. In this, the freest, the most prosperous, and, so far as the masses are concerned, the best-instructed of all Christian countries, we have but had breathing time since one of the bloodiest civil wars on record. In the lull (protracted by war and its results) many Catholics seem to have become in like manner possessed with an undefined notion that the people who made the Penal Laws and executed them have become imbued with a milder spirit toward the church; that Know-nothingism is a thing of the past, the virtue of the cry of “No Popery” dissipated, and the fell spirit of the Native American party utterly extinct.
Those who think thus will see cause to awake from their dream on examining the volume whose title heads this article. In October, 1876, a Joint Special Committee of three senators and three members of the Lower House sat in San Francisco for the purpose of procuring testimony in regard to the advisability of restricting or abolishing the immigration of Mongolians to this country—a question which has been for some time exciting at least a considerable section of the inhabitants of our Pacific coast. Whether truly or falsely we cannot say, but the impression is produced that the Catholic, and more particularly the Irish Catholic, population of California has ranged itself in hostility to the Chinese. If this be true we should be very sorry for it, knowing full well that by any such action foreigners of all sorts, more especially Catholics, are simply supplying whips of scorpions with which they will be lashed on the outburst of the next campaign (under whatsoever name it may be known) conducted on principles of hostility to them. On its face it looks altogether likely that so plausible a movement as this opposition to the Chinese should take with a laboring class not very well posted in the principles of political economy, and we know that the large majority of white laboring people are in San Francisco Catholic, while certainly a great many of them are Irishmen. Their priests are too few and have too much to do to give them lectures on Say, Smith, and Ricardo; and it is no part of their duty, still less would it be a pleasure, to instruct them how they shall view purely political issues, whether local or national. Repeating, then, that we cannot but deem it a terrible blunder for their own sakes, and utterly against their own real interests, that these people should so range themselves against the influx of the Chinese, we have certainly no right to dictate to them how they shall vote or on what side they shall exert any influence they may have; and we must add that they seem to err (if error there be) in very good company, and plenty of it, since both political parties have in their national platforms endorsed the views said to be held by the Irish Catholics of California, as did also both Republicans and Democrats in the last campaign of the Golden State.
This report contains the sworn testimony on the subject at issue of one hundred and thirty witnesses; but we only call attention to the evidence of some of the preachers, and that, too, not on the general merits of their testimony or concerning Chinese immigration at all, but on account of the Vatinian hatred which they have gone out of the way to display towards Catholics, and the deadly venom they exhibit towards Irishmen especially. For just as women are sometimes most bloodthirsty during a war, far outdoing in rancor the combatants themselves, so would preachers seem to be the least charitable of the human species—to have, as Dean Swift well remarked, “just enough religion to make them hate, and not enough to make them love, one another.” The first of these worthy representatives of Christian charity and disseminators of the truth is a certain Rev. O. W. Loomis, in the employ of the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions, who takes occasion to say: “Unlike some others who come to America, as we have been told (and who manage to get to the ballot-boxes very soon), they [the Chinese] are not sworn to support any foreign hierarchy and foreign ecclesiastical magnate who claims the whole earth as his dominion” (p. 417). While the English of this sentence is very far from clear, yet the animus of the whole is so patent that he must needs be a very stupid fellow indeed who does not perceive that Catholics are aimed at. Whether Mr. Loomis “has been informed” that Catholics come to America, or that they reach the ballot-boxes early, or that they are sworn to support a foreign hierarchy, or that the Chinese are not under such obligations, is far from being as limpid as “bog-water,” and it is to be hoped that, in his instructions to his neophytes, he seldom degenerates into such want of perspicuity; still more would it be desirable that he should confine himself more strictly in his usual ministrations to the truth and to matters within his own knowledge than he does when before the committee and on oath.
It is distinctly false that Catholic foreigners, in coming to this country, make a business of getting to the ballot-boxes any sooner than the law allows them to do. It is equally mendacious, if he means to assert the same thing of any one set of Catholics as a specific nationality. If the statement were as true as it is false, scurrilous, and malicious, that “man of God” could not possibly know more than a few individual instances, and could not predicate the fact as true of a whole nationality, any more than the writer (who happens to have known in his life four instances in which young Americans voted without having attained their majority) would be justified in slanderously describing the young men of the United States as in the habit of perjuring themselves in order to anticipate the right of elective franchise. But our friend, though on oath, never blinks—in fact, he has, while on oath, gone out of his way to drag in the above statement, and is only prevented from taking the bit in his teeth and careering madly over the whole plain of anti-Catholic bigotry by being checked peremptorily with the information furnished him by Representative Piper: “That is entirely foreign to the matter at issue.”
As to the assertion that Catholics swear allegiance to the Pope in any sense that would interfere with their fealty to any temporal rule or government, its absurdity has been so often, so ably, and so clearly demonstrated that it is only persons of the third sex who at this day pretend to believe it. We will give even Mr. Loomis credit for appreciating the distinction between the loyalty which his people owe to the confession of faith, their synods and presbyteries, and that which they owe to the government of the land. We wish we could in conscience credit him with as much candor as ability and knowledge in the premises; for a great deal of his testimony proves him to be by no means one of those persons whom we pass by as being entitled to a “fool’s pardon.” Did it never occur to this man, and to others of his way of thought or expression, that this oath or obligation of two hundred million Catholics must be of very little avail—might, in short, quite as well not have been taken—if its only result is to land the Pope here in the fag end of the nineteenth century, in the Vatican, without an acre of land over which he can exercise temporal jurisdiction, while Catholics all over the world, with the numbers, the power, and the means to restore him, if they had but the will, lie supinely by, not making a move, either as governments or as individuals, in his behalf? That bugbear is too transparent for use; people can no longer be scared by it; it is high time to excogitate another and a more plausible one, if you are still bent on war with the Pope. For our own part, we would recommend the propriety of a change; but that change should be to the culture of Christian charity, the practice of the golden rule, not forgetting the commandment which people of Mr. Loomis’ persuasion call the ninth. Ah! Mr. Loomis, hatred springs apace fast enough among men without any necessity for its culture on the part of professing religious teachers.
Again, the same professor of the doctrine that “the earth is the Lord’s,” that “we are all his children,” and that “we are all one in Christ,” announces: “I was a Native American on principle, and I believe that America should belong to Americans” (p. 464). This is bad, in our opinion, but it is English, it is intelligible, and it is no doubt true as an utterance of his individual sentiment. The set of principles referred to have twice been adjudged by the voice of the American people, and condemned on both occasions as anti-American, opposed to the genius and traditions of our people, and subversive of the aims which made us one of the foremost nations of the earth. Mr. Loomis, or any other man, has an inherent right to believe in them, if he so list; but we question much his discretion in dragging his enunciation of political principles into his sworn evidence on the Chinese question, and we doubt much whether a knowledge that such is his belief would be calculated to enhance the regard of the Chinese, among whom he states that he is an evangelist, for either the philanthropy or the hard sense of their coryphæus.
That there may be no doubt about the intensity of his virulence against the church, he returns to the charge; and, strangely enough, it is the same committeeman that now goads him on who, on the previously-mentioned reference to foreign hierarchs, stopped his mouth by stating that his opinions on that subject were not at issue in the examination.
“Ques. You spoke about these Irish as people coming here who have sworn allegiance to some foreign potentate. To whom have you reference?