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Show A k 1 0 ooxxxxxkxxxoxooxx . I Material Success j I fe test of true : 0 . - A 0 V Protestant Platform Orators Maintain that National Prosperity is a Sign of True 0 "i Religion, as if We Could Go to Heaven , in Steamships. $ 0 $ I A STOCK ARGUMENT OF NON-CATHOLIC CONTROVERSALISTS OVERCOME. ) 00000000000000000 OOOOOOOOOOOOOW oc 0 !; Of late years, writes C J. Armls- J tead in Truth, of Raleigh. N. C., it has , become a stock argument with non- 1 Cathjlic controversialists that the na tional prosperity of Protestant people is a proof that their religion is true Christianity. For the sake of brevity we will call this the -prosperity theo- ry." Whether it be a true theory de-rends de-rends on the sense in which the term prosperity is used. For it has two widHv different meanings. It may mean' the absence of widespread and distressing poverty among the masses. t freedom from crime, peace between the different classes of society, and the ptneral prevalence of the Christian virtues of contentment and kindliness, .courtesy and good will between man and man. Or it may mean the possession posses-sion of vast armies and navies, the framing of colonial possessions, the winning of bloody victories of great , )k prestige as a military and naval world power, together with the multiplica- ! 1 tion of the means of gaining wealth j L end of gratifying luxurious tastes. It is in this latter sense that the ad- r T vocates of the theory in question use j the word prosperity. Nothing is more I r common than to find preachehs, editors and platform speakers pointing out the contrast between Protestant nations the poverty and backwardness of Catholic Cath-olic peoples, and asserting that it is a demonstration that the former have j the true religion of Christ and the lat- j I ter a false one. Only a short time ago 1 a Methodist bishop evoked rounds of , ! applause by saying that the descend- , 1 ant of the men who made the Roman empire are men who now make a bare H living bv the help of a hand organ and I a monkey. And he laid this decadence f the Italian people, of course, at the door of the Catholic Church. The good man . evidently forgot that he was ppeaking as a Christian minister, and j tr.at according to his o.vn principles the empire builder may have been an unmitigated scoundrel, while the organ I t irrinder may be one of God's humble 1 hidden saints. Now. to make its material prosper- Jty a test of whether a nation pro- 1 I fesses the true religion is to set up the falsest possible standard of judgment. We propose to show that thosa who ' apply th s criterion ride rough shod ever the teachings of common sense, : of experience and of the Bible itself, f and are, moreover, complacently un mindful of .the self-contradictions in which it involves them at every step. And what has common sense to say on that subject? Simply this, that a rich and prosperous nation is only an aggregation of rich and prosperous individuals. in-dividuals. But it says also that, in the individual, absorption in accumulating money, constant preoccupation in making mak-ing paying investments, the devotion of time and engrossing thought and labor to the development of railway systems and coal and iron properties, do not. and never will, tend to that j detachment from the things of earth, k which is the essential condition of the j k development of the highest Christian J j 7iv character. Mr. Samuel Lewis, the Lnn- j J i don usurer, and Mr. Terah Hooley, the i l V promoter, was each a modern Midas, 4m - but no advocate of the prosperity the-1 the-1 ' - ory has ever claimed eminent sanctity ' tor cither .,f them. Then how can it I J be claimed that a nation of Lewises i I' and Hoov-ys would be truly a people j !' fl after God's own heart? I s;o, too. our own millionaires, al- ' though they do many nuble acts of philanthropy, are not. as a class, looked upon as our most shining examples ex-amples of Chris!!:: n nu-ekness, lowliness lowli-ness and self-denial. To build hospitals and found libraries is no proof that the benefactor has the spirit of Christ, for St. Paul teaches us that one may give even U that ha nas to fet-J the poor, and yet not Jjave that supernatural charity without which thv? profession of Christianity js a conscious prounse or an unconscious uncon-scious de-ption. Therefore, we might be a nation of millionaires, sending fhiploads f treasure to relieve want and misery in other lands, and might still be a nation of pagans, or at best of nominal, not real Christians. It is. I then, a dictate of common s-anse that jj prosperity has no necessary connection y with true piety. Experience also teaches the same thing. In proportion to their num-f num-f bers, the Jews lmve more wealth that ' any other nationality: therefore, to he consistent, the advocates of the th?ory t in question ougnt to say ihut the pros perity of the Jews is a proof thai ti;ey are stili the chosen people of God. Or take the case of the Mormon'-:; they have transformed the inhospitable .vhores of Salt Lake into a veritable parden spot, but nobody believes that ifceir material prosperity is a proof hat bi Latter-day bainis are the true aints of God. And what of the Par-pees Par-pees of India? - a ere is. perhaps, in all the wide domain of Great Britain no more prosperous community. They can give the English themselves points Jn the art of getting and enjoying the pood things of the earth. Yet they are still as rank pagans as if the missionary mission-ary had never set foot on their land. And once more, if, as is asserted, it is the Catholic religion that makes Spain Fo poor and ignorant, why is it that, with rhe same faith as Spain's Belgium 1b one of the enlightened, progressive r . ana prosperous nations of Europe. 1 t Moreover, these lessons of common fense and of our own experience are 1 confirmed by the experience and the history of the past. The ume was ,. when the Israelites were without ; wealth or learning or civilization, and 1 ' had no means of acquiring them. They were even in slavery to the Egypans. And this too while face to face with all the power and glory and wealth of the ! Kgyp'ian monarc hy. Does this prove l that the God of Jacob was a false god, ; j a . -, - -' '. - !. - - . . .... I and that Osiris was tue true divinity to I be worshiped? It does prove it. accord-j accord-j ing to the prosperity theory, unless -s advocates say again that God has ' changed, and that although poverty ' and persecution were once the paths to His favor, in our day wealth and lux-: lux-: ury and avarice are the proofs of His j special regard, i $ Again, for three centuries the disciples disci-ples cf Christ were a poor, despised and persecuted people. Although they have teen looked up to by all succeeding age; ?.s the most perfect models of ' Christian virtue, they were destitute of pr.-srerity. either personal or national. na-tional. This prosperity, this strange evidence of the possession of the true rebgion. was found in those days in pagan Rome alone. For she indeed had j received the devil's promise, and all the : kingdoms of the world and the glory of j j them were hers. Therefore, according I to the non-Catholic test, God frowned I upon the worship of the poor and de-I de-I spised Christian in the catacombs and 1 looked with delight upon the smoking sacrifices laid on the altars of the i heathen divinities. I But let us come to later times. "What powfr was dominant in two hemispheres hemis-pheres three centuries ago? Into whose coffers flowed the gold gathered from tne tour quarters of the globe? It was ; Spain, f.nd Spain, too, just when her : Catholicity was most fervent, and was doin 7 most in' permeating the lives and molding the character of her people. What :nsVv'r have our friends to this obj cilon to their notion that Catholo-cism Catholo-cism if necessity entails poverty, ignorance ig-norance and degradation upon a na tion? None that we can see but this Uiat,. God . . .must : have changed once more, ard that while He favors the Protestant peoples in the nineteenth century, because they possess the true Christian vaith. in the sixteenth century. cen-tury. He was pleased to pour out the blessings of v.ealth and power and m3rnifioenee vpon a nation whose religion re-ligion was in ''lit sight a mass of ignorant, igno-rant, degrading, soul-destroying super stitions. Once more, what becomes of the theory the-ory when applied to nations that were once almost a rowerful and progressive progres-sive as was Spam, but have sunk almost, al-most, if not quite, to her present level? Holland mce r.-nl s plendid colonial pos-I pos-I -essions in .vidolv different parts of the earth. But he has lost them and has j shrunk to th-. c'imensions of her own j lnsignifcmt ho'r.c land. Yet she was, j and still is, staunchly Protestant. But if it is Protestantism that exalts and I Catholocism that debases a people, how is it that each has produced the same j unhappy result in these two different : cases? So, too. Sweden once had a ! commanding influence in the affairs of I the world. Bu. now she has little more ; than Greece or lurkey. Yet she em-I em-I braced and sVll clings to the princi-pls princi-pls of the reformation. Look, too, ;it Russia, perhaps the I most ambitious nj well as the might- iest and most progressive of all the I world powers, progressive at least m all that goes to make a nation the dominant dom-inant factor in the affairs of the world. Napoleon's prediction that she would one day rule th' continent seems more credible than when it was first uttered. If, then, there be any truth in the national prosperity theory, here again its advocates must swallow their own words. For upon their principles I the case of Russia proves that it is ! neither Protestantism nor Ca- tholocism. but the faith of the Greek 1 church, that is most pleasing to God. : But a word more upon another ob-i ob-i .lection to the prosoerity theory. It is the flippant, cocksure way in which I its advocates 1ecide offhand a question o complicated and difficult as to require re-quire the hichest degree of learning, critical analysis and good judgment to answer It well and wisely. It is the quest'on of the manifold causes that , lead to the decline and fall of a once ; powerful nation. "VYe do not propose ; to say anything about it, except to show that causes more reasonable and sufficient than their religion may gen- ' erally be assigned for the material progress or decay of nations. I Why. for instance, should England's commercial supremacy be credited to I the reformation, when it can be readily ; accounted for by her abundance of coa; and iron, and by the modern application ap-plication of steam to navigation, by ; which her finished products can be easily and quickly carried to all the markets of the world? Protestant as she is, where would her commerce be if she had no more coal or iron than Switzerland, and no more coast line than Bavaria? Here, too, we may ask which has contributed most to her real greatness, hc-r mere commerce or her free government? Every sensible man wil! say the latter, of course. "Then, if her Protestantism must have the credit for her commerce, is it not sim-'le sim-'le justice to give the Catholic Church the credit for what she gained in her Catholic days her constitution, her representative government, her trial by jury, her macrna charta, her universities? universi-ties? And why lat- the ignorance and ; poverty of the Irish at the door of the Church when it may be fully explained by the fact that every effort they made at material development was sternly repressed by England, and the onen-Mng onen-Mng of a Catholic school was made a 1 penal offense? i -4-- It, . 1 I lane, asrain.-our own southern states. .With cotton growing at the very house floors of their people, with untold millions mil-lions of treasure in coal and iron in their mountains, thoy sat down supinely supine-ly for centuries and bought their iron and cotton goods from th north. Yet all this time they were intensely Protestant. Pro-testant. But in a anarter of a century they awoke and showed themselves such adents at material development that Enpland and the north now dread their rivalry. But they are no more 1 Protestants now than they were during their centuries of lethargy. Clearly, i then, their religion was not a factor in the matter at all. The secret of their lethargy was not their faith, but the j , incubus of slavery; the secret of their I wonderful progress is that they have 1 thrown off the incubus and have set J J themselves manfully . to the task of developing their material resources. j I And last, material success and j prosperity depend more upon the characteristics char-acteristics of the individual than upon his faith. A Jew will start in business Jso small and unpromising that a Gen-j Gen-j tile would think a man must starve at j it. Yet in a few years he will be comfortably com-fortably well, off, if not rich. But it. is net because he does not believe in Christ, but because of his shrewd business busi-ness sense and methods and his patient economy. A Chinese will begin with ironing- collars at 2 cents apiece and ere long will go back home with a competence, com-petence, not because he is a pagan, but because he has carried economy and tireless industry to their last possible limits. It is . not polygamy that ac-I ac-I counts for the prosperity of the Mormon Mor-mon colony, but the long-headed business busi-ness calculations of Brigham Young and his successors. A community of monks have bought a tract of land In Kentucky so poor that nobody else cared to have it. It is now covered cov-ered with bountiful harvests and adorned with a wealth of flowers. Their brethren have done the same thing a thousand times before in. other parts of the world, not by virtue of their Catholic- faith, but of their untiring untir-ing industry guided by the experience and practical wisdom gained by their order in its long existence and handed down in it by tradition from generation to generation. But we have said enough to show the folly of testing the truth and purity of a people's faith by the degree de-gree of their national prosperity. YV"e have made it clear also that its advocates advo-cates are determined to apply . their false criterions to Ca'hotic nations only, and are equally determined to Ehut their eyes to the fact that it cuts both ways, like a two-edered sword that if it proves the falsity of the Catholic Cath-olic religion, it also proves that of Protestantism as well. But the most significant and the worst thing about. It is its thinly veiled paganism. The theory the-ory has its roots in the old Pagan belief that the best that the gods could bestow be-stow upon men was the ease and comfort com-fort and happiness that wealth enables them to buy. and that the thing to be dreaded as the worst of all evils is the misery, the shame and the suffering that poverty entails. |