HERESY HUNTING.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR."] Sun—The Marquesas Islands came under the protectorate of the French in 1842. Along with the Governmental officials went priests of the Roman branch of the Catholic Church. The following précis from Frederick O'Brien's White Shadows in the South Seas will show that Mr. Major's alleged back- sliding was forestalled nearly a century ago by the Marquesin cannibals. It may rather cause those precocious ecclesiastics who superiorly affect to sneer cheaply with such Christian charitableness at " Modernists " to think furiously, though " a headache from thinking " may supervene and conceivably lead them to be honest enough with themselves to prefer truth to tradition :—
" Never were people less able to comprehend the creeds and formulas in which the religious beliefs of the white men are clothed. Marquesans are not deep thinkers. In fact, they have a word, tahoa,' which means a headache from thinking.' And when they did begin to meditate the doctrines preached to them as necessary beliefs in order to win salvation their heads ached indeed. The resurrection of the (material) body at the Last Judgment horrified them. What would God do in cases where a shark had eaten a Marquesan? And what when the same shark had been killed and eaten by other Marquesans? And in the case of the early Christian forefathers who were eaten by men of other tribes, and afterward the cannibals eaten in retaliation, and then the last feaster eaten by sharks? There was a headache query. And they were puzzled that they should be told that it was wrong to feed on the flesh of a fellow human creature when they were urged to ' eat the body and drink the blood ' of Ietu Kirito Himself 1 " Modern Churchmen, whatever the term may connote, of 1022 are eighty years behind the times. They must hurry up if they want to be really modern and interpret pristine essential truths in present-day language. But how is all this recriminatory hysteria going to help 'the Lambeth proposals? How can we Anglicans have the decency to ask our Nonconforming brethren to line up with us if our own branch of the Catholic Church is a factious sort of ecclesiastical Dail Eireann?
The negroes of the West Indies say of folk who breed discord that they are " making sin."
" How pitiful are little minds—
They seem so very small; They look at stars, and think they are Denominational."
A truer message was never sent forth than that uttered by Marcus Aurelius, that "our anger and impatience often prove more mischievous than the things we are angry and impatient The Well House, -Gigyksztick-in-Craveri.
Previous page
