eption", a home for more priests, and Catholic ladies
who desire to collect for it may receive little books which they are
requested to return within three months. Pius X writes a letter of
warm endorsement, and sets an example by giving four hundred dollars
"out of his poverty"--or, to be more precise, out of the poverty of
the pitiful peasantry of Italy. There is included in the paper a form
of bequest for "devoted clients of Our Blessed Mother", and at the top
of the editorial page the most alluring of all baits for the loving
hearts of the flock--that the names of deceased relatives and friends
may be written in the collection books, and will be transferred to the
records of the Shrine, and these persons "will share in all its
spiritual benefits". In the days of Job it was with threats of boils
and poverty that the Priestly Lie maintained itself; but in the case
of this blackest of all Terrors, transplanted to our free Republic
from the heart of the Dark Ages, the wretched victims see before their
eyes the glare of flames, and hear the shrieks of their loved ones
writhing in torment through uncounted ages and eternities.
#Fresh Meat#
In the days when I was experimenting with vegetarianism, I sought
earnestly for evidence of a non-meat-eating race; but candor compelled
me to admit that man was like the monkey and the pig and the bear--he
was vegetarian when he could not help it. The advocates of the reform
insist that meat as a diet causes muddy brains and dulled nerves; but
you would certainly never suspect this from a study of history. What
you find in history is that all men crave meat, all struggle for it,
and the strongest and cleverest get it. Everywhere you find the
subject classes living in the midst of animals which they tend, but
whose flesh they rarely taste. Even in modern America, sweet land of
liberty, our millions of tenant farmers raise chickens and geese and
turkeys, and hardly venture to consume as much as an egg, but save
everything for the summer-boarder or the buyer from the city. It would
not be too much to say of the cultural records of early man that they
all have to do, directly or indirectly, with the reserving of fresh
meat to the masters. In J.T. Trowbridge's cheerful tale of the
adventures of Captain Seaborn, we are told by the cannibal priest how
idol-worship has ameliorated the morals of the tribe--
For though some warriors of renown
Continue anthropophagous,
'Tis rare
|