I CHAPTER XXXVII A DECADENT CHRISTENDOM N the summer of 1896, through the kindness of my parishioners, I went abroad and made the "grand tour" of Europe. The voyage over was very delightful; I had become a hardened sailor and every hour upon the sea was a joy to my soul. I reached Antwerp in safety after a ten days' sail. Nothing was more charming in all my journey through Europe than the passage up the Scheldt; here the shores are lower than the river, which is diked to keep the waters from flooding the land. It is not my purpose to give a detailed account of my visit to the various cities of Europe (my time was spent chiefly in the cities), but only to remarked those things which I saw that do not come under the purview of the ordinary traveller. Everyone sees not only with his own eyes, but also with his own mind. He interprets what comes within the range of his vision by his previous thoughts. Antwerp was interesting to me because it was the first Catholic city which I had ever visited. I went to the cathedral and was charmed and excited by its architecture and by Rubens' "Descent from the Cross." I spent hours sitting in that building and meditating upon that picture. I also went to other churches, and everywhere I saw that the people were very devout. The women thronged the various places of worship, bringing their votive candles and placing them before the various saints. I perceived that the Catholic Church was still in its mediæval period in this Belgian city; modern thought had not disturbed the minds of these simple Belgian peasants. The Protestant Reformation had swept over the land and left it more Catholic than it was before. diævalism at first hand in this city. I was able to study me- saw in all the churches a box for alms, which was labelled: "For your friends in purgatory"; and the people were continually dropping money into these boxes. They must have been a source of considerable revenue to the Church. This troubled me sorely; it presented a problem which I could not solve. Purgatory is a place in which the souls of men suffer purification from their earthly sins. They are obliged to stay there until the justice of God is satisfied; it would seem, then, that all human effort to relieve them from their sad state were vain. The justice of God in the nature of things cannot be purchased with money. The doctrine of Indulgences had ruined the Church in the fifteenth century; it was because of this doctrine that Luther thundered and the great Catholic Church was disrupted, but the older portion of that Church still clung tenaciously to the ancient custom; it was too profitable to be abandoned. The poor of Catholic countries were still paying millions into the coffers of the Church to buy the pardon of their suffering relatives; it was not until the pontificate of Pius X that this pernicious custom was finally abandoned. I dwell upon this first experience in Catholic Europe because it is the underlying cause of the two great evils that have destroyed Western civilization. I will now carry my reader, as it were, by aeroplane from Antwerp to Naples. When I came to this city, I had, as a tourist, to make the visit to Mt. Vesuvius, which was then in eruption; that visit is always made in the night. By the time that I had come near the crater, I was so overcome that I did not dare to look down very long into the burning mass below, but returned almost immediately to the hotel on the mountain, where we spent the night. In the grey of the morning, we returned by stage to Naples, and then I experienced a shock which affected decidedly my attitude toward the Church. Italy and especially Southern Italy, is crowded with churches, overrun with priests and nuns. There is a long street running from the foot of Vesuvius to the heart of the city. As we went through the streets, I saw the people preparing for the coming day; they were the poverty-stricken population of the country; they were out there in the open and mothers were cleaning lice out of the hair of their children. They were washing their rags and putting them on. They had no sense of shame; the dignity of human nature was lost to them; never had so repulsive a sight sickened my soul, and I said to myself, if one tithe of the money that is spent to maintain the multitude of churches that throng the land and to support the multitude of priests and nuns that live upon the churches, were spent in the physical redemption of these people, this disgrace would never afflict the eye of the traveller who came to delight his soul in the marvellous beauty with which the great God had clothed the Italian land. I perceived at once that this poverty was the product of superstition. From Naples we will fly to London, and we will not visit any of the usual places that are the haunt of the tourist. We will simply go to Piccadilly Circus and walk the streets of that vicinity and we will see a sight that will make the bitter tears flow from our hearts, if not from our eyes. Piccadilly Circus, after eight o'clock at night, is London's open market in the traffic in women. There women by the hundreds offer themselves for sale, and there men by the hundreds buy them. The scene, itself, is not obnoxious; the women are well dressed; to look at them you would suppose that they were of good quality. It is only when you are aware of what is going on that you class them where they belong. Nowhere in the world is that traffic so open and unashamed as it was in the region of Piccadilly and Regent Street, in the year 1896. The prostitution of woman was as much a part of the life of the city of London as the buying and selling of cotton goods. We will now take our plane and fly to Edinburgh and we will be the guests of my dear friend Donald Kennedy, and the reader is very fortunate to be the guest of so delightful a host, and hostess; he will have to be an iron man as to energy and strong-headed as to sobriety, for the Scotch are hard workers and drinkers and eaters. The hospitality begins at breakfast, which is none of your little Continental breakfasts of coffee and rolls, but a substantial meal of cold joints, toast, eggs and marmalade and such coffee as is never tasted on this side of the water. After breakfast your host and hostess carry you away to some of the interesting sights that make Edinburgh the wonderful city that it is. About one o'clock you are home to luncheon; this again is a very substantial feast. After luncheon you take your siesta; then you go out with Donald to the golf links and spend the afternoon. You come home, go to your room, rest awhile and then are called to afternoon tea. You are at liberty to do as you please until it is time to dress for dinner. Being a clergyman, I was always dressed for dinner; that is one advantage of the clerical profession. And a Scotch dinner is a dinner! You have your soups, your fish and meat and entrée, your desserts and your wines, all of which is made more palatable by the delightful conversation that leaves you not a moment to think of what you are eating and drinking, and so you are present at an intellectual rather than a material feast. If you are visiting of a Saturday night, perhaps Donald will say to you, if you are a clergyman, "I wish you would take off that uniform of yours and put on these Scotch tweeds." Which you obediently do. Then Donald hands you a big stick and you go down with him through the ravine and up the hill-side into the Old Town, till you come to the Haymarket and the Canongate, and there you see what will remain with you till the end of your days. On Saturday night all of the Old Town gives way to a debauch; that night I saw at least ten thousand men, women and children lying dead drunk in the streets. There was one lodging-house in which the men were so close together that we had to step on them to get through the room. A more appalling sight than this I have never seen; human degradation in that city of light, religious and secular, reached the lowest point possible for human nature. The next morning being the Sabbath day, you and Donald will, of course, go to church and hear a sermon by some distinguished Protestant divine. In that sermon you will not hear the slightest allusion to the sinfulness which frightened you the night before. The minister will discourse learnedly of some theological doctrine. At dinner you and Donald will discuss the problem presented to you by the drunkenness and degradation of Saturday night and the piety and respectability of Sunday morning, and you will conclude that there is no present solution of that problem. Donald will say that it is the outcome of human nature; you will affirm that it is the product of social organization. I have given my reader no details of the "grand tour"; he has doubtless made that tour himself and has seen all the usual sights. What I saw was a society afflicted with a fatal disease; a disease manifesting itself in superstition, poverty, prostitution and drunkenness. I came away with the firm conviction that unless Christian civilization repented and applied a remedy for these evils, Christian civilization was doomed, and in our day this doom has fallen upon it. |