A W eekly Newspaper and R eview .
DUM VOBIS GRATULAMUK, ANIMOS ETIAM ADDIMUS UT IN INCCEPTIS VESTRIS CONSTANTER MANEATIS.
From the B r i e f o f H is Holiness P iu s IX . to T he T ablet, fu n e 4, 1870.
V o l . 75. No. 2610. L o n d o n , M a y 17, 1890.
price ¡6., b>- post ¡yz<i.
[ R e g i s t e r e d a t t h e G e n e r a l P ost O f f i c e a s a N ew s p a p e r .
Our Golden Jubilee . . . . 757 The Story of the Conversions . . 758 After F ifty Y e a r s .......................... 7$2 The Harvest of H a lf a Century :
In England .. .. •• 7^4 The Harvest of H a lf a Century :
In Ireland.. .. . . • • 766 The Harvest of H a lf a Century :
In Scotland .. . . • ■ 768 Catholic Education.. . . . . 769 The Temperance Movement . . 771 Envoi.. .. •• •• 774
C 0 N T
C h ro n ic le o f t h e W e e k :
Page.
Imperial Parliament — Various Matters — Compensation for the Publicans—A Further Sitting— The Cod Dispute with France— Germany and East Africa—Ocean Penny Postage—The Bristol Election—Death of General Cassola— The Welcome to Lord Hartington 775 N o t e s . . . . . . . . . . 777 C o rrespo n d en c e :
Rome :—From Our Own Corre
spondent) . . . . . . . . 777
ENTS.
Page.
The Jerusalen Pilgrimage . . . . 778 L e t t e r s to t h e E d ito r :
Mr. Balfour and Irish Marriages 779 St. Patrick in Lancashire . . .. 779 How to Write Russian Names in
English Characters . . .. 780 Cardinal Newman and Dr. Dol-
linger . . . . . . . . 780 Short Notices . . . . . . . . 780 England, the Vatican, and M alta .. 780 Catholicism in Sweden . . ..781 Catholics and the Law . . . . 781
Page.
Among the Lepers . . . . . . 782 Natural Religion . . . . . . 782 S o c ia l and P o l it ic a l . . . . 783
S U P P L EM E N T . D ec is io n s of R oman Congrega
t io n s ......................................... 789 N ew s from t h e S chools.. . . 789 N ews from t h e D io c e s e s :
Southwark . . . . . . . . 790 Liverpool .. . . . . . . 790 Newport and Menevia . . . . 790 Northampton . . . . .. 790 The Pope and the German Pilgrims 790
OUR GOLDEN JUBILEE.
* ' | ' HE Tablet is one of the most offensive and virulent s newspapers in Europe; ” so wrote L ord C la-
rendon when Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. It would be difficult to find a single sentence which better points to all the long road we have travelled since the days when F r ed e r ic k L ucas was writing, and working, and fighting his life away. And it. is not we only who have travelled that road, but all English Catholicism. To us, looking back now, it seems a remote past, that time of 50 years ago. It all seems somehow so unendingly far off, the ■ conditions and the days when Catholics were chiefly a lonely and an unpopular sect, and when a Catholic publicist was driven to scream, if he would be heard at all, and to scream unpleasantly. Convention has fixed a time in the tide of the years when men shall look back upon their work and see how it has fared, and, if that may be, how it has prospered. The men who stood round the Tablet in 1840 are all dead. F r ed e r ic k L ucas and M r . C harles Weld of Chideock, Mr. D e la ba r r e B odenham and M r . Waterton, M r . L angdale, the H on. C harles C l if fo rd , and C olonel T ownley, all of them are gone ; but their work lives on, and will live. We were tempted for a moment to take this occasion of our Golden Jubilee to set in review the past of the paper, to say something of those who were the good pilots in its early and difficult days, who stood bravely at the helm till they had weathered all the storms, and till the Tablet at length “ broke into the sunnier seas ” of to-day. Every newspaper office has its own special pieties to the past, its own memories and its own traditions ; its own regards for those who worked for it, and, in their measure, were spent for it. But, after all, what is a Catholic newspaper but a means to an end ? The generations of men who have given their strength for us—what were they but human units in a mightier crowd : items lost in the vast army of those whose life-work has been for 50 years— in the schools, and the street, and the library, and the Church, and the workshop—to forward the onward march of Catholicism through all the shires and the cities of Great Britain ? The history of a newspaper however chequered and however broken with stirring incident—at one time L ucas in his passionate disappointment was ready to sell the paper to the first comer, to fling the thing, as he said, like a hundred of hides into Leadenhall Market—must needs seem a poor and a trivial business whenset beside thetremendous religious drama which has been unfolding itself over England for the
New Series, Vol. XLIII., No. 1,119.
last 50 years. For the year which saw the founding of the Tablet was also the year which saw the appointment of C ard in a l Wiseman as the coadjutor of the Midland district. It seemed, therefore, that the worthiest way of celebrating our Jubilee was to prepare some summary of the progress of the cause for which alone we have existed in the past, and for which alone we care to exist in the future. We offer our readers, therefore, as a fittest memorial of our Jubilee a record of the reconquering advance of Catholicism during the 50 years for which the Tablet has at least tried, with whatever blunderings and whatever errors of judgment, with whatever lapses and with whatever failings from highest endeavour, to be towards the great surrounding mass of Protestantism (in a rough figure) the incarnate voice of Catholic needs.
The indifferent English public will now have an opportunity of mentally realising and seeing at a glance, as in some historic picture, something of the spiritual changes which in these 50 years have passed over all the face of the land, wearing lines there which no hand shall efface. We have tried to deal in detail with the multiplying of people and priests, the missions and the schools ; we have recorded the varying fortunes of the war with the demon of intemperance ; we have treated, as in a chapter of contrasts between Then and Now, of the condition of Ireland and the Catholic advance of Scotland ; and, above all, we have told that wonderful, and till now almost untold tale, the Story of the Conversions—a story which if makes for an abiding gladness in the Church, yet stands also for a sea of human suffering silent and poignant, the depth of which no plummet of this world is ever likely to sound. We permit ourselves the hope that this imperfect record of a great movement may be of value and some permanent interest, not only to the many who have been reconciled to Catholicism, but to that larger multitude, their friends who still remain held in the various Protestant communions of the country. And it can hardly be of less interest, we think, to those whose lineage has no soil of apostasy, whose fathers belonged to the 99 over whom there was no rejoicing, but who, through long years of persecution and fine and social ostracism, though they suffered in loss of lands and liberties and purse and everything except honour, were true to the Catholic Church for all their lives, and in death left their faithfulness for their children’s proudest inheritance.
