Suicidal Mania

The Catholic Standard and Times

It is significant of the extent to which the crime of suicide prevails, in nominally Christian countries, that a movement looking toward an antidote should be formally inaugurated here. Το Mayor Johnson, of Cleveland, belongs the credit of starting this highly commendable crusade. He and some other philanthropic gentlemen of the same city have formed a club or society whose object will be to seek out the probable victims of despair and gently strive to win them back from the spell of the fiend who whispers that in living there is no use, in death a blessed relief. It is a noble idea to put into practice the theory of the brotherhood of man, and bid the hope-riven again take heart and look up toward God's sky.

But, ah! how much more noble to plant in such weak and empty hearts the seed that blossoms into a talisman against despair! Suicide is accounted for by many causes, but the one primary cause is the infidelity of the age. Suicide is, in the last analysis, the negation of God. It is the one unforgivable sinthe sin against the Holy Ghost. Where there is no religion there is no fear of God. Infidelity is the foster parent of sin, sin of shame, shame of despair and despair of death. Strong drink is a potent agency. Over-indulgence in it produces a frightful physical and moral depression; and the alternation from wild gaiety to sickening melancholia, repeated from week to week, mayhap from day to day, destroys the fountains of life and spirit. It becomes impossible for the unhappy victim to call up again the

stimulus of hope; life ceases to have any purpose or goal worth striving any longer for, and at last the whisper of the tempter overcomes the natural instinct of self-preservation and the fatal plunge into the dark ensues. Miserable indeed is the case of the unhappy wight who has not known God, or who, worse still, having once known, has dared to cast Him out and defy His judgments.

Hardly less potent a cause of this terrible crime is the abandonment of the soul to the spirit of materialism and worldly success. This sordid spirit is almost universal. Money and the things that money can procure are held up in book and magazine and newspaper as the great prizes of life. Pagan Greece was a thousand times higher in the moral scale than Christian England and America are to-day in this regard. It cultivated beauty and truth in art and literature, and thereby paved the way for the reception of the really beautiful and true-the knowledge and love of God.

Perhaps the most pathetic of all the fruits of this worldliness of spirit is the state of the child mind in parts of Germany. Recent statistics reveal the appalling fact that the suicide of children is beginning to be a new and dark feature of industrial life. Over-schooling and premature drudgery in factories are given as the causes of such an unnatural condition of things. All the joyousness is thrust out of the children's lives in many communities. The unhappy beings are made to feel the hard, pitiless grip of a sordid, God-ignoring world ere they have well begun to taste of the innocent gaiety of youth, and they

have no promptings of religion to sustain them in the hours of sadness and disappointment; and so, children though they be, they decide to end it once for all. In Saxony especially is this tragedy of child-destruction becoming common. That France leads in suicide is a common belief. If the ratio of increase in the United States keep up, we shall soon have established a claim to supremacy this dreadful distinction. The use of absinthe and similar villainous decoctions of wormwood and other deadly vegetables and plants is indirectly responsible for the high rate of self-destruction in France. But the direct responsibility lies at the door of Voltaire and his school. When you destroy the belief in God you destroy the respect for human life, of which He only is the giver. Hence the desire for nothingness, the frantic appeal of despair to the eternal dark.

An Antidote to Bad Reading

The Sacred Heart Review

A valuable aid in our efforts to combat the manifold evils of the present day will be found in a steady effort towards acquiring an accurate knowledge concerning the history, doctrines, and practical working-methods of the Catholic Church.

The Catholic Church is an organization, an institution, so vast, so longlived, so unconquerable, so skilled in the making of great men and the accomplishment of great things, that writers. not of her fold have lavished magnificent tributes of praise and admiration upon. her, tributes which it has long been one of the special aims of the Sacred Heart Review to present from time to time to the attention of its readers. If these writers are thus impressed, if they display so keen an appreciation of the Church's glories, what ought to be our own knowledge and our own admira

tion of the glory of our heritage, of that treasury of good things that is ours by right of inheritance, and because we are truly the Church's children?

A story exists to the effect that, one night, in a fearful dream, the inventor of printing saw before him the terrible evils that awaited the promulgation of his invention. From that discovery not good alone would flow, but awful harm, direful temptation, tremendous power for lasting woe and ill. What serious thinker to-day is not well aware of this flood of evils now pouring out into the minds and before the eyes of young and old through the medium of the daily press! This state of things should prove the Church's wisdom in maintaining, on her part, a censorship of the press, by means of her index of condemned writings, forbidden writings, writings concerning which she says to her children, as God said to our first parents in Eden: "Of the fruit of this tree ye shall not eat!"

Yet, because a thing is forbidden, it does not follow that there will be no transgression of the law, no temptation to break it, no longing to follow one's own will and the devil's seductions, no tasting of the forbidden fruit. Too many persons, young and old, want to be conversant with what their careless neighbors are talking about; they dread to be called ignorant, prudish, or eccentric.

A remedy for this cowardly spirit

excellent remedy among many others, lies in making ourselves, and those under our influence, conscious of, and joyful in, the beauty, the grandeur, the magnificence of our inheritance as Catholics. We should cultivate in every way a taste for Catholic knowledge, just as carefully as we cultivate a taste for anything noble and beautiful; nay, far more than for any other subject, since in the Church the beauty of holiness is

stored up and with it the unfathomable stores of the truest wisdom and the deepest mines of thought.

We should make our reading a part of our examination of conscience. What do I read? It it harmful or helpful? Is it elevating? Is it such as I should like. to face God with, or the eye of the friend whom I honor most on earth? But to this self-examination, let us add a firm resolution, namely, that by God's grace we shall do all in our power to become intelligent Catholics through daily helpful reading in the Church's marvelous stores of literature-history, biography, missionary travel and discovery, poetry, philosophy, fiction even, for the writers of Catholic fiction well

deserve attention from many readers. But, above all, let us cultivate the love for truth, for purity, for profound wisdom, for holiness. Let us desire these things; and let us hate and despise and scorn what is false and impure, foolish and evil. For, at the last day, believe it, the unerring Judge will demand from us how we used the intellect, the mind, the wondrous gifts He gave us whether we spent them in His service, or flung them to the dogs among the mire.

Unclean Literature

The Michigan Catholic

"The murderer is not alone to blame for the foul piece of work he has done. It is the fault of this city, of the state and of the United states. It is the fault of every community and every government that allows unclean literature to be sent out to poison the minds of our young people and inflame them to deeds of darkness."-Extract from sermon at funeral of Josie Oom, of Grand Rapids.

Once more has the influence of foul literature brought death into a happy home; once more has the corruption of the blood and thunder novel made some one a murderer. The recent murder in

Grand Rapids of a young lady, who was returning from her daily employment, has brought grief to her parents and relatives, and aroused the sympathy of every law-abiding citizen of the "Second City" of Michigan.

The murder of Josie Oom was most brutal. It was the act of a fiend in human form; the aftermath of a premeditation encouraged by a curse which is ruining and wrecking the youth of the country-impure literature. Until the Christian people of the United States, in one harmonious acclaim, demand from the Federal government the suppression of immoral literary filth, murders will continue; crime will increase; sin will flourish. What fills our jails, our penitentiaries, with inmates? Literary moral sewerage, which is the production of degenerates who are encouraged by unscrupulous publishers in their work of the devil. The daily press, with its scare heads, its "cuts," and inflammatory paragraphs describing sin and abomination, is an accomplice and breeder of crime and vice. Crime is too glorified in this country, and it is through this glorification of criminals-by men and women from whom is expected "common sense" that justice is defeated.

Well did the Christian minister speak the truth when he declared at the bier of Josie Oom that "the murderer is not to blame." Under the sanction of a government, National and State, and encouraged by the citizens of a nation which boasts of advanced civilization, the literature of hell is permitted to spread broadcast throughout the land. But as sure as night succeeds day, the nation, whether it be empire, kingdom, republic or principality, that does not check the flow of literary poison will fall.

Suppress yellow-back literature; suppress a publication that glorifies vice, and demand a more rigid punishment for criminals that we may avoid murder and other crimes.

hobby-horses, dolls, books, tops, blocks, engines, and mechanical toys, broken before night. The noise was deafening, for the sound of drums, tin horns, French harps, and accordians mingled with the tinkle of the toy piano and the rasping scrape of beginners on violin and mandolin.

The children were none the better for these attentions. Indeed, there had been people cruel enough to voice the sentiment that the Stork children were "spoiled little brats;" but these were for the most part old bachelors-wont to be critical-or parents who had not the wherewithal with which to spoil their own children. Things proceeded in the same old way until one year there was a strike in the Christmas trade.

There were so many family names in the family that every one had a particular designation. There was Aunt Mary, and Aunt Mary Dave, Little Mary and Jim's Mary. There was Arthur and young Arthur and young Mrs. Arthur, and this last-named had dropped like a nihilistic bomb into the family circle. She was young and pretty and opinionated, and this is a fatal combination; for while a plain woman may yield her ideas upon occasions, a pretty one never changes her opinions. Never having felt the need of ideas, being always approved, no matter how idealess, by the censor, Man, she clings to her opinions tenaciously.

Young Mrs. Arthur had been busy since her advent into the family six years before and, with the glamor still upon her as to her husband and to all that pertained thereunto, had accepted his family's ways. But she had reviewed the situation and felt that the time had come to make a change. She had talked it all over with Arthur in the silent midnight watches when her husband, weary with a strenuous day upon

the links, yearned for sleep and had acquiesced with everything she said as the nearest way to approach unto his desired haven.

"I think the way we keep Christmas is all wrong, don't you?" she said.

"Um Um!" Arthur didn't mind when she asked questions which could be answered with yes or no. He had learned to sleep with one ear open and could catch the intonation and tell whether to say, um-hum or un-un. It was when her remarks required answers with ideas to them that Arthur squirmed. He couldn't see why women would expect the impossible from their husbands! Mrs. Arthur went on in a monologue pleasant and soothing:

"We never made such a fuss over Christmas at home. When we were little we had a tree trimmed with popcorn, cranberries and candles, and some gold and silver paper things, and we had presents, a few simple ones, and we mended up our old toys we were too big for, and took some pennies out of our banks, and made up a basket for some poor children. My mother used to say that children shouldn't think about what they were going to get, and of course she was right." Young Mrs. Arthur had the old-fashioned idea that everything her mother did was right, and in this she was an agreeable change from the modern young woman who thinks herself superior to all of femininity which has gone before. "We used to get into a perfect fever over what we were going to give Mother and Father. and each other. Why, when I was only five years old I remember pricking my fingers nearly to the bone working a cross-stitch needle-book for Mamma,bless her! she has it yet. And putting in my playtime for weeks making a shaving-paper case for Father. The present I liked best that Christmas was