less than two hundred and twenty-five lives will
suffice as a yearly sacrifice upon the altar of
the demon, Mismanagement.

SOMETHING STRONG IN WATER.

IT is some comfort, in this unbelieving and
pitilessly logical nineteenth century, to know
that there still are to be found a few men whose
simple and childish faith remains as pure, as
untouched by rationalism, as accessible to
supernatural influences, as in those grand old
mediaeval days when the Church imposed on men
every item of her creed on pain of torture here
and hereafter.

M. l'Abbé Gaume is one of these men, and
he has made the fact apparent by the publication
of a treatise on the virtues of holy water.
At a time when many of our own countrymen,
and not a few of our clergy, hold and disseminate
the doctrine that natural effects are not to
be traced to natural causes, and that an all-
wise, all-just, all-merciful, and loving Creator
deals with his children, good and bad, alike, by
means of blind, blundering, indiscriminate, bull-
in-a-china-shop "judgments," in the shapes of
cholera, cattle-plague, &c., he may be thanked
for giving some notice of a means, having no
origin whatever in any rational, scientific, or
natural grounds, to avert those sudden, sweeping,
insensate furies of "an offended Deity," whose
particular motive of offence can be traced to no
more definite cause than the general "sinfulness"
of a world certainly no worse, and in general
striving and struggling to be better, than it has
been since its commencement. Further, too, to
such persons who, for the most part, are
assiduous in devil-worship, the arch-enemy, who
only comes a step below God, is duly recognised
and considered and gets his full due, in
the work of the Abbé Gaume.

The ecclesiastic in question begins by a well-
merited attack on science for neglecting, as she
unquestionably does, to study and make herself
fully acquainted with the properties of holy
water—nay, for actually being and remaining
unconscious of the extraordinary physical
difference that exists between holy and
unconsecrated water.

She persists in seeking far and wide for the
material causes of disease, whether individual
or epidemic, and when she has, or fancies she
has, detected these, she proceeds, with a
rationalism appalling to the truly devout, to treat
the maladies by first removing the causes, then,
in as far as her lights allow, healing the effects.

What ought she to do? Hear Monsignor
(for our authority is a high Church dignity)
Gaurne.

He begins by informing us that "water is
the mother of the world, and the blood of
nature." You may not quite comprehend this,
but then that intense desire for comprehending
—"wanting to know, you know," to speak
familiarly—is just one of the gravest of the
many faults Monsignor and his congeners
condemn. Let us therefore accept the statement
that water is the mother of the world, and the
blood of nature. Then comes the blessing on
the element, hitherto regarded as one generally
useful, beneficent, even essential, but not gifted
with especial and supernatural powers. But let
a priest, be he, as a man, saint or sinner,
mumble through a few brief words of consecration,
behold! the following results are produced: In
the first place, the "water is withdrawn from
the influences of the demon." Now we have
heard of persons in great suffering "se
démenant comme le diable dans un bénitier," and,
as a proverb is quite as good an authority as
some of those cited by the abbé, we may consider
this point proved. It occurs to us that if every
ship that put to sea took with it a priest or
priests to keep continually blessing the water
during the vessel's progress, shipwreck and loss
at sea of all kinds might be avoided. Surely
science, studying the question, might ascertain
to a fraction how many priest-power might be
needed to consecrate a certain breadth and
depth of ocean, and whatever might be the
expenses attendant on carrying a staff of ecclesiastics,
it might be balanced against the cost of
insurance, thus rendered wholly a work of
supererogation, to say nothing of the doing away
with danger to life.

Let us hear further the effects of holy water.
It drives the demon out of water, as we have
seen; it also drives him out of fire—his own
element! It expels him from the air, from the
human body. "It prevents plagues and
epidemics, destroys noxious insects, and cures the
vine-disease. It remits venial sin; it remits the
temporal punishments due to sins." Here is
a saving in the matter of purchasing
indulgences: "It preserves health; it cures fever;
it cures dysentery." Such are a few of its
general virtues; but the abbé favours us with
the enumeration of certain individual instances
of its power, supported by the most irrefragable
proofs. He tells us of the cure of a fracture, of
a leprosy, of blindness, of a lady in the agonies
of death, of a case of epilepsy, of madness, of
cancer, of a woman in childbirth; and listen, O
Science!—when have you even pretended to
attempt the crowning miracle?—Monsignor
solemnly assures us, with proofs, à l'appui, "of
the resurrection of a corpse by holy water "!

And this is the agent that science, as
well as the world in general, persistently
ignores. She scales the heavens, she dives into
the bowels of the earth, into the depths of the
ocean to find the means of improving the
condition, moral and physical, of mankind, while
scornfully she "passes by on the other side" of
that one specific which, through driving out the
devil, the sole and only thing needful to secure
every advantage here and hereafter—though
indeed when it cures all diseases, saves from all
peril, and resuscitates the dead, we do not see
why we should trouble ourselves about a
hereafter—regenerates the world at once and for
ever!

"And now let us hear the conclusion of the