The Sun.
London, England, 1863-12-30 00:00:00

AN ADMIRABLE SPEECH ON THE PRESS

By a Catholic Priest,

The Edinburgh Courant gives the following re-
port of a lecture delivered by a priest in the
Catholic Church, Cowgate, on Sunday night :
newspapers, Dr. Marshall, after a few introductory remarks
said—l often thought, What did our early ancestors
d o without
variousthe
circulating
library, the
,books
teeming
and
Press,dh e
periodi-
cals that come out quarterly, monthly, weekly, and
daily, supplying us with food for
and glorious things were achieved by our ancestors,
and yet there was no Press. Men married and were
given in marriage—marriages of lust, marriages of
convenience, marriages of love; deaths, coming
and going, buying and selling ; dynasties
were founded, arose, fought, and conquered ;
poets sung, philosophers taught, society existed
and flourished, and yet no Press, no books,
no newspapers ! The Press came up at the time that
tobacco did ; I like them both. But when there was
no Press and no printed books, was there anything
to supply their place ? Yes; there was. Society
could never have progressed, nor civilisation existed,
if there had riot been something as powerful in that
day as the Press is in ours. They had their orators,
poets; dramatists, tragedians, philosophers, school-
men, heralds, and bards. When I speak of the
Press, I don't merely mean ink, paper, types, ma-
chines, and compositors, but I mean the great talent
behind—those who direct it, and make us happy
possessors of it. Whether the power of the Press
will increase, I don't know. I can hardly imagine
that it will become greater or more glorious than it
is at the present moment. Here we have the won-
derful machinery that can impress so fast—
that can bring the printed impression before us
at every hour of our existence. Here we have
the electric wires—the flashing telegraphs from
the most distant regions of the world, with news
true and false, with such speed that no
man can speak in Parliament, or utter a single sen-
timent anywhere that is for the advantage of his
fellow-men to hear, but almost as soon as he has
uttered it, and perhaps before he has finished speak-
ing, it is in print. Here we have not only labour,
skill, and industry, but we have the most intelli-
gent men of the day, men of the greatest learning
and intelligence, employed on the Press. Not that
everything that is in a newspaper is true, for I can-
not believe that all that is said about the wonder-
ful turnips or the magnified gooseberries—(laugh-
ter)—I cannot believe all that is contained in a
Reuter's telegram ; I do not believe all the critiques
that are printed in regard to every songster that
sings or every painter that paints. But we are
not to suppose that the Press is all evil ; and so
at the present moment it gives us what the
Pagans, the early Christians, and the inhabi-
tants of Europe possessed. We have but small
poets now compared with those that went
before us ; we have r.o wonderful philosophers that
would compare with those of old—with Plato or
Aristotle—with men of such talent as Socrates or
Julius Caesar; but here we have something to sup-
ply the places that these men occupied. We have
all this in the wonderful Press that we possess at the
present moment, whose powers cannot be exagger-
ated ; and there is not a single preacher in the uni-
verse who would bestow more praise upon it and do
more homage to it than the humble individual be-
fore you. Now comes the question, How does the
Press affect religion and society ? Many men, and
I believe no men more than the respectable gentle-
men of the Press themselves, have an idea that
the Press is hostile to religion. • All ignorant
men think so, all superstitious men think so,
all bigoted men think so. God preserve me
from being classed with any of these ! Still,
men think so, and many members of the Press,
in their writings, and what they put forth in
books and newspapers, seem to imagine that this is
really the case. I must tell you honestly that I
cannot believe that the Press can ever be hostile to
religion or destructive to society. I can give you
my reasons for my opinion. In the first place, my
great guide is the Church. What does the Church
itself do with regard to the Press ? Decidedly it
makes use of it. At Rome, Milan, and Venice, the
Press is worked with wondrous power; and in the
first few years after the discovery of the art of
printing, Italy issued works, which they specially
tell us are on theology and the classics, in the pro-
portion almost of ten to one that resulted from the
German Press. Under the influence of the Popes,
under the influence of the most leading and power-
ful families of Italy, the Press arose in that country
to a wondrous power; and from it there
issued printed books that are to be counted
in the first century of the invention, not
by hundreds, but by thousands. Therefore,
if I find in God's providence such gifts, skill,
and discovery, so active, earnest, and energetic, in
making use of the Press, I would never think that
the Press cln be hostile to the Church. I find that
the Church has outrivalled all other powers to the
present day, until in spite of Printing-house-squar e
and the enormous engines that are at work to give
us the great Times newspaper, I will challenge
all England, France, and Germany to touch, in the
race, the great Propaganda Press in Rome, which
gives us not only the Fathers, the Scriptures, the
classics of Greece and Rome, but such remains of
literature as may be found in the treasures of
Arabia or spread before us in the Sanscrit. I have
other reasons, however, for my assertions. In the
first place—pardon me, gentlemen of the Press, if I
should knock a little of the conceit of you—l admit
your power, I glory in your energy ; but I must
remind you that you are not an institution,
though you often assert it. I must tell you plainly
that you are not an Estate' though you pretend to
be. Great and powerful and valuable as you are,
you are no more an institution than a looking-glass
is a young body's face—(a laugh)—or a duet a
pianoforte, or a telescope an astronomical observa-
tion. Like the orators, er the bards, or the heralds,
or the actors of old, you only reflect the public
mind—no doubt an immense service, an immense
use to society. The Press only reflects the public
opinion; and just as men think, or wish to think,
or desire to think, the Press is obliged to utter.
Tory to Tory, Whig to Whig, Radical to Radical
—each man has his own newspaper. The commer-
cial man reads the " City article ;" the prizefighter
takes in Bell's Life in London. Go and write a
paper that the public does not like—put St. Paul
and St. Peter to edit a Times and a Morning
Chronicle in Rome and Athens, and how many
subscribers would they have ? Give me the
power to write a journal in Edinburgh, and
see how long I would be out of the Gazette ?
(Laughter.) Gentlemen of the Press, you do well,
but remember you are only a portion of society, not
the masters of society; you have no head, no orga-
nisation, no principle, no aim but to se l your paper
and get men to read it. Do it with all the inge-
nuity you can. Those who write truthfully and
sincerely will earn a good and honest existence, but
the false man, the untrue man will do the same for
his own purposes. As the orators of Greece and
Rome spoke the minds of the Grecians and Romans,
so you speak the minds of Frenchmen, Scotchmen,
Englishmen, and Irishmen. You are a wonderful
power, a great engine, but you are no institution;
and therefore the Church cannot fear you, except as
it dreads and fears society. In connexion with the
Press there is plenty of lies, plenty of errors, plenty
of what is bad ; but unless society 10 lies,all
and all falsehood, and all sin—which I don't believe
—then the Press is not all falsehood or Bin.
I look
upon the the Press merely as the tongue of so
be
be bad.
not as its head or its heart. The Press may
Presto
What is the Press in America—what 18 the
in France—in spite of the activity of the one, and
the wonderful intellect of the other What is the
described by itself ? There
Press- in our country it—pienty of falsehoods.
are plenty of evils in
W
een—hy you speak so
But then it may be as
favourably of it ? Because the fi ecdom of the Press
corrects itself. The newspapers correct themselves
by accusing one another, laughing at one another,
and insulting one another. I should be sorry to
see the slightest restriction put on the liberty of
the Press. Give it rope enough
and it will hang
itself—(laughter)—and since its charges against
the Church are untrue, ell I have to Nay ie that
" \ellen rogues fall out honest men get their own."
(Leug Ater, ) But it may be aelsed, does set the

S,

Church restrain the Press ? No. True, the Church
condemns what men print, just as it condemns what
men say, but it merely condemns by saying, " This
is contrary to Catholic truth." The Church just
puts the label "poison" on what it knows to be
poison. It merely says, " This is Christianity,
that is heresy." But if I give the Press liberty, it
must give me liberty too; if the Press is to be free,
let the Church be free ; if the Press is to sit in
judgment on the Church, let the Church do the
same, and then see whose judgment God will ratify.
Dr. Marshall concluded by saying, " In the name
of good society I protest against any idea of fetter-
ing the Press. Liberty I love, and tyranny and
licence are its opponents."