The Birmingham age-herald., 1914-07-26

Voiltaire or Mably, Hume, Robertson or Henry, treat the clergy of the church with fairness, not even with common honesty. If historical noto- riety enforces the allowance of any merit to priest, the effect of this extorted acknowledgement Is destroyed by happy turn, a clever insinuation, or a coarse innuendC."
 Emerson: "In modern Europe the middle ages were called the dark ages 10 centuries from the fifth to the fif- teenth. Who dares to call them so now? They gave us decimal numbers, gunpowder, glass, chemistry and Gothic architecture, and their paintings are tho delight and tuition of our age. The darkness of those times arises from our own want of information. not from the absence of intelligence that dis tinguished them. Human thought was never more active and never produced greater results in any period of the world"
 Carlyle: This glorious Elizabethan era with its Shakespeare as the out come and fiowerage of all which pre- ceded it, Is itself attributable to the Catholics of the middle ages. The Chris tian faith. which was the theme of Dante's song had produced the prac- tical life which Shakespeare was to sing"
 Hallam: "It was no crime of the clergy that the huns burned their churches or the Normans pillaged their lmonasteries. It was not by their means that the Saracens shut up the supply l of papyrus and that sheep skins bore 1 a great price, Europe was altogether decayed in intellectual character, partly | in consequence of the barbarian incur sions partly of other similar influences acting long before. We certainly owe | it to the church every spark of learn- ling which then glimmered, and which she preserved through that darkness l to rekindle the light of a happier age" ], Bosanquet I've speak sometimes of
 the dark ages, and in matters of the
 exact science, perhaps they were dark enough. Yet we must deduct som ething l from our youthful idea of their ob-
 scurity, when we find that our truest
 lovers of beauty fix the building age | of the world between the years 500 and
 1500 of our era. Architecture. more than any other art, Is an index to the happiness and freedom of the people, and during this period of 1000 years,
 an architecture, pure In its principle, reasonable in it's practice, and beau-
 tiful to the eyes of all men, even the 1 simplest, covered Europe with beautiful buildings from Constantinople to the north of Britain. The more | closely we examine the question the less | the ground we shall find for the concep- | ton of the middle ages as long sleep 1 followed by sudden awakening.
 Rather we should consider that ancient Greece was the root, ancient Rome the | stem and branches of our own life, that the dark ages, as we call them, rep
 resent the flower, and the modern world of science and political freedom, the slowly matured fruit"
 Mir Editor: could quote many more
 n-Catholic writers confirmatory of
 above. but I fear I have already tres Hoxsed too much on your patience, and I could not reasonably expect very much more space. You may observe that I have not quoted among the above, the Literary Digest so seem- lingly authoritative for MT. School l
 plead guilty to reading the publica-
 tion each week. reading that is. in the
 modern sense of judiciously skipping l cannot however. mea maxima culpa, accept 1t as a mentor Consequently car give but scant) credence to the story quoted from its pages. The story has all the earmarks of improhability Why should we suppose that ESs maj esty of Spain, even if he is Catholic King, is an utter ignoramus? The fact of the matter is that statement of AL phonso's, like other statements at tributed to more distinguished men Hike say Louis WIS "Petat c'est moi like Galileo's Gan old friend of Mir Scboels) "epur si muore," like Welling- tons up, guards and at them! like lDewey's Cease firing till we have Ihreakfast." must be placed, not in the department of history, but in the de- | partment of-well, say romance Oi Italian to whom related the story oI Alphonse smiled. shrugged his shoul- ders. blew ring of cigarette smoke land said: "davero ben trovato." Sin lcerely JAMES E. COYLE.
 Birmingham. July 25. 1914
 Fairgrounds for Negroes