The Freeman's Journal - Saturday, June 1, 1895

NOTES CURRENT.

Still, with all its unsavoury details of both past and present, we should be sorry indeed to exchange our criminal cause celèbre for the horrible case just concluded in unspeakable shame in London. It is said that the abominable revelations of the Oscar Wilde scandal have roused a perfect tempest of loathing and wrath throughout the nation. Yes, but the horror which has burst upon Puritan England is no new thing, a very old thing indeed in the world's history, wherever a people have forgotten God. There, with all its boast of accomplished civilization, there have long been signs of a moral pestilence in the air. Art, literature, the drama, commercial and social life, all have been debased. It is the inevitable result of the so-called religious agnoticism, otherwise scientific atheism, which is so marked a feature of the time, proving once more that "emancipation," as the new phrase for an old iniquity runs, from religion means also emancipation from all the moralities of man. Under this baleful influence a new-old school has sprung up, the Satanic, to whom the words "sacred" and "ashamed" have no meaning, whose very boast it is to substitute for the light from Heaven irradiating love, marriage, friendship, duty—all the life of man—the moral blackness of the pit. Naturalism naked and unashamed is the note of the new school, and from that to un-naturalism equally bare and shameless is an easy descent, as one of the new school's chief prophets has now proved.