1 J Mendota Minn 12.11.15 Dear Mr S. You've passed the Censor.
O.K! Madness surely tis: mostly from badness too, more of the
ugly ways of Cain. My, but what a conversion from 'laissez-faire'!
What a quite German rise to government in earnest in one year! Had
that come a few years ago we should be in the millennium mnow. And the
mission preachers might take a long holiday. And still an odd crank
of them might find right now a fine field. In Bess's days it looked in
Spain as if about all there was for God to be angry with & punish was in England.
And so all the good people of Spain & outside it were praying for the Armada.
And the Lord deigned to explain the upshot to some highly favored & holy
one. England did not deserve being set alight, & Spain deserved being
punished…. And as does Ireland. And I'm grieved not to see some
one, several, saying so, & convincing the people that they are called on
not only for econom economic retrenchment but for humble self
afflicting penance, In which mood they'd look with high favor on every
deamening of those pagan luxuries they lately so stoutly fought for.
Maybe even if the priests have to go it is no worse than they & their
people deserve for the universal neglect of the Love from Heaven given
some years by poor . Maybe this last year will have given
them all a new idea of the efficacy there can be in thracts, posters, car
toons, in those bizarre, unlofty forms of literature which, the nation Eiré
have so changed the views & ways of whole peoples & continents. Notice how the Poles, cousin of ours in felinisity take to abstinence
& fasting. Their action may well serve you for to start the idea in Eire.
There is now & especially thereabouts so much sham & lying & fourberie
that all the Heavens Powers would be mightily struck by something so
novel & different as humble self-reproach & penitential fasting: try
it, do ye! The ad. going Mitchellbooks in 3 issues each of the IW, the St Paul Cath Bulletin
&& the Pillsbury Elsevier, brought me $1.90, .30c, .00c, so desperately are we
under some sort of Curse of Columbkille. What a lift to the Irish melody & to read
those Miss Petersons' articles: but — not a book that she has mentioned — &
recommended is, or ever has been accredited in the Leader. Start on it an appeal
& subscription but for a gratis supplement reproducing on a 4 or 8 page sheet the
best of what the songs & airs she mentions, plus what she so unaccountably
omits, the Heather Glen. Be not beat by evil, but beat evil by God! M.M