Page:Czecho-Slovak Student Life, Volume 18.djvu/104

brought the girls to shore where they were revived.

When the Rev. R. Hodik was given a cash reward by the grateful parents of the girls whose lives he had saved, he did not keep the money. The question was to what use it might best be devoted. With this money Father Hodik constructed a beautiful tennis court and presented it to the young people of the community.

Soon after this incident, Father Hodik was made pastor of St. Joseph’s Church, Kewaunee, Wis.

Father Hodik is to be congratulated on his heroic act and the unselfish way in which he willingly gave the cash awards to good causes. The Carnegie Medal is only a small intimation of the deep regard felt for him throughout his parishes for thus risking his life to save the lives of others.

College boys, and, perhaps college girls, casting about a little and beginning to read for themselves, sooner or later come upon an author named Mencken. They are puzzled and repelled by his general attitude, though undoubtedly entertained by his eleverness. In this frame of mind they want to know, next, what “the Church” thinks of Mencken. While the Church, as such, has never heard of Mencken, it might be of interest to these college students to learn what a stalwart Catholic like Chesterton thinks of the gentleman in question. Here, then, it is in G. K.’s unmistakable idiom:

“Mr. Mencken is a clever and bitter Jew, in whom a very real love of letters is everlastingly exasperated by the American love of cheap pathos and platitude. There is a great deal to be said for him, and it is all quite negative. His own philosophy is the sort of Nihilistic pride, which belongs to a man with a sensitive race and a dead religion. He has nothing to defend, and he defends it splendidly. To be just to him, we must remember the vast prairies of flat and vulgar sentiment with which he is surrounded. It is only just to Mencken to remember that he has to put up with America, and only just to America to remember that it has to put up with Mencken.

“We should normally be in sympathy with the Americans who are defending morality, only that the Americans seem to have such an extraordinary morality to defend. We believe that Mr. Mencken, who makes himself a champion of Nietzsche and delights in shocking the Christian as well as the Puritan sensibility, is quite capable of praising works which we should not touch with a pitchfork.”

We have not much to add to this except, perhaps, that while many read Mencken, no one believes him. We should advise college students to read all of Chesterton before they read any of Mencken. And we fondly hope the supply of Chesterton will be inexhaustible.