The Catholic Church in Oceania (Classic Reprint)

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Excerpt from The Catholic Church in Oceania The early history of peoples and of places has a special interest of its own. Oftentimes, however, owing to the scanty, or, it may be, the unreliable records that are to hand, the historian is not in possession of many of those facts and circumstances which, if of no great intrinsic importance, are nevertheless the key to many a result and feature, self-evident, indeed, in their present and actual existence, but veiled in uncertainty as to their source and origin. The same remark is applicable to the early history of the Church, whether we speak of the Church as a whole, or whether we restrict our investigations to the origin, rise, and growth of the Church in any particular portion of the globe. It would be instructive and interesting to show how - if we wish to get behind the Christian era - sacred history has such a decided superiority over profane history that, with the exception of the comparatively short period of the historical times of Athens and Rome, the early history of the peoples of the earth is lost in fable and oblivion. It is only in the inspired books of the Old Testament that we find any authentic and reliable records of the infancy of the human race through the early history of that chosen people of God - the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob - that people who, under the providence of God, was singled out to be the favoured recipients of His favours, of His mercy, of His predilection, - and why? - because this was the people who were in the fulness of time to realise the promise of the future Redeemer made to our first parents themselves, because the synagogue was the type and figure of the Church, because, as St. Paul intimates, every ceremony, every sacrifice, every prominent personage under the dispensation of "the law, " received its meaning, its significance, its importance, from the future Messias whom they foreshadowed, to whom they referred, round whom they were grouped as the centre of "grace." To follow up this vein of thought would, however, take me too far away from my immediate purpose. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.