"MISCHIEVOUS, UNTRUE."

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 226, 24 September 1929, Page 5

"MISCHIEVOUS, UNTRUE."

EVANGELIST'S STATEMENTS. | MORALITY OF WEST COAST. PARLIAMENTARIANS' REPLY, (By Telegraph.—Press Association.) WELLINGTON, Monday. Mr. H. E. Holland, M.P. for Buller, and Mr. J, O'Brien, M.P. for Westland, handed the following statement to the Press this evening :— "We have read with amazement the Press Association message regarding the utterances of the Rev. G. H. Gilbert at Hamilton yesterday and find it hard to believe that he has been correctly reported. If the report is not incorrect, however, the reverend gentleman has allowed his imagination to play havoc with his veracity. The people of the West Coast maintain standards of citizenship and morality as high as those in any part of the world, and in proportion to the population there are as many churches and churchgoers as in any other part of the Dominion. "It is reckless and foolishly absurd to say that the public houses and picture shows in the mining towns keep open in defiance of the law. The hotels are as well conducted as elsewhere and such picture shows as open on Sundays do so with the permission of the Minister of Internal Affairs, and devote their net takings to the relief of distress cases. Moreover, balance-sheets of all income and expenditure are presented to the police, furnishing an additional guarantee that the funds so raised are safeguarded. In any case there is no difference whatever in principal between the Sunday concerts in the big cities, which such large numbers of churchgoers attend, and the picture shows in the isolated mining centres, which many churchgoers also attend after church. "Finally, Mr. Gilbert's reference to the conduct of funerals is both callous and wretchedly untrue and will be resented not only by the people of the mining towns, but by every citizen of New Zealand with a knowledge of the West Coast and its splendid people. It is deplorable in the extreme that any member of the clergy should use the pulpit for the dissemination of mischievous statements that are so widely separated from fact."