RAILWAY PARSES FOR CHILDREN.

Evening Star, Issue 4130, 23 May 1876, Page 3

RAILWAY PARSES FOR CHILDREN.

To the Editor. Sir,— ln your paper of yesterday was a local noticing that the ‘ Tablet ’ is scarcely able to contain itself because the Government has declined to insult every other religious sect by granting specially to the children of the lieges of his Holiness the Pope free passes by rail to his schools in Dunedin, and this refusal they characterise as “a crying and most insulting injustice”; and, say their leaders, “See how we are persecuted !” But before this is printed they will be mortified to learn that, although the prayer of their petition was rejected, it was agreed that children attending any school should have passes for a trifle. Thus, to serve some political purpose, our Executive have admitted the thin end of the wedge of religious despotism. These railways are a portion of the fruits of secular knowledge, called “a godless knowledge by denominationalists. At our secular schools the pupils are initiated into the beginnings of independent knowledge, i. e. of their own minds, themselves, while all their facculties are called forth and cultivated so as to give self-dependence, and to bow only to truth, the path to which is to doubt and inquire. Denominationalists prefer their children should grow up in ignorance as be so educated—the reason why seems plain. Secularists carry out God’s first commands to them to the letter, see Genesis, Ist chap., and 28 verse, “Increase and multiply and fill the earth, and subdue it, and rule over the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the air, and all living creatures that move upon the earth.” Nemo. Dunedin, May 20.