MR EWING’S CASE.

Evening Star, Issue 4298, 5 December 1876, Page 1

MR EWING’S CASE.

I The papers to hand by the Albion report the final decision of the General Assembly of Victoria in the case of the Key. Mr Ewing, who, after acting as j a minister of the Presbyterian Church in Tasmania for more than twenty years, and leaving the island with the highest credentials from his congregation and his presbytery ; after sitting for years as an elder in the General Assembly of Victoria, after preaching in numerous Victorian pulpits at the special request of the men who now condemn him, is now refused recognition as a minister of the Presbyterian Church m Victoria, on account of charges made against him in Tasmania twenty-four years ago. Mr Erring is now charged with unministerial conduct, unpresbyterial conduct, and falsehood. But as soon as we read the evidence adduced, or what, goes by that name, we find that it is so ridiculously weak that it would be laughed out' of court by every barrister, and would be censured by every competent judge as a mere mockery. Indeed, we have no hesitation in stating that there is not evidence enough to hang a cat npon, and that the whole case is, as we mentioned some months back, the grossest case of ecclesiastical oppression that has occurred in the Australasian colonies for the last quarter of a century. For what are the facts f Mr Ewing’s accusers walk over the details of the alleged unministerial conduct m a gingerly way, but we shall not be so squeamish. It appears that when he was a young man he took lessons m elocution of Mr G. V. Brooke, and as President of the Lailnceston Athenaeum waited on Madame Anna • Bishop, to induce her to .sing «t a concert for the benefit of the institution, and horror l of horrors ! actually handed • the kdy on to the platform. The third charge made against him in Melbourne a few days ago was the most serious by far-one of falsehood. But what is the evidence to support it ? Nothing but two or three letters written by him to his wife, and by her to him, twentvfour years ago, and another letter which the writer of it (Dr Lillie) considered so improper that he wished it withdrawn almost as soon as written, and which is not brought to light Until the writer and eveiy man who Can explain it is dead, and which has remained for twenty-two years in the hands of a Mr Russell, who for nineteen years denit d its existence, and fifteen years ago expressed his full confidence in the man whose character hj e no wdesires to blacken. Respecting Mr Ewing’s letters to fiUT wife twenty-four years ago, they are certainly veiy foolish letters. But we fancy that if most of the reverend gentlemen who form the General Ass°emb!y of Victoria were to produce all their letters to their present wives or to the young women whom they were courting when they were young men indictments of folly and indiscretioncould be sustained against every one of them. As the Rev. Mr Stobbs,the ablest preacher among the Presbyterian ministers in Melbourne, put it with his usual manly straightforwardness to the other members of the Assembly. “ which one of you could endure a rigid scrutiny of his whole past life?” For it must be borne in mind that the whole of these charges were investigated by the proper persons, the Presbytery of Tasmania, twenty-four years ago, and that Mr Ewing was either acquitted or his offences con cloned. That fact is not disputed by his enemies. In our law courts a man cannot be tried twice for the same alleged offence, especially if the second trial is to take place twenty-four years afterwards, when almost every witness is dead. Nevertheless it seems that the law of Christ is—if Presbyterianism in Victoria be Christianity less mercitul than the law of the land An old man and a clergyman, a scholar and a gentleman, is branded in his old age as unfit for his profession, and turned adrift on the world to starve or die for aught his accusers care, after those accusers themselves have shown by their conduct that they have no belief that the charges they bring are true, and are only a thin veil to blind protessional jealousy of a more gifted and liberal-minded member of their body, whose congregation almost to a man desire to retain his services after all that has happened, and who still retains the confidence of almost every Presbyterian minister of distinguished ability throughout Victoria. ‘ Southland Times.’