Correspondence

Feilding Star, Volume XIV, Issue 63, 15 November 1892, Page 2

Correspondence

MR WHIBLEY IN REPLY TO MR LUCAS.

TO THK liDITOH OF THE STAK. Sir,— That article of yours entitled " Moral (?) Melbourne" which caught my attention, and on which I ventured a fewremarks to show that not in Melbourne only is decadence in morals noticeable, can hardly be called a religious subject, as your correspondent, Mr G. R. Lucas, wishes to make it. It is rather a question i for fathers and mothers to consider, and say, as this immorality is so much on tbe increase in countries where religion is tabooed or excluded from daily teaching, it is time the subject was ventilated and re-considered. There is no doubt that religious education will become a prominent feature during the election. We bave, it is true, a splendid system of secular education ! but yet, as the Primate very truly remarked (no matter whether others pooh ! pooh !) " Moral teaching without a religious foundation will never develope moral character." Hayter's statistics for 1890-91 shows that one form of immorality (illegitimacy) is gradually decreasing in the United Kingdom, but increasing in Australasia, with the exception of Tasmania. New Zealand bas increased and trebled the number of its illegitimate births since 1873. People see this in every-day life, put pooh pooh the idea of altering the moral training of the generation, forgetting that the records of a nation are made up of individual cases. I rather wonder at a man of such " mental calibre" as your correspondent putting himself in such a position as he did about certain people professing to belong to some church committing great frauds, as an argument against religion. If, as Shakspeare writes, "Although it be not written down, yet I am an ass" — if I, one of a thousand in the Manchester Block, be an ass, that does not make the other nine hundred aud ninety-nine heads in the block asses. If one, man in 10,000 does not see the hand of the " Diyinity that shapes our ends," it only excites the commiseration of those who do. If, as Mr Lucas says, some examples of fraud and dishonesty among professing churchmen have come under his notice, more is the pity, but it does not condemn the whole body of 250,000 who have enrolled themselves as members of the English Church in New Zealand. Mr Lucas, as a man of the world, knows there are professors, the false and the true, in other than religious matters. People are asking themselves, if these public records on the increasing looseness and immorality of the generation are correct, what may be expected in another decade ? This is the consideration which is making thousands think that we must either have religious teaching day by day in our public schools, or rather grants to denominational schools, so that those who think their children should be grounded in spiritual as much as in temporal matters, can have it so. There would then be no injustice as now. Those who think secular education is all sufficient can have it for their children, and vice versa, I am, eto., F. W. Whibley.