FINAL REPLY TO MR ROOTS.

Feilding Star, Volume XVIII, Issue 54, 1 September 1896, Page 2

FINAL REPLY TO MR ROOTS.

TO THE EDITOR OF THE STAB. Sib, —Your correspondent, J. B. Roots, has really puzzled me. I have exercised my intelligence to the utmost to find anything worth replying to in his last, bnt have sadly failed in the hope* less attempt. A constant flow of vituperation and abuse is the only suitable description I can think of at this moment. However, with your kind permission, I would like to take a final leave of J.B.R. with a few remarks based on his latest " extraordinary." In dealing with such a confused mixture, it does not matter much where I begin, so will take his latter end. In a postscript he " does not hold himself bound to reply to any skulkings under assumed names," though be has been trying to do so all through his labyrinth of blunders. Now, sir, we temperance reformers maintain that our arguments are, in themselves, entirely impregnable and only require to be stated to be fully appreciated by everyone exercising the least quantity of unprejudiced intelligence; but Mr Roots, evidently, imagines that bis arguments —save the mark I—require all the weight of his great name and reputation. He judges rightly for once. So they do, and mach more, to make them acceptable to ordinary sensible folk. Seeing temperance, or teetotal, reformers have bad to face the vast majority in the past —not now, thanks to spreading intelligence —Mr Roots will not be so utterly foolish as to charge us with cowardice when we feel it expedient to keep our names out of print. " Thrice is he armed who hath bis quarrel just," and " He is but naked, though locked up in steel, whose conscience with injustice is corrupted." Mr Roots' last proves the correctiveness of my opinion — which he incorrectly calls ' personalties '—that he is terribly prejudiced against " those religious bodies who betray themselves as ruthless oppressors." It will be easily seen whence the ruthless oppression would coma if they were in a majority. From a generation of religious cranks, good Lord, deliver us! When a man professes to be a Christian and claims Christ as a patron of the most foolish and destructive babit that human society is addicted to, such a man I give up as hopeless, and fear for bis mental balance. We most emphatically deny that Jesus Christ, the greatest lover of our race, ever had anything to do with destroying the most nourishing fruit in existence in order to produce a poisonous spirit, so destructive when taken as a beverage. It is so inconsistent with His infinitely benevolent character, and with the teachings of that book He so truly believed in, that the man who maintains such a doctrine must unchristianise himself. Undoubtedly the drink produced by His miraculous word was the unfermented juice of the grape, the drink of all the wise ancient Eastern kings. Mr Roots is so ridiculous as to charge waterdrinking temperance folk with trying to " inflame the passions of the multitude," when all are well aware which side uses so successfully the passion-inflamin" material. When Mr Roots ignores the best evidence of the benign effects of Prohibition in the Clntha district, let us in charity hope " the wish is not father to the thought." In taking leave of Mr Roots, I would strongly advise him to divest himself of his thick coating of prejudice against other religious bodies, and against Prohibitionists, before he begins to read in the sacred book again, when I have no doubt he will write more reasonably and in due course with other wise and good men." I am, &0., Cross out the Top Line.