“A NATION OF HEATHENS”

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXVIII, Issue 3723, 27 November 1906, Page 2

“A NATION OF HEATHENS”

The Right Rev. Dr. Wallis, Bishop of Wellington, has been attending the'Anglican Congress at Melbourne. It is interesting to know what Dr Wallis has been saying about the people who pay him his salary. He is reported in the cablegrams to have remarked that New Zealanders were developing into a nation of heathens. Anyone who has had the pleasure of looking on the rotund and jolly person who is reported to have uttered these dreadful words, would

hardly believe it of him. The Bishop appears to be a gentleman who would neither make an enemy nor be an enemy to anyone. He is one of the most smilable men. He enjoys his pipe or his cigar, he preaches'a fighting sermon wherein one sees the glint of the bayonet and hears the roar of artillery and he seems to be an ordinary sane decent kind of body who is occupied in getting a living like the rest ot us.

It is a pity the cable did not say why New Zealanders were becoming heathens, because few people here will know the reason. But at the same time, supposing they recoenise that they are heathens or are becoming heathens, they may reason that Dr Wallis the stout gentleman in the apron and gaiters—who used to pull stroke in his University eight—is paid to snatch the heathern brands from the burning. When Dr Wallis is at home in New Zealand he does not denounce the people as heathens, because perhaps he knows that to tell a person he is sick will not cure him. On the whole professional religionists lately have been making exceedingly painful allegations about the people with whom they live, and there is not the slightest evidence that the allegations are true or that they cure the alleged evils.

One clergyman—who draws ,£Boo a year and has a free house— not long ago accused the people of New Zealand of ‘ frank paganism.’ The people on their side might accuse a parson of making a living out of what should be a duty. They might if they cared say that theteaching of religion and the scattering of accusations should not be a paid business and that the Man they say they follow was a carpenter who did not draw eight hundred a year and who did not possess a doctorship of divinity issued exactly in the same way as is issued a doctorship of medicine or law. The people might tell the cleric whose claim to be heard is that he wears a uniform designed —not by the Carpenter, but by business religionists that the people of the earth are becoming almost as intelligent as the clergy, that reverence for clothes and degrees is not holiness and that irreverence for form is not heathenism. Dr Wallis says we are heathens. He wears an apron, gaiters and a shovel hat. Therefore we are, heathens. Could logic be more Conclusive ?