THE GAME OF GRAB. We All Play It.

Free Lance, Volume IV, Issue 188, 6 February 1904, Page 6

THE GAME OF GRAB. We All Play It.

PERHAPS that outspoken cleric, Bishop Neligan, of Auckland, is illogical. He said the other day that the doctrine of getting and hoarding was eating into Imperial and national life. He likewise said that the Church he represented, though reviled, reviled not again, and also that the national life which was measured by the question, "Will it pay?" would, sooner or later, be a curse to all. Now, there are rectors in England who do not receive £100 a year. There are archbishops who receive £15,000. The archbishop need not notice the appalling disparity. He need not get and hoard. There are clergymen in New Zealand who don't get the wages of a carpenter, and there are bishops who get the salary of a Cabinet Minister. They need not get it. The possibility is that a quiet curate, on £100 a year, is able to accomplish as much good as a clarion-voiced bishop. Doesn't the question "Will it pay?" enter into almost every transaction, religious or otherwise? The bishop doesn't refuse his salary, and the Salvation Army captain never forgets the flag and the tambourine. * # * It may be "a curse to all," but Church bazaars and Church socials are not usually run "free, gratis and for nothing;" "Will it pay?" is a very important question with them Success is counted of more value than service, says the Bishop. If it were not so, Bishop Neligan might be still a curate, and some grey-headed rector who earns £100 a year a bishop. The clergy, of course, must deprecate hoarding, but no modern religious prince has sold all he has to give to the poor. The Bishop told the Synod in Auckland that the blight on the Church m New Zealand was fault-finding ' Bishop Neligan wasn't, of course, speaking about himself * * * If the clergy really and truly subscribed to the Bishop's advice not to hoard, not to ask "Will it pay*" clerics in high places would not ride in motor-cars, and clerics on the lower rungs wouldn't wear green coats and look starved. Britons have always

grabbed all they caai get, and, sad as it may seem, nearly all the bishops in the Empire are Britons. There is a warning m holy writ advising the removal of a beam in the critic's eye before he starts out to look for motes m the other fellow's optics.