OUR CALUMNIATORS.

Poverty Bay Standard, Volume III, Issue 329, 1 December 1875, Page 2

OUR CALUMNIATORS.

TO THE BDITOB. Sib, —Your remarks in the Standard of Saturday last on the Reverend (?) Mr. Smalley were both fitting and appropriate ; but it is to be hoped that the matter will not rest where it does, — follow up the work you have begun, Mr. Editor, and you will have the support of every settler in the place. Until I read the vile calumny in print, I did not think that amongst the ministers of New Zealand, there could befound one so totally oblivious to the obligations of his sacred calling ,as to descend to the meanness of direct untruth for the aimless object of vilifying a community for whose spiritual benefit he was supposed to be laboring, and amongst whom he was located on sufferance as a visitor.

The subject matter of Mr. Smalley’s calumny is, of itself, sufficiently odious to stamp it as one of the most unchristian and ungenerous of which any one can be guilty; but when we come to consider the time and place in which it was uttered, it borrows an importance which, under ordinary circumstances, would not belong to it. It was in no less a place than the meeting house for the members of the Wesleyan Home Mission at Wellington, that this very irreverent servant of the Lord gave birth to the remarkable utterance that “ Gisborne was the most immoral and degraded place he had ever visited.” Now Mr. Smalley must have known either that he was telling the mission a wilful lie, or that he was stating what he believed to be true, but could not substantiate it by proof. On either horn of the dilemma he is impaled, and he stands forth now charged with having outraged the cloth that he wears, and violently scandalised this community by an intentional perversion of that Truth of which he should be an exponent. I wonder if Mr. Smalley thinks that this is the kind of charity which his and. our Great Master would accept as covering a multitude of sins ?—that charity which ‘■speaketh no ill, which suffiereth long and is kind ?” Mr. Smalley is condemned out of his own mouth as a breaker of one of those commandments on which the foundation of human society rests—or should rest —Thou shall not bear false witness against thy neighbour,” is a command which Mr, Smalley ignominiously breaks with impious indifference to the High Authority which gave it for his observauce, as well as to those for whose salvation he is supposed to be working. Again, sir, I, for one, thank you for the prompt and prominent denial given in your columns to Mr. Smalley’s scandalously incorrect assertion, and trust that, in the name of the settlers of Gisborne, you will demand that the matter be brought before the Conference, or some other tribunal competent to investigate it to the bottom. But some surprise is manifested at the reported silence of the Rev. Mr. Carr, who was at the mission meeting at the time, and who does not appear to have raised his voice in defence even of his own flock, who form part of the calumniated community. One,would think that such a statement would have evoked manifestations of such displeasure as would have rendered some further explanation necessary ; but we must, in the meantime, ask Mr. Carr to afford us such information as may in some degree explain why no one was found valiant enough to defend an absent community, from one of the most unwarrantable and dastardly attacks that ever disgraced a minister of the gospel.— I am, &c., Laity.