THISTLEDOWN.

Te Aroha News, Volume XI, Issue 1736, 4 May 1895, Page 2

THISTLEDOWN.

“ A man may jest and tell the truth.”

—HORA.CE.

The genial Mr Upton, one of the best chairmen or the Board of Education we have had in Auckland, had his name immortalised a few years ago by entering into a controversy on Sunday observance. Having conscientiously attended church ih: " the morning he took his dolceHfcu' hiente in the afternoon with the threefold aid of a verandah chair, a newspaper and a cigar, all tending to a,state of sleepy- satisfaction. This comfortable way of putting in the Sunday afternoon was christened. Uptonlsm. We are however badly in want of a name for the habit of sleeping in church. The medical notes of our newspapers are full of remedies for sleeplessness, and Lord * Roseberry has recently ■ suffered severely from insomonia. I wonder none of his advisers suggested a good course of sermon hearing, though sermons are so short now-a-days, parsons having struck like other tradesmen for shorter hours, that a man can have only forty winks even if he winks twice a minute. The old family pews and the eighty or ninety minute sermon were powerful, sedatives, and acted as double _ charm, resting the mind wearied with the week’s worries, and patting the conscience in a happy state of self-satisfaction at doing’your’duty to God. There is no Pharisee like the man who.keeps special Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes, and puts them weekly to their proper use—a Sunday suit of broad cloth aired each week in church is the test of respectability with John Bull, and covers any amount of devil-worshiping the way of usury, stock gambling and sweating during the week: We- were once told on fairly good authority that we could not worship, both God and Mammon, but in these enlightened day’s we have changed all that and a man builds up a name on ’change by his service to God, and a name - in his church by heart service to Mammon. * / * ' * : * : Curious thing the association of ideas. I have been led into this tirade by readng that, Mr Gladstone complaining the other day he could not hear a sermon, his wife said *go to sleep, dear; it will do you a lot more good.’ The newspaper fiend, who is resposible for this yarn, considerately omitted the preacher’s name or it would have been rough on him. A home clergyman, however, who has only some hundred and ten sermons to preach in the year ought to give better quality than an overdriven colonial minister. I know of one just south of Auckland who averages some half dozen a week, and has, I believe, attentive audiences. We.can’t expect all to be such a success, but when I hear some of the pap which does duty for spiritual good I can’t help thinking of Audley Egerton’s explanation of his success as a speaker, * I never supported measure unless I believe in it.’ , 4 # ‘ Life is sweet ’ they say. It must have been sweet to that brute of a Russian we read of the other day, who flung his wife and baby to the wolves to save bis own iniesrable life. The doctrine of a special Providence has been wretchedly overworked, but if ever we are justified in assuming such a thing it assuredly appeared here when the man fell a prey to wolves and his helpless wife and child escaped. And yet wolves, like Frenchmen, have a preference for horseflesh, so that the special Providence resolves itself into.-, the general laws of a wolf’s appetite. Far? different to this dastard was the hero who closed the door of escape on himself in the Melbourne sewer in order to save his mates, and the grandmother who saved her son from the flames and calmly sank into them herself. Life with them, too, was sweefc, but then it meant ■* life ’ not the cabbagl existence of the body,; the love of which robbed the Russian of heart, soul, and conscience. 1 Big words are sometimes a trap to the unwary. The honorable member for Masterton in criticising the jaundiced spectacles, the phrase is his not mine, through which the Opposition viewed Mr Ward’s Budget, concluded they must be suffering' from ‘ financial catarrh.’ I presume he would call a violent running at the nose a cataract, in which case we might say the shareholders in the Loan and Mercantile, or Bank Of New Zealand have lately suffered from financial cataract.' When a daily paper, too, loses no opportunity of sneering at the English of teachers and inspectors it ought first to learn that * bi-weekly ’ does not mean ‘fortnightly,’ and that ‘very pleased,’ whatever it may- be, is not English. i Itpax.