LATEST CABLE NEWS

Taranaki Daily News, Volume L, Issue 59, 7 June 1907, Page 3

LATEST CABLE NEWS

DHITBD PEES 3 ASSOCIATION -lIV JUiICTBIC TKLEOBAPfI.—COPVKIOHT.

METHODIST CONFERENCE

TEE CHURCH IN FIJI. MOTION FOR LAY REPRESENTATIVES CARRIED. Received Uth 10.50 p.m. Sydney June 0. The Conference further discussed the question of lay representation for Fiji. The Rev Garland (New Zealand) maintained that lay representation gave a preponderance of pow e . «, me native vote.

Rev. Woolls-Rutlege urged that it would be unwise to hand over such great questions. Granted that power, the natives would piohabbly desire to go siill farther, and might start a rebellion or secession if the proposals carried by them were negatived here. Rev. Robson (New South Wales) warned the Conference that, if not verycareful, they would lose the Fijian church altogether. The Rev. Smale declared he was absolutely on the side of lay representation.

Doctor Brown said the only way thev could save the Fijian mission was to make the church in Fiji a church of chiefs and the people, not a church of missionaries. One of the greatest anxieties the Rev. Smale had in Fiji was the Free Church. Its influence was spreading and only wanted a chief of some importance to place himself at the head of discontented natives and they would have the Tonga experience repeated in Fiji. No greater slur could be cast on Fiji than to say of its people, among whom they had been laboring for 70 years and from whom the Government took civil servants, magistrates and doctors, that not a solitary layman in each circuit was fit to take u place in the financial district synod, and have a voice in the dividing of his own money. The talk of the preponderance of the native vote was a bogey.

Dr Brown's motion, that the principle of lay representation be put into operation at the Fiji Synod of 1908, was carried with a few dissentients.