"LEAD US NOT INTO TEMPTATION."

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 197, 29 November 1910, Page 3

"LEAD US NOT INTO TEMPTATION."

To the Editor. Sir, —Social questions seem pressing on our age. Our papers are a mass of frivolity; ,«ames with balls, with horse-rac-ing, with horse-racing cards last of all; ;'inl the text seems more needed now than 2000 years a§o. We say;. ''Lead us not into temptation, 0 Lord"; ''Lord, don't take the -evil away." Is it justice to hang the bookie and let the jockey go free? We have the social evil grossly exaggerated, the Southland doctors say, anent tile remarks of the Minister of Justice, while we have a member of the I'pper House stating in Parliament that "racing keeps the criminal out of worse mischief." We have the homoculture people clamoring to prevent marriage between unsuitable parents. The Battle of .Armageddon is evidently approaching —when Satan is to be seen in his true Mount Edgecumbe or Egmont, or the colors. I care not a straw for Lord streets of New Plymouth, but I feel responsible for the ego. Your correspondent quotes Latin, so I will take Greek. "Deina dena deontai" means "Dreadful things need dreadful things." Guy Vawkes quoted it to King James as justifying the gunpowder plot. We keep cats because rats and mice abound. The rats and mice should not complain but clear out. The cat has many qualities we do not admire. She is up on the table the moment she sees the coast clear. She is unsympathetic. She plays with the n-ou-e one moment and eats it the next. Even her eves are constructed to appear closnl when really the cat is watching the victim. Now, if we want racing abolished we put a lot of racing men into Parliament to make our laws. We have made it a revenue-raising item, and the only tiling that will run it (et hoc genus omne) is increasing the realities of rewards and punishments in a future life. ; Unfortunately these have almost ceased . to exist. Hence to purify the age is to act in earnest.—l am, etc., IN MERCY.