A WOMAN'S OPINION OF CHINIQUY.

Thames Star, Volume XI, Issue 3506, 20 March 1880, Page 2

A WOMAN'S OPINION OF CHINIQUY.

Madame Lotti Wilmot, a well-known temperance lecturer, delivered an address to a very large audience in the Town Hail, Hobart Town, in July last. After criticising, in a very trenchant manner, the various statements of Chiniquy against the Church of Eome, Madame Wilmot concluded as follows:—Was it likely that millions of women would remain in a faith, and bring their daughters up in it, were it as described by Chiniquy P (Applause.) There was that strong affection in mother* for their children which made every mother protect her own and her children's virtue. He then began to speak in a most cowardly manner of the Convents, the Nuns, and the Sisters. In their ordinary experience of life they all knew the virtue, the abstinence of those women. They knew their self-denial, their relinquishment of the world. They knew how they visited and comforted the poor, they knew how they tended the sick, they knew how they attend the wounded in the wars, and they knew, too, the earnestness of their exertions in the cause of education, which must earn for them a place in heaven. She (Madame) had been ia the French wars of 1871 and 1872, and had opportunities of becoming acquainted with their virtues, and wherever she went she attri- : buted that praise. She saw them minis r ; tcr to the sick and forlorn, irrespective of their creed or their country. To her they had ministered in all her troubles, and never left her while those troubles remained, and when she heard nuns spoken of itf the manner Chiniquy spoke of them she felt that she could "grip him by the throat and choke him. (Applause.) When Chiniquy spoke of women as he did they could but say, " cursed be the tongue that does it, and may he repent befpre he leaves this world." Chiniquy would seem, when turned out of the Church, to have got married. It was a wonder that Chiniquy was allowed to go on slandering women as he had done. To strengthen bis slanders, he said that in ! Sydney a woman was brought on to the \ platform to lecture and confirm his 1 (Chiniquy's) statements. This woman's lecture consisted in nodding assent to questions put to her; that woman's character was well known to the police. It was under a cloud. In Sydney, Chiniquy circulated some books that he dare not circulate in Victoria. They were suppressed by the police. One of them she held in her hand entitled the " Priest and Woman." If he had published it in France they would have put him on the treadmill for three years, and done the same with the publishers. It came under the category of obscene literature" and would not be allowed to circulate. in Victoria. If any of Chiniquy's Committee were present, they could, as well as anyone else, look at the book and judge for themselves of its filthioess. [Here Madame took the book from a table and held it up.] There was another incident which occurred at Geelong she would like to mention. She followed Chiniquy to that town, and heard him. say at one of bis lectures, that the Inspector of Police

asked him as a favour, not to go on the - platform, or he would be killed. A very-well-known resident, having reason to doubt the truthfulness of Cbiniquy, went to the Inspector and asked him it he had said so. That officer indignantly denied having done so, or that he concerned him* self at all about Cliiniquy, and publicly announced in the papers that Chiniquy ■ assertion was a falsehood. She subsequently visited Geelong and exposed his untrulljfulness, and attracted such audiences as he could not get in two years if he tried ever so hard. In the face of 8© many exaggerations as she had called attention to, she asked any one of common sense, without speaking from a religious point of view, whether what he had said could be possibly true.