OPENING OF THE IMPERIAL PARLIAMENT

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXIX, Issue 8, 21 February 1901, Page 20

OPENING OF THE IMPERIAL PARLIAMENT.

The Imperial Parliament was opened last week by the King, who was accompanied by the Queen Consort. The opening ceremony was a magnificent spectacle. There was nothing very striking in the Speech, which regretted the prolongation of the war in South Africa, but at the same time paid a tribute to the patriotism and devotion of the colonies in sending contingents to ail the Imperial authorities. We are also told that the Lord Chancellor administered the oath of adjuration to the King, who signed the declaration against transubstantiation. With reference to the latter matter we were informed a few days later that ;(0 Catholic peers protested to Lord Salisbury against the declaration that the King was called upon to sign against transubatantiation, and in the House of Commons Mr. Balfour said, in reply to a question, that the Government did not intend to introduce a Bill altering the Coronation Oath. We gave the full text of this adjuration, a relic of barbarism and bigotry, in our issue of February 7. A very able and trenchant article, condemning ' the discredited phraseology of the Coronation Oath,' appeared in the Dunedin JJvrnliuj Star of Tuesday. Our contemporary says : — ' In this age of religious toleration and comparative enlightenment, in the dawn of the twentieth century, it might surely be possible to dispense with words which reflect the spirit of a bygone age of passion and danger, and which mu'-t be peculiarly offensive to thousands of loyal subjects of the Crown. What possible justification can there be, at the present day for requiring the Sovereign of a free Empire ostentatiously to declare his belief in the '' superstitious and idolatrous" nature of doctrines which are dear and sacred to no insiguilicant minority of his people? It is email wonder that the Roman Catholic peers, have protested against the continued preservation ««f thi>» sectarian barbarism, and we are quite at one with the N Z Tmii.kt in denouncing the unreasonableness of the oath. 1