A Flank Movement

New Zealand Tablet, 8 November 1906, Page 9

A Flank Movement

The following paragraph appeared a few days ago in a New Zealand daily contemporary : • Through the donation of a sum approximating £400, the Director of Education in South Australia has been .enabled to prepare a scheme for the distribution of free copies of the New Testament throughout public .schools of the State.' The presumption is that the Testaments here referred to are copies of a sectarian version of the 'Holy Scriptures—most probably the .grievously erroneous fransla-

tion known as ' the Authorised ' or ' King James '. How's this ? The Bible-in-sohools party were solidly defeated in their frontal movement for the sectariariising of^ public primary instruction in South Australia. Is this an effort on.- their part, or on the . pact 'of some of them, to capture the schools - by-a flank- movement? And can it be' thai? •* the Director of Education in South Australia' is" officially turning himself into a colporteur, . and converting his Department into an agency for the „. distribution of a sectarian and incorrect version of God's Good Book in. State institutions ? If there's anything- in the statement quoted above, .our -alert and straight-hitting contemporary, the Adelaide ' Southern Cross ', will, no doubt, have a tilt at it. On both sides of the Tasman Sea, the Party deprecate ' sectarianism 'in the public schools. But the sectarianism that fimdeth not favor in their sight is ' the other fellows--' sectarianism.. ' I differ with you ; I am right and unsectariaii ; therefore you are-, wrong aiid sectarian. Jam res judicata est— judgment's passed, and the court has risen '. It is the good old rule, the simple plan of argument : 'my doxy is orthodqxy, your doxy is heterodoxy '—what is Catholic or Jewish is sectarian ; what is Protestant is unsectarian.