The Editor

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXV, Issue 11, 14 March 1907, Page 9

The Editor

'An editor ', says the ' S.H. Review ', is a man who is liable to grammatical blunders, toothache, typographical errors, and lapses of memory, and usually be has hjalf a million people watching to catch him tripping. And yet the world is full of people who want to be editors ! '

There are at least some people who seem .to regard the editor of a religious paper at least as necessarily a wicked man.'— a member of some new and uncatalogued brigade of ' the devirs own '. And they are seldom content to leave him to the uncovenanted mercies of God." Outside Texas he is not commonly upholstered in tar-and-feathers, or turned into a colander with „303 bullets. But the unfriendly critics whose wings he clips or whose (illegibly written names he misinterprets in type sometimes make the editor feel that it would be more tolerable for him if he were a Deeming or a" Charles Peace. Most of the religious editor's high crimes arise out of the use (or shall we say abuse ?) of those two beneficent institutions— the blue pencil and the waste basket— which; a merciful Providence has provided for the protection of a long-suffering and afflicted public. But time and many Aveals make him at last somewhat of a pachyderm in feeling. And there are so many gentle souls who can ' Be to his virtues very kind ; • Be to his faults a little blind '. Are there not, too, the apologists who plead for him— as Douglas Jerrold did for the editor of his day— that even the devil may be painted in shadow ; or as Artemius Ward pleaded once upon a time with the powderblazing miners out West—' not to shoot the man at the planner, as he is doing his best ' ?