Still Sore

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXVI, Issue 17, 30 April 1908, Page 22

Still Sore

Some people's wounds heal slowly. The feelings of sundry weUl-me-aiming but over-anxious folk in, England are still black and blue, and (so to speak) running, ever since the King and Queeni attended the Requiem M a ss for the murdered royalties of Portugal. They have been showing their wounds in the March number of the ' Protestant Alliance- Magazine '. One good soul, for instance, declares that ' the King's action is a disgrace to a Protestant- monarch ', and another wants to know 1 what we are coming to when a Protestant King of a Protestant people can dare to be present at such a service '. However, no harm is done* by these complaints, aoid superheated feeling finds in them a safety-valve. A wise and practical suggestion in point comes from the Birmingham ' Daily Post '. ' Apart ', it says, ' from the somewhat painful controversy immediately involved, good may come from the raising of this matter now, as advantage might be taken, when there is no immediate prospect of a demise of the Crown, to settleonce and for all the vexed question of the Accession Oath, which few persons in these days consider should continue to be administered to each succeeding British Sovereign in its present form,- which is crudely . oflensive to the feelings of every Roman Catholic in these realms.'

It -is BSg'h time that the British statute book should be purged of the ' relic of barbarism which requires the; Sovereign, on his < accession, to single one faith out of "all the faith's 'in his far-flung Empire, and publicly and by oath place upon it t<he brutal stigma of superstition and idolatry.