BIBLE-IN-SCHOOLS EXECUTIVE’S METHODS

New Zealand Tablet, 26 June 1913, Page 23

BIBLE-IN-SCHOOLS EXECUTIVE’S METHODS

To the Editor. ... ' ■// Sir,The Executive of the Bible-in-Schools League recently published a set of resolutions by way of * reply ’ to my protests against the grave and numerous misrepresentations appearing in the two - editions of its official leaflet, ‘ Methods of Opposition/ , The following is my first rejoinder to the Executive: ‘lt is to me a matter of profound regret that your Executive has thought fit to add to and aggravate, in a second edition, the swarming misrepresentations of the first issue of your official leaflet, “Methods of Opposition.” For these grave misrepresentations your League is socially and morally responsible, whether your official untruths were devised directly by your .Executive or by your proper agents for you. You in no way extenuate your offence, or escape from your duty of retraction, or honorably meet my protests, by the plea that your relation to this or that paid servant of your Executive is one of trust. ‘ 1. Your Executive has officially stated, in both editions of your leaflet, that I accused your Bible-in-Schools' League of “seeking to revive” legislation “which prohibited the Homan Catholic religion.” For about the tenth time, I declare that this official statement of your Executive is a fabrication. 2. Your Executive has officially stated, in both editions of the same leaflet, that I treated “as a' revival of the penal code” the right of the Catholic clergy to enter the public schools of New South Wales for the purpose of imparting religious instruction to

Catholic children. For about the tenth time I also describe this official statement of your Executive as a fabrication. Hundreds of times over I have publicly specified the four penal proposals of your . League but this and the previously mentioned never. 3. Your Executive has falsified a series of New South Wales official statistics in order to hold me up to public contempt as a prevaricator, You falsified those returns for‘the express purpose of “disproving” the two statements numbered (1) and (2) above—statements invented by your Executive and by your Executive falsely attributed to me, in order to attack in his personal honor one whose arguments you dared not squarely face, (a) For this purpose your Executive took seven separate and independent sets of “ official statistics of New South Wales (b) in each of the seven documents you struck out the words “Number of children enrolled ” (in the public schools) (c) in each of the seven documents you substituted for the words so struck out, the widely different words, “children instructed” (“by Roman Catholic priests”). The words thus substituted were coined by your Executive. I will not here use the harsh term which, in law and literature, applies to such a manipulation of even one document, much less of a series of seven. * Here are nine outright untruths, devised by your Executive for these three obvious purposes: (a) to hold an honorable opponent up to public odium; (b) thereby to discount his opposition to certain of your League’s proposals; and (c) to capture sympathetic votes by misleading your readers into the belief that these are sample “ methods of opposition” to what you wrongly describe, in the same leaflet, as “liberty of conscience and an open Bible.” Your Executive now aggravates this deplorable scandal by “resolving” that this nine-fold outrage upon truth and justice is an airy nothing or a matter of “ very little” account. Your Executive’s code of morals is clearly not the code of the Christian Revelation. Driven at last by repeated public exposures by indignant Protestants and others, your Executive, after prolonged delays, made a pretence of “correcting” those nine flagrant mis-statements in a second edition of your “Methods of Opposition.” (1) You have “ corrected ” your first two fabrications (mentioned above) by repeating them word for word. You have not given so much as a hint that they have even been questioned _or challenged, much less that they have been described as fabrications to your Executive and through the Press (Protestant, Catholic, and secular) of this Dominion. ■‘.2... In your “corrected” leaflet your Executive has, it is true, cast aside its falsified words, “children instructed” (“by Roman Catholic priests”) and substituted therefor the words, “ children enrolled.” But (a) you have (as pointed out to you by me) done this in small, thin type; (b) in thick, black type, and by the word ‘‘valued,” and otherwise, your Executive (as also pointed out to you) has cunningly suggested the same seven statistical falsifications as before; (c) in its “corrected” leaflet, your Executive has retracted nothing— vou have not given even the smallest hint that any one of your nine grievous untruths has been questioned, challenged, or exposed, or that any error whatsoever has been committed by you. All this was duly pointed out to your Executive. The chief difference between the two editions of your official leaflet is this: that the second edition is an even graver scandal than the first. ‘ 3. (a) In extenuation of your Executive’s conduct, one of your paid officials has described as “ accidental” your seven set alterations of seven official documents for the purpose of injuring an honorable opponent. Such a plea is a slur .upon the commonsense or sanity of those to whom it is addressed, (b) Your Executive, furthermore, states that its “error” was “plainly acknowledged” and “corrected” in the Dominion of March 27. This statement is contrary to fact. Jfour Dominion paragraph (written by one of your officials) is before me. So far from being a “plain acknowledgment’ of error, even its scrappy statistical reference is so studiously vague that very few readers could gather to what, precisely, it refers; while there

is not so much as a hint of “ correction” of your two above-quoted attacks on my personal honor— sustain which attacks your Executive falsified those seven separate sets of official statistics, (c) In both editions of your Executive’s lamentable leaflet, you declare that the public avowal and correction of even an inadvertent error should not be delayed “for one single minute,’’ In the same shocking leaflet here under consideration, your Executive is still officially circulating some scores of untruths that were exposed" to you and throughout New Zealand from six weeks to seven mouths ago—and that without so much as a hint on your part that your mis-statements have even been questioned In the present letter you have some glaring instances in point. You and the general public shall hear of numerous others at an early and opportune moment So too, shall you and they have melancholy details of other vote-catching misrepresentations which have filled earnest lay and clerical members of your own several faiths with shame and indignation, and evoked protests by reputable secular and other journals, in this Dominion It pains me to the heart that your Executive has left me no choice but to denounce in such plain terms the policy of employing, in the supposed service of religion, methods from which men of politics or of commerce would recoil. This sort of scandal is not to be combated with kid gloves and lispmg accents and rapiers of gilded bulrush. fTi -!?at, M c Editor, is my letter to the Executive of the Bible-in-Schools League. , It has been delayed through my recent absences from home.—l am, etc., * Henry W. Oleary, D.D., Ju M 19. Bishop of Auckland. June 19,