THE BISHOP'S PLAIN SPEAKING.

Auckland Star, Volume XXXIV, Issue 154, 30 June 1903, Page 5

THE BISHOP'S PLAIN SPEAKING.

CRACKED TEACUPS AND MINIS

TERS' SALARIES

The following is a fuller report than we gave previously of the remarks made by Bishop Neligan in St. John's Church at Waihi recently, and which have caused much stir in the mining township.

"There was one question," the Bishop said, "he must speak to them about, and that was the mode of paying the ministers. He considered it was absolutely degrading to get a minister into a place and then to make him worry himself what he was going to live on. They got his ministrations, and the services and sacraments were duly administered. What did it matter whether they drank their tea out of a whole cup or a cup with a crack in it, or a cup without a handle, so long as they got the tea? Why need they worry themselves about whether a fciinis,ter turned over one page or two pages at a time, so long as they got what they wanted? He had noticed since he had been in the colony, in places he had visited, that there -were people who, if the ministers did not please them, or if they could not do exactly as they liked, and have it all their own way, immediately said: 'We shall not pay anything more towards the stipend of that minister.' For anybody calling themselves church people to act in that way was degrading beyond measure. These, kind of church people were like the man who put up a pole and sat on the top of it, and said, 'Here I am, a little minister and congregation all to myself.'- Such people, he said, had no right to call themselves church people. He presumed they knew what they wanted when they asked their minister to come there, and, as he said before, they had the sacraments and the services. They got those, and what more did they

want- In fact, they got what they paid for, and this being so, why bother about the crack in the cup or the cup without the handle and all the other twopennyha'penny things? If he thought it necessary to take a certain line for the good of any place, he would do so in the face of any opposition. In this connection he did not care the snap of his finger for anyone. He was telling them straight out what he thought and also what he intended to do in every place in the diocese he hoped to visit."