THE FREEDOM OF RELIGION SOCIETY.

Daily Southern Cross, Volume XIV, Issue 996, 13 January 1857, Page 3

THE FREEDOM OF RELIGION SOCIETY.

To the Editor of the Southern Cross. Sir, — There have lately been two meetings of the Freedom of Religion Society, and although the reports of their pi oceedings appea? to be considerably abridged, yet there are some statements published which are only worthy of notice because of the false impressions they are calculated to convey. With your permission, Sir, I will very shortly call the attention of your readers to the remarks of Capt. Rattray, as printed in the ' Southern Cross* of the 6th January ; and, for the sake of being brief, will confine niy£elf to them alone. What he means by the passage in which he speaks of the " want of conscience in the gentlemen who had gone to the Government with a Scheme of Education of their own concocting,' 1 I am at a loss to know ; but it may be allowed to pass, seeing that it is not giVen forth as a truth or fact, but only as an opinion, and which, like many other opinions, may have been taken up and asserted without previous enquiry. But when he goes on to say that " the leading feature of that scheme was to ask from the funds of the Colony, to fully one half the support of their schools,' 1 he asserts what is neither a truth or fact, as every one may understand who has intellect to comprehend and will take the trouble of reading the scheme as originally propounded. Again, does Captain Rattray mean to aver that the ministers of three denominations (I use his own words) "declare that the Bible was insufficient —that the catechism and creed, and not the Scriptures, were their religious authority ?'' I cannot find out the truth or fact here. I was present and presided at all the meetings where certain discussions, if they may be so called, we-e carried on, and I heard no such sentiment reiterated by any minister ; but I heard one minister, when pressed on the point by another, admit that if a teacher in a school made any allusion to the doctrine of the atonement, it would be teaching sectarianism, and consequently such allusions would, under his scheme, be prohibited. This admission, more than anything else, tended to break up the conference. The sum of the whole appears to be tha* Captain Rattray and his friends will have no catechisms as exponents of truth taught in the schools, nor will they allow the teacher to draw the truth from the fountain of truth itself, which is the Bible. It is not, in my mind, Sir, characteristic of single mindedness to set forth, with so much apparent liberality, the proposition that, in their scheme, the Bible may be used in schools, when they keep out of view the impoitant " provided always," which practically forbids the teacher from using it as the Bible. Better to exclude it altogether than subject it to so much ii reverence. Yours truly, Archibald Clark. Auckland, 7th Jan., 1857.