(FROM OUR OWN CORRESPONDENT.) AUCKLAND. 30th November.

Evening Post, Volume XVI, Issue 285, 2 December 1878, Page 2

(FROM OUR OWN CORRESPONDENT.) AUCKLAND. 30th November.

Father Hennebery lectured on mixed marriages to nearly four thousand people last evening. He said that Roman Catholics are forbidden to marry with Protestants, except by dispensation, and he warned Roman Catholics not to marry Protestants, because such marriagest produced dissension, ill-will, and unhappiness in families. He related au anecdote of a young man who said that because of his father being a Roman Catholic and his mother a Protestant, they quarrelled every day about religion, and he had therefore determined not to belong to any religion. During his address a seat broke down, when Father Hennebery said :— " Never mind, it is only a seat. If you never fall further than that it will not matter." He then related another anedote of a Roman Catholic woman, whose husbaod was a Protestant, and who said she wept every day for fifteen years, and for the succeeding fifteen years she was to> bitter to weep. She would rather put a millstone round the necks of her children and sink them to the bottom of Lake Winnepeg than see them make mixed marriages. He warned Roman Catholics not to m-irry Protestants, who regarded marriage not as a divine institution, but as a civil contract, which might be dissolved, while Roman Catholics believed that they could obtain divorce for adultery but could not marry again. He related instances where nonCatholics signed documents in the presence of the priest promising to allow their wives religious liberty, and the children to be taught Catholics, but broke their promise, and sought to coerce their wives against Catholicism. He created great laughter by an anecdote of a man who attempted to push meat down his wiie's throat on a Friday. In Canterbury there was a lady before the church door, a Roman Catholic married to a non-Catholic. Her husband had forbidden her to come across the street into the church, and said, " If you enter that church I will blow your brains out (sei.sation)— and if I ever see a priest speaking to you I will blow his brains out also." After some further remarks, Father Hennebery concluded by saying :—": — " That is the substance of what I have to say on marriage, and it is very different from what has been said about me in many of the newspapers in New Zealand."