A PRO-GERMAN LAMB.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LXIX, Issue LXIX, 1 June 1915, Page 3

A PRO-GERMAN LAMB.

, : y How fortunate that the headmaster of Eton cannot speak English! If he could the Press would have known what he meant and would have "got down to avoid." At it was, they shook their bly white hands and joined the jocund chorus to a man. And, of course, after that the good doctor bad to explain. Ah, then, my countrymen, is it not that his explanation is of a drollness, of an ambiguity most wonderful, most clerical, .most England ? . I would not have missed that explanation for worlds. As an explanation it should become a classic. No Cabinet Minister ever offered Parliament an explanation so lucidly opaque, so candidly involved, so successfully impossible. I shall remember Dr Lyttelton with gratitude in mv future incarnations. I shall think of him always as a luminous darkness, "pinnacled dim in the immense inane." (As you were.) If the bead master of Eton could write English, or if the British editor could understand Etonese, we should have missed all the fun. Because the simple meaning of Dr. Lyttelton's sermon was that a Christian nation should behave as Christians. Only that and nothing more. ,And though the lesson was clumsily expressed, it was quite logical and quite true. As for the "explanation," it may, I think, be reduced into a simple formula: What a muddle-headed lot we are. And who can deny ifc? We are muddle-headed — some of us. The other chans. I mean.

We British have been taught to love our enemies, to turn our cheek to the smiter, to hand over our cloak to him who steals our coat. We cannot reconcile these principles with patriotism and the sacred duty of defending the weak and resisting oppression. Being, as Dr Lyttelton is kind enough to remind us, a muddle-headed lot, we march against the enemy and leave the parsons to find us absolution —if they can.

The parsons do not agree. One preaches Christian charity, another enlists in Kitchener's Army, another fills shells. Candn Scott Holland explains that Jesus was a dual personality who preached non-resistance, but not eternal and boundless non-resistance. The Arshbishop of York recalled sacred memories of the Kaiser, and some bishops blossed the colors or the guns. Then along comes the P^ncipal of Eton College (where the subalterns come from) and calls wjon a muddle-hended peonle not to be so muddle-headed. — Robt. Blatchford.