GOVERNMENT EDUCATION.

New Zealand Herald, Volume VII, Issue 1899, 16 February 1870, Page 5

GOVERNMENT EDUCATION.

To the Editor of the Hebamj. Sib, —About 350 years ago Cardinal Wolsey sent Jfrom 'his deathbed a message to lus sovereign 'earnestly conjuring,him'"to depress the new sect of Lutherans." In those days the followers of the w apostate- monk" were regarded as heretics whose atrocious doctrines would inevitably lead to atheism and anarchy < here, and to. perdition hereafter. True, the Cardinal, like our own modest social reformer, i Mr. J. Wood, mingled a little of the wisdom ] of the serpent with the innocence of the dove. They had sufficient prudence to keep in with the powers that be, and while using every effort to excite the vilest passion of religious i bigotry against those who dared dispute their views, they took good csre to modify their denunciations where " men ' of influence" were concerned. • They did- not mean to' assert that those men — princes of Germany - and members of the English Universities — shared in the heretic views, of the German monk. No —(to use Mr. Wood's own' words)^—God forbid ! But like him they had no hesitation in saying that the new views which they favored would lead the nation into the same deplorable stateof perversion, in a moral and religious. point, •f view, as was presented in their , dyes by th Germany of that time. ' Mr. wood looks with horror on the Germany of to-day, and seeks to raise the senseless cry of atheism against its people. If Mr. Wood will read the works of any of the class to whom he refers,' be they Neol >gians, Unitarians,. or . Universalists, he will find in them a spirit of reverend inquiry and a vein of. deep religious feeling, whicfc would show Idui the absurdity of the cry of atheism with

which he is seeking to raise a prejudice aeainst some of the most learned and best men of Europe. But as Mr. Wood quotes—not from the original writers, but from a newspaper correspondent, speaking probably in hia turn at second-hand about them—l presume that he has not looked into the works which he so much condemns ; until he does, I would respectfully advise him to stick to his Permissive Bill, as that is a theme on which any amount of vague declamation or doubtful statistics i may pass muster, but the educational question is too grave, and concerns too deep the future of the province, to be obscured by irrelevant appeals to the passions and bigotry of the ignorant, or, what is still worse, of the half-educated clashes to bo found among all people.—l am, &c., G-EBMAJTICU3