PASSING NOTES.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 7777, 22 January 1887, Page 4

PASSING NOTES.

(From Otago Witness.)

'The war clouds that lower darkly upon the European horizon have been momentarily parted by one shaft of light. " The Emperors of Russia and Austria," says a Tuesday's cable, "have exchanged cordial New Year greetings." So like emperors'. This is the "kind of thing I might even find it necessary to do myself if I wore purple, and that many men actually do in Mosgiel tweed. Gourko, on behalf of Russia, has just promised the garrison of Warsaw that they shall shortly have an opportunity of wiping out recent insults; and Austria, we are told, is actively and openly preparing for war. Yet the emperors exchange cordial greetings preliminary to their early meeting—at Philippi. The greetings of Germany and France are less cordial and more candid. Bismarck, in a speech which for directness is perhaps unsurpassed in diplomatic annals, informs a nation with which his country is professedly at peace: that he will, in the inevitable war that is coming, if victorious," cripple France for generations." France rails, not without reason, at Bismarckian "brutality," and votes an extra war credit to her cher TBoulanger. We also learn that Montenegro is increasing her armaments, and that Russia, in addition to the little bother in Bulgaria, is preparing to invade Afghanistan. This is veritably a season of peace on earth and goodwill towards men. The only factor that points at all towaois delay in hostilities is a marked uncertainty existing upon the subject of alliances. Nobody seems to know precisely who is allied with whom, and even the assertions of the renowned filowitz, Parisian editor of The Times, are ridiculed. But the matter will be cleared up with the firing of the first few shots. Everyone will take a side, and Providence will be expected, as usual, to side with the biggest and best trained battalions. It seems impossible this time, at any rate, that the tension should be-relaxed peacefully.

From the weariness of very exhaustion the European Powers must end the situation, and soon. Nations cannot continue to support their present enormous armaments or to maintain their present irksome attitude of keen attention. A man may stand for a long time with fists clenched and muscles strung waiting for the onset, but he must tire presently and find it necessary to get his dinner, smoke a pipe, and cultivate the arts of peace for a season,with a view to the replenishment of the larder. Has the startling increase of European armies during the past 15, and especially during the past 10 years been realised? In the FrancoGerman struggle armies were reckoned by the hundred thousand. They touched a millioa, and a little over—on paper—in the Rnsso-Turkish war, and now, when not a blow has been struck between European Powers.for 10 years, sober calculators reckon the armies of Germany, France, Russia, and Austria by millions. Obviously, increase at this rate cannot continue. There must be disbandment and disarmament with or without a " shindy." The shindy will come, no doubt, and there is no reason to wonder if a little hesitancy ;is displayed in starting it. We hear a great deal of the awful responsibility of committing one individual to death; the spectacle of Elizabeth signing the death warrant of Mary, Queen of Scots, is considered worthy of oils; but what of the statesman upon whose action it depends to launch two nineteenth century armies at each other's throats ? Does he sleep soundly upon the night of the " rupture of diplomatic relations " or the " declaration of war " ? It depends upon the material of his structure, and no one has vet quite discovered of what material statesmen are constructed. Olivier entered upon that bloody Franco-German conflict "with a light heart," and Gladstone went to see "The Magistrate" upon the night that the news of Gordon's death reached London.

The paronomasia, or pun, is a graceless form of wit much affected by comic periodicals and the writers of theatrical burlesques. Though well adapted to relieve the dulness of sermons, and tickle up the attention of a congregation inclining to slumber under " fifthly," puns seem to be avoided, as a general rule, by preachers, A preacher who will pick a pocket—by his emphasis on the subject 'of the collection—is common enough; a preacher who, in preaching, will make a pun is a rarity. But the old order changeth, yielding place to new. The Synod has been startled ont of its propriety this week by the unprecedented apparition of a pun—a sacred and Scriptural pun, it is true, but still a pun—-ia the report ofthe Synodical Committee oii

the " State of Religion within the Bounds." " What the Church needs to promote her spirituality," said the grave and reverend rabbi who prepared the report, "is more of the dynamite mentioned in Acts i.,8." _ It would be a pity if the force of this ecclesiastical witticism should be lost to pious and puzzled Presbyterians for the want of a little explaining, even though the explanation should graze the edge of irreverence." Acts i., 8. contains, as I find upon exI amination, the word dunamis, power, —" But ye shall receive power," &c. (searchers of the Scriptures will be able to complete the quotation)—and this word dunamis the erudite and reverend punster tortures into " dynamite." The humour of the thing is as grim and un-couth-as that of the dancing bear lately exhibited in the Dunedin streets, but we mustn't expect too much at ouce. A pun in a Synod report is the next thing to a pun in a sermon, and should be welcomed as prophetic of a blessed Teform in the fashion of pulpit discourse. No doubt sacred punning is an " innovation," but only the "First Free Presbyterian Church" — itself the latest innovation—objects to innovations on principle. The attempt in the Synod (was only a partial success. The reverend brother meant to be funny, and succeeded only in being profane. But he will improve by

practice, his example will be followed, and ere long a sermon at Knox or the First Kirk will be as thick set with puns as a burlesque by Byron or Burnand.

Pathetic in a high degree is the case of those venerable Free Kirkers who feel themselves driven to secesh from all other Christians of their name by the 6teady resistless march of

"innovation." They have lifted up their last testimony against organs and human hymns, and lifted it up in vain. Organs is in, and hymns is in; psalms is out, or going out. Sermons is in that betray no consciousness in the preacher of tho " foondamentals," and "make little use of that blessed word "Mesopotamia." You may hear about such merely secular people as Burns and Carlyle, but about David and Nebuchadnezzar, Jehu "the son of Nimshi, Jeshuron who waxed fat and kicked, | Jehoshaphat, and Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz you | cannot hear at all. What is a gray-haired Free Kirker of the old Covenanting type to do in these conditions but secesh ? Even though he should be left solitary as a sparrow upon the housetop, or a lodge in a garden of cucumbers, he must come out from among them and save his own soul. The handful of seceders of this type who have formed themselves into the " First Free Presbyterian Church" deserve all the kindly consideration that the Synod gave them. They are only a remnant, minished and brought

low; they cannot change with the changing times, and the world is moving away from them. They are content to be left stranded in the rear, if only it be in company with Tate and Brady, if only they are no more persecuted by

"innovations," asked to sing human hymns, or praise God by machinery. They merely want to be let alone, and allowed to die in peace. It is a modest request, and the Synod would have been inhuman to deny them. Nature herself is the great innovator; the most remarkable innovation imaginable is the advent of anew-born baby,—an innovation and the prolific source of more innovations, world without end. But the First Free. Kirkeis, poor old souls! must be beyond the risk of innovations of that sort now. .Let it content us that they should be equally beyond the risk of all others. TReguitscant .in pact! .;■-.,

The prolonged tilting between the Premier and Bishop Moran was evidently watched, first with interest, and then with growing excitement, by a number of other combative theologians literally suffering for a fight. The Rev. A. C. Gillies and Dr Copland both began to breathe hard and drum with their, heels mpon ths floor in nervous anxiety to be " in it," and no sooner do the chief disputants pause than each finds himself tackled by a fresh assailant. Mr Gillies precipitates himself upon the Catholic Bishop with a softly-worded but uglylooking demand for M information." He wants " n» controversy, no angry words, no annoyance to any person" — far from it —he wants merely certain information concerning Aquinas and Liguori, and .the alleged persecuting dogmas of. the Romish Church. "I want no row," says the Rev. Gillies, stripped to the waist, " but just step. out here, take off your coat, and let me talk to you." Pr Copland, the Presbyterian champidtt of Bible-reading in schools, flings himself upon the almost exhausted Premier, and buries his teeth viciously in the very weakest part of Sir Robert's anatomy. He draws the attention of the Synod to a certain "manual of morals" of which we have heard aforetime, and chooses to take this as a model of the kind of text book the present Minister of Education would-, introduce, into our public schools instead of the Bible, " Invocation to the Infinite," " Invocation to ourDivinities," " Prayer to the Virtues 1" what Synod could stand this kind of thing ? Sir Robert must at that moment have appeared to their appalled imagination as a species of civilised fetish worshipper, for whom no condemnation could be too deep.. With pious haste they agreed to a deliverance, praying to be delivered from Sir Robert Stout. That hon. gentleman's friends— his most sincere well-wishers—should loDg ago have formed a midnight procession, and burned at the junction of some quiet crossroads the whole extant edition of the Lyceum Guide. This obvious duty has been neglected and now a copy has fallen into the hands of Dr Copland with the deplorable end narrated. Possibly neither he nor the Synod he instructed knew of the publication until the other day, in which case they have secured matter for astonished contemplation for weeks to come.

The less said about the Mount Rennie affair now and henceforth the better. Morally malodorous in an all but unexampled degree, this Sydney horror, like some rotting carcass that infects the common air, demands swift and final burial. But it is not at all so imperative to bury and forget the scandalous fact that in Sydney they do not seem to be able even to hang a man decently. The scaffold scene at the recent execution as described by the Sydney papers will tend to weaken respect for the law, and foster an unhealthy sympathy for the criminals the law punishes. The prison was crowded with sightseers eager with the excitement of Lord Tomnoddy when Tiger Tim made the welcome announcement, " Ant please you, my Lord, there's a man to be hanged":—

My Lord Tomnoddy jumped up at the news, "RuntoM'Fuze And Lieutenant Tregooze, And run to Sir Carnaby Jenks qf the Blues. Hope-dancers a score ' I've seen before, But to see a man swing at the end of a string, With his neck in a noose, will be quite a new thing." ■ . In Darlinghurst Jail there were four men to swing at the end of a string, and there were 140 Tomnoddys collected to see them do it. Seven clergymen elbowed each other, the prison officials, and the victims, on the scaffold. With seven parsons about them, praying and preaching all at once, whilst 140 Tomnoddys with strained eyes gaped in front, the sheriff and hangman lost head, lost nerve, lost whatever they had that was of service to the work in hand, and bungled the whole business. After reading the account of what followed one feels a momentary desire to hang the hangman, or the sheriff, or a member of the New South Wales Government, or all three. On the whole, in this Mount Rennie affair justice has been vindicated very imperfectly. The moral effect of the Darlinghurst hanging will not be good. Nor in my humble opinion was hanging the meet and proper punishment for the human gorillas there done to death. Hanging was too good for them. They should have been publicly flogged with cat-o'-nine-tails in Wynyard Square or the Domain, and then sent to hard labour for life. As it is, Sydney larrikinism canonises them as heroes and martyrs. That would have been somewhat difficult in the other case.

A correspondent who evidently meant exceedingly well at midnight on December 31st, and has since relapsed, writes to me demanding a reason why the New Year—a harassing juncture when one has to commence writing an unfamiliar . date—should be chosen for the universal turning over of a new leaf. The reason, I should say, is obvious enough. ' A year is the longest natural division of time, and man can therefore select no less frequently recurring occasion for a mild and gently purgative repentance. There is no definite objection to the first day of each month, the Monday, of each week, or the breakfast bell of each day being made to serve as milestones to mark the effluxion of time and remind one of the necessity for immediate amendment in this or that small matter. But the occasions are too frequent, and the resolves and relapses would follow each other so quickly as to become monotonous. Therefore it is at the New Year, and then alone, that the smoker determines silently upon a less consumption of tbbacco, the tradesman upon a partial cessation from the tricks of the trade, and that the tippler contemplates training him self gradually but firmly for the blue ribbon, These mental exercises are productive probablj of resultsinja ratio of about 3or 4 per cent., but they may nevertheless not be entirely without their use. . At all events the custom is now ar established one, and if the wild bells are to ring out in anything like good tone it must be •bserved.

What te do with the Burns statue now we have got it is a puzzle soluble a 5 yet only to the artistic taste and refined intelligence of Mr H. S. Fish. Other people are still in doubt, in illustration whereof take the following letter:—

" Dear Civis, —There are many suggestions re the site of the Burns statue, all of them, as it seems to me, wide of the mark. To put a poet in the midst of street traffic is an affront to the Muses. A retired spot is alone suitable to th 9 contemplative poetio nature; hence, after consideration of all that has been said on the question of site, I suggest the.old cemetery in Stuart street. Think it out, go and see the spot yourself, and you will admit that I am right.—Ayrshire.' There is something in this, undoubtedly. Nearly all street statues areL an offence in art. Why should a gentleman without his hat be re* presented as seated or standing in the pubhstreet ? An equestrian statue—the Iron Duke, for example, before the Royal Exchange—is •orrect enough, but hatless poets, and statesmen in togas, grasping rolls of manuscript, always look as if they had been carried out of some neighbouring church during the progress of cleaning or repairs. I forget whether the Burns statue has or has not a hat. If it has not a hat, one should be ordered, and the poet, so far protected from sun and rain, might very fitly, as my correspondent suggests, be placed in the old cemetery, where he might be supposed to be admiring the scenery. Better still—and this is my own contribution—put him on the White Island, opposite the Ocean Beach, a pedestal

provided by Nature herself. There the immortal bard would be, as he ought to b^ far from ths madding crowd, alone with bis greatness and the sounding sea,. and at the same tjme safe from desecration by dogs, Salvationist orators,'or Mr J. G. S. Grant.

"Civis.