PASSING NOTES.

Otago Witness, Issue 3899, 4 December 1928, Page 3

PASSING NOTES.

(From Saturday’s Otago Daily Times.) O, my offence Is rank, and smells to heaven I Under one name or other the Reform Party has held office sixteen years. All that time keeping others out! There needs no further indictment. Faults and foibles are not in point. Like any other party in office, Reform has done tilings it ought not to have done and left undone things it ought to have done. That is common form. To en is human, and Reform is human. Alack! —and so are we all. But in what way Reform, as incarnated in the Coates Ministry, chiefly errs, its critics are not agreed. The man in the street, who. is also the man in the shop, the office, the bank, complains of Government intrusion on the Rialto, meddling in business affairs, interfering with private enter-

prise. But in the House quite another story: “The big lending institutions have too many guns for the Government; the Government has put up both hands and surrendered to the associated banks of this country.” Thus, with variations, the Opposition bench as reported in Hansard. These contradictories cancel each other. But there is no cancelling the sixteen years’ tenur6. If Reform could speak with a single voice it would echo the wicked King in Hamlet: “ O. my offence is rank, and smells to heaven! ”

Sir Joseph Ward, who thinks in millions, and as a New Zealand borrower would raid the London Stock Exchange for seventy millions sterling, is worth quoting on the extravagance of the Coates Ministry, its borrowings and its spendings. In one of the latest Hansards he is thus reported: —

I, for one. feel very anxious indeed about the amount provided for under the public-works estimates under all heads. It is huge. Me have ..ever known anything like it in my time, and if the Government attempts to spend all the money proposed to be voted I Jo not know what will happen I will not use the only term that could properly be applied to it, because it might be misunderstood; but I will say thatit is out of all proportion to what this country is able to meet reasonably. Satan rebuking sin,—the latest example. Once again the Presbyterian General Assembly has been stumbling, staggering, barking its shins over hat blessed word “ conscience,” its denotation, connotations, implications. A Romanist conscience forbids the eating of meat in Lent; a Protestant conscience permits and favours the eating of meat all the year round. An Anglican .conscience arrays a bishop in surplice and lawn sleeves; a Presbyterian conscience would choose in preference the stake and “ the martyr s sheet of lire.” And yet we are asked to believe that in each of these opposites conscience' is a divine intuition, an infallible guide. The youngster who proclaims himself a “ conscientious objector ” to military training, refusing to go into camp, flouting the law of the land, is to be sympathetically backed up by the whole church. It is a case of “ conscience ” —freedom of conscience—and conscience, that divine light within the soul, must be respected.

But to the lay mind, be it si id —and our spiritual pastors and masters may take note of the fact —conscience means si nply what a man thinks, just that, — what he thinks on any issue demanding choice. And what the man thinks is determined by his history and training. A Romanist training produces a Romanist conscience, a Protestant training produces a Protestant conscience, a Mahometan training produces r. Mahometan conscience. It is absurd to talk of • conscience as an infallible guide, a divine sundiai always telling you what is true. The sundial will tell you anything you like if you keep it in a cellar and inspect it by the light of a lantern. But here lam repeating something said in this column last week, plagiarising from myself. So I break off, wishing the Presbyterian General Assembly in its labyrinthine perplexities on the subject of conscience a happy deliverance.

The vagaries of religious sentiment possible when the sundial is shut up to candle-light are well seen in America. Both in America and in New Zealand Pussyfoot is the salient example; but as we in New Zealand have shunted Pussyfoot for three years, possibly for

ever, that morbid variety of religious sentiment may be passed by with the remark that “ nothing since the Civil War has so thoroughly cleft the American nation ii. two.” Ne-.tly allied to Pussyfoot is the anti-tobacco fanatic. Miss* Maud Royden’s lecture tour in the United States was held up there by a religious taboo —she was a smoker of cigarettes! And in a land of facile divorces —“ divorce while you wait ” —

there is in respect of social relations great delicacy, a prurient delicacy, of speech. A business advertisement for a “ sleeping partner ” may be rejected by the newspaper editor as immoral. There are towns in the Western States —fundamentalist in doctrine probably — where the window-blinds must be up at night. Lower the blinds, and within half an hour a policeman comes in to know what is going on. And yet the benighted Westerner lifts up his voice— My country, ’tis of thee, Sweet land of l.berty, Of thee I sing ! —and he sings it to the tune of “ God Save the King ” 1 Superstitions and misbeliefs—the British people have their own and may not boast. We may doubt the cabled story of a Jaco'bite attempt to carry off the Coronation Stone from Westminster Abbey, but the stone itself has a story, part of which is veritable history and part myth. It is matter of history that one of our Plantagenet kings, Ed ward 1, brought this stone from Scone, in Perthshire, Scotland, to Westminster, and enclosed it in an oaken frame as the seat of a coronation chair. According to legend it was the stone on which Celtic kings for ages past had been crowned and legend clings to it still:

Unless the fates are faithless found, And prophets’ voice be vain, Where’er is placed this stone, e'en there, The Scottish race shall reign. The mythical part of its story, dear to British-Israelites and Great Pyramid True Believers, is that the stone which served Jacob foi*»a pillow when sleeping in the desert, and which next morning he se up as a pillar, was miraculously transported to the British Isles as the Stone of Destiny and the coronation seat of British kings. It is unfortunate that our geologists would derive the Westminster stone from some ancient quarry in Perthshire, Scotland.

Here let me acknowledge with thanks the courtesy that from time to time sends me The Jacobite, described as “ a quarterly published in New Zealand which proclaims the conviction that Rupert of Bavaria is the heir of the Stuarts,” and by right'should at this moment be seated on the British throne. The word “ Jacobite,” be it noted, has no relation to the Biblical Jacob, but to the Latin for James, and in this context refers to James 11, who fled from crown and kingdom to exile in France, and, according to the Jacobites, was—excepting Queen Anne—the last Stuart that reigned in England. Therein they are mistaken. The latest Stuart to reign in England, the latest, not the last, is his present Majesty King George V—whom may God preserve! —he is a sick man to-day, but by the mercy of Heaven may yet be spared to us—King George V. who is in lineal descent from Mary Queen of Scots, and through Mary Queen of Scots from the Tudors and Plantagenets, our ancient kings. But these pedi gree questions count for little with us. It suffices that under our “ temperate kings,” as Tennyson assesses them, we are godly and quietly governed.

German kultur, for many Germans a religion or the next thing to it, has evolved a sect that professes Nacktkultur, the cult of the nude, of going about stark naked. Incredible, but true. The editor of the London Spectator has investigated

the matter personally and on the spot. He writes : At the time of our visit the societies claimed a membership ■»£ between 50,000 and 60,000, and their rnemthly periodical had a circulation of >3,000. Members spend the week-en? from Saturday afternoor. till Sundaj •veiling in the summer in the special fenced-off reserves among the forests or near lake or stream, working, bathing, playing games in a state of Nature; members frequently i’ing their children, who also wear no clothes.' Clothes are put cvi for meals, no smoking is allowed, ulcohol is barred, and meat-eating is discouraged. It is a trace of the ole Adam tliat they dress for dinner; but a loin cloth or ; fig leaf should suffice. Nacktkultu? sn tin German climate ! True, the* e pre cedents. I don’t remember whethw Taci tus in his “ Germania ” records 1 time when “ wild in woods the naked ravage ran ” ; but it is beyond doubt that at the Reformation period evangelists :'*a the nude paraded certain German villages as “ the naked truth.” The editor ci the Spectator says in closing: “ is being taken very seriously in Germany, and we took away the impression Uxit every precaution is taken to prc-ti.nt abuse.” It remains to be seen how ’Ait and how far this gospel ’if nudity, wi.ii or without precautions, 'will spread. We may hear of it next in America.

From a School Teacher: Dear Civis. —I ask-rd my boys to quote a line fro.T Goldsmith's “Traveller,” expressing vowel music. The line I wanted was “The naked negro, panting at the line,” and one boy gave me, quite innocently, as I afterwards found by questioning him, “The naked m*gvo, pantless at the line.” If the negro was nakei he wore no pants, and “ pantless ” is a seat mention of the unmentionables. ThU local howler maybe kept in countenance by one or two from a distance : — William the Conqueror met the death he richly deserved, for when he was destroying by fire a town in the North of France he vias struck by an arrow in his Feudal System—from which, being a corpulent man, he never recovered. Herculaneum and Pompeii were two 4 ancient cities in Italy which were destroyed by an overflow of saliva from the Vatican. “ Feudal System ” in its context is good and may be left undisturbed; but “overflow of saliva from the Vatican ” is better, and better still when puzzled out. Civis.