INGLEWOOD.

Taranaki Herald, Volume XXX, Issue 4068, 15 June 1882, Page 2

INGLEWOOD.

[from our own correspondent.] June 13. — We have been somewhat dull here of late, in spite of the revivalists — Messrs. Moyse and Hinman — who have been carrying on amongst us a biisk crusade against, what men of their peculiar views call, "infidelity." According to their tenets, honesty and respectability count as nothing, and they boldly assure us that men of thought, genius, and good character will be oandemned to future torment if they do not accept their antiquated views of faith and the Deity. Their assurance in declaring who will be saved and who lost, makes one wonder what will be the ultimate fate of those who, in spite of their great Master's command to " Judge not lest ye be judged," daily judge their fellow-creatures, forgetting that we are in relation to til" Great Being merely as human animalculre inhabiting a world which is as a grain of sand in bulk, compared with the millions of other worlds amidstwhich she moves in space so great that the human mind cannot conceive it. They ignore these great and noble truths, and, setting forth unhesitatingly their poor, little, tiny conceptions of the Deity, pitilessly damn all who take a vaster, more scientific, more ennobling, and more holy view of the Infinite Being who governs the grand assemblage of innumerable worlds that nightly parade the heavens. The Rev. A. Taylor is also, in a cour3e of six sermons, attacking "Infidelity." It would be better, I fancy, if they let these matters rest — that is, better for themselves — for. since the introduction of national education, steam communication, and, above all, the cheap newspaper, the public have insisted on doing their own thinking, and are not so easily frightened into thia, that, or the other system of religion by the threat of brimstone and agony eternal. I cannot think why Government always issues stringent orders to our railway men, just at the time in winter when our roads are at the worst, that extra vigilance is to he used to keep the public from walking on the railway line. Any new chum arriving here, and being nhown the Mountain Road from Inglewood to Manutahi Station, would probably ask " why we had drained that canal off." and remark that '' he supposed it didn't pay the shareholders." However, although the road is in this state, on Sunday evening last a party of welldressed people who had been to the English Church were met by one of the railway men, who, acting under orders, turned them off the line into the vile elongated bog in question, where they had to struggle to their homes in darkness, through pits of mud, over logs and ditches, and along a part of the road we call "the swamp," which is metalled with Hghtwoods and dmyloads of rough timber, stuck up on end. It is truly a disgraceful sight to see little girls, married women, and others struggling ovp r this road for miles by daylight and dark, wet up the waist, sometimes incommoded with parcels and children in arms ; and a good sound railroad alongside them, upon which they would not do one shilling's worth of harm in a twelvemonth. The men, with their wives and families, who go to open up New Zealand and make her future wealth, are, it seems, not worth government consideration. They may reach their homes exhausted, their wives be laid up, and their children sit wet through up to the knees at the Government schools for hours, and get educated and die of consumption, but the Government gentry at Wellington are dry and snug in their offices there, and so " all's well " — or they think so. A petition to the Minister for Public Works, signed by over 150 settlers and tradespeople, was, however, sent to Wellington on Saturday respecting the state of this main rond, over which nearly all the cattle traffic of Tnranaki passes, and it ia to be hoped that our troubles respecting it, which have hitherto been patiently endured, will shortly come to an end. A stage copy of Schiller's " William Tell," with the poet's handwriting easily recognisable in the notes, and ia the song " With Arrow and Bow," has just been found ia the shop of a Munich antiquary.