APPEAL TO CHRISTIANITY.

Wanganui Herald, Volume XXXVII, Issue 10971, 10 June 1903, Page 6

APPEAL TO CHRISTIANITY.

"We call upon the Churches of Christianity to tell the world that 19 centuries oi' martyrdom of the Jews are enough; that sintering should no longer be their badge; that the plague-stricken ghetto, the scourge, the torture, the infamy, the ! blow of manhood and the Mss 1 of childhood — the grim history of Israel's living suflering — should cease; that the night owl's shriek of intolerance, crazing men into riot and bloodshed, should cease tohunt a peaceful, a gentle, a, loyal and lawabiding people, with a hatred a's fierce as the forest fires that chase the wild beast from its lair. Let the ChurcheE — of whose sympathy in this horror we may be • assured — tcacli tha -.world the 'unhocd&d lesson of religious tolerance; lot them destrby the s old: -prejudices of rate^rid re-" ligion — let them unfurl the bamiei*' ot*the'' unity of the sons of man. Let them .<ttell the people that the nations which to-day unearth the .putuidecarease^o^ intolerance from its dishonored grave; who galvanise its hideous form with spurious life; who poison the atmosphere of brotherly love and the miasma of hatred and illwill, are anti-patriotic, anti-social, and anti-religious. ' y/ t ' , - "While ' Russia, is rdHihg back the progress of the centuries, this great British Empire — of which it is our privilege and pride to be citizens — remains as ever, how could we help thinking of this on Wednesday last — the ideal and pattern of free government, the palladium of liberty, the. secure haven and refuge to- all men arid ideas persecuted and down-trodden by despots — A land of settled government, A land of free and old- renown, Where freedom slowly broadens down, From precedent to » precedent.

"Her strength has 'always been in her equal laws, in s the fact that over cottage and palace alike the aegis of 'the Constitution rests, and that all the machinery of justice is set in motion to protect the peasant's home if the high-horn, wrong' assail it, and to guard the beggar's conscience if he bxit fancy it aggrieved. It has placed its hand in benediction on the. head of the Jew, saying to him, f O, man of sorrows and acquainted with' grief, rest from thy world-travels on the soil of • a liberty-blessed Empire. And establish thou a covenant of eternal hope under the reign of justice and under the ,«proud and mighty banner of freedom. And' thou shalt feel the sacrediiess of manhood, the illimitable horizon of thy hopes. ~ 'That thy children and thy children's children may for the goodly land that He hath given to us, saying, 'Thank God, we bless the Lord Grod of their fathers also are Britons.'"