A SENSIBLE PIETIST.

New Zealand Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic Review, Volume XVIII, Issue 1037, 20 January 1910, Page 22

A SENSIBLE PIETIST.

Religious persons of a certain per- i suasion (says the Licensing World”! were not ■in .the past such ' narrowminded purists as we find them to? day. A day or two ago we turned up a volume of "The Cottagers’ Friend,”, a publication issued by the Wesleyan authorities seventy-two years ago. In it we find a memoir, of Mrs. Sarah' Butler, of Brinscombe, which is remarkable for the following particulars:—" At her husband’s death, in i 1795, the government of the boise as an innkeeper fell under her own man agement. This situation ... . she maintained with all the dignity of her Christian character and in entire conformity with the spirit of hue religion. Her whole domestic arrangements were reduced to rule. . . . . The character of the house was so well-known that rarely did any personvisit it but with the intention of behaving well.’. There is much more about this excellent and exemplary landlord which, for lack of space,' we cannot print. Most noteworthy is the fact that she saw no harm in conducting a legitimate and’,useful business; for “about twenty years before her death she delivered the business to her eldest son, and retired from the cares of public life.” What would narrow-minded secretaries like Lief Jones and men of his ilk say to a case like this? It is an example of high-minded charity, “ thinking no evil,” that outshines all the acrid and dry philosophy of the United Kingdom Alliance.' But Mrs. Butler is not without successoi-s in the inns of today, as our tedtotal friends£w<X&ld discover if they were., not blinded with the sophistry of- their. shallow creed.