MUD-THROWING.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume IV, Issue 203, 23 February 1877, Page 7

MUD-THROWING.

(To the Editor of the ' Nelson Daily Times.')

Sir, — It is to be regretted that when the members of any particular sect meet together to discuss the management of their own, they should voluntarily say or do anything to hurt the feelings and insult the honest faith of those who by conscientious convictions are compelled to worship God in other communions. Most people by this time know the elasticity of the doctrine of the English Church, and it may be therefore necessary for a dignitary of that church, when addressing his immediate " belongings," to say something soothing and pleasurable to the various phases of opinion he sees before him. Thus, the Ultra-Evangelicals will always be pleased with a " dig " at the Church of Borne, whilst another party will utter a chuckle of delight when Tyndall, Huxley, and other leaders of that school of thought are rapped over the knuckles.

What the Church of Home, as represented by the inoffensive people of that persuasion we know here, will say to such a gratuitous piece of mud-throwing as that contained in Bishop Harper's charge I cannot say ; in all probability they will treat it as their church usually does treat the babble of her opponents, with silent contempt. However, they must fight their own battle. lam only a respecter of their church in just so far as that church is a mere logical and reasonable representative of the faith common to both it and the Anglican Church.

Some of those attacked by the Bishop in his charge, think that there is a gradual approximation going on of all the best thought in all the different churches, which will lead to a higher and deeper perception of the meaning of Christianity ; that this process will be slow and attended with many and frequent forms of error, but that the error will be gradually eliminated and the truth remain.

Against these dreamers Bishop Harper warns his flock, advising the Anglicans everywhere to draw together to resist the attacks upon " the faith once for all delivered to the saints/ thereby asserting that the members of the Church of England are the only authorised repositories and defenders of that faith. What is this but asserting in an ambiguous and roundabout way that the Church of England is infallible ? A Catholic Bishop would 6ay, at once ; — " My church is the only true church, and is yafajlible, and go is the

head of my church when he speaks ex cathedra ; do not, therefore, distress yourselves because of the attacks of the heretic and infidel, for we know the church is founded on a rock, and the gates of hell j shall not prevail against her." There is a manly reliance and consistent pluck about this, however fallacious many would say it to be. But Bishop Harper beats about the bush to say almost the same thing as regards his church ; only he is in a terrible pucker " when the faith once for all delivered to the saints has to be maintained alike against the insidious doctrinal developments of the Church of Rome, and the open assaults of men who would overthrow it altogether, or who, unintentionally perhaps, but not less certainly, are undermining the authority on which it exists," and he fails to see that in his own statements he has been serenely developing the very doctrine he would condemn in the Papal Church. It is a pity Synods cannot be held without throwing mud at their neighbors and stirring up sectarian strife. Omega.