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New Zealand Tablet, Volume V, Issue 249, 8 February 1878, Page 1

Current Topics

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fOTHING strikes us as being better illustrative of the " Gospel " of the period than the admiration professed by certain of its ministers for the character of Oliver Cromwell. We can, indeed, understand how this monster should be the accepted apostle of free thinkers, the Messiah of Pantheists, and Atheists, and of all such as hold that, so long as the dooi- is thrown open for the indulgence of the inclinations of human nature, it matters not how terrible may have been the deeds that led to so desirable a consummation. We can also understand how such a fiend should become a " hero " to a man, for example, like Carlyle, blinded by the very light of his own genius, and to whom every- barbarian who has exercised the bloody hand over his fellow creatures, is venerable as one who has disciplined " anarchic peoples." The admiration of such men as these for Cromwell, we say, we can understand, for the former are guided by no principle, but follow the lead of their own wild, and for the most part nonsensical, imaginations into devious paths innumerable, and the latter, having originated peculiar ideas, is possessed of talent sufficient to make it appear to himself and his disciples that they are just, and amongst them that the degree to which divinity is enshrined in a man is to be judged of by the strength and sincerity shown by Mm, let them have what method of manifestation they may. We can further understand how, in times of excitement, orators, possessed of no very exalted talents or deep learning, may invoke the memory of Cromwell, as if be were in a manner the patron saint of vengeance, of which we lately witnessed an example at the Bulgarian Atrocity Meeting in Dunedin, when Mr. Macandrew made such an invocation, and that, parjfarentJusse, under the very nose of Bishop Neville, within whose province it would have fallen a little time ago to celebrate a yeaily service in honour of " King Charles the Martyr." But the process of reasoning by which a gentleman, who combines the occupation of the lecturing platform with that of an evangelical pulpit, has brought himself to recognise Cromwell as the best and mildest of mankind we fail to follow, nor has our philosophy as yet succeeded in reconciling with Christianity a somewhat similar declaration of views recently made amongst us in Dunedin by the learned professor, who helps to their theology the Presbyterian students of the Otago University, Cromwell was the perfection of a Christian gentlemen, in effect, says one. Cromwell, says the other, wielded the sword of Moses, and may God prosper all who act as he did. But, saj's History, Cromwell was a murderer and a ravisher. Ho slaughtered in cold blood, by the sword and by famine. He desolated a country so that the wolves grew plentiful enough there to become a scourge to his own myrmidons. He seized the women of Ireland and sent them to the West Indies to be subjected to the like fate with that of those slave women, whose condiformed by far the worst feature in that accursed system, cheaply in the Bouthern" States of America even by so great a war as witnessed in the present generation there. Surely these gentlemen to whom we allude cannot pretend to be preachers of that Gospel to whose " spirit " the fire of Elias and the &word of Moses are alike forcigu. Their claim is rather to be promulgates of an evangel adapted to the period.

Fob more than three hundred years Protestants have been loudly assuring the world that their faith is based upon the infallible word of God contained in the Bible, and so plainly to be discerned there that "he who runs may read" without the need of an interpreter. But now we find that occasionally their faith has been sustained very feebly indeed, and that the infallible word of God has had nothing whatever to do with it. It turns out in fact that their beliefs have now and then been propped up by the mistranslations of incompetent and decidedly fallible men. Take the following paragraph from a letter in the London Times as an example :— " Professor Tyndall has fallen into a not uncommon error. Quoting the songs of the herald angels, ' Glory to God in the Highest, &c.,' he saysLook to the East at the present moment as a comment on the pro-

mise of peace on earth, goodwill towards men. That promise is a dream dissolved by the experience of eighteen centuries.' There is a mistranslation of Mark ii. 14, in our version. It should be — • Peace on earth, to men of goodwill,' or ' among men of God's good pleasure.' Dean Alford says (Alford's Greek Testament, 4th edition, vol. i, p. 430, note) — The only admissible rendering is ' Among men of God's good pleasure — i.e., among the elect people of God.' Those who have read their Bible should know that the promise of the Gospel is not 1 peace, but a sword.' " We have nothing in the world to do with Dean Alford, whose Greek Testament, by the way, has we believe followed its predecessors, the Testaments of other such editors and commentators, and gone out of fashion, but we are amused at finding that after the lapse of more than three hundred years, when an infidel accuses their version of containing a false prophecy, the only defence Protestants can offer is that they were mistaken all along, and to see them obliged to fall back upon the interpretation authorised by the Catholic Church ages before ever a Protestant was heard of, "M in terra pax Twniinilnis honoe voluntatis" Their whole safety indeed in the war now waged, and to be still more fiercely waged against them, as the time goes on, by atheism and infidelity lies in discovering what is the answer which the Church returns to the sophistries of the enemy, and in urging that answer.

It seems to us a suggestive comment upon the teaching of the Christian sect which long enjoyed a monopoly of religious instruction in Otago, that Dunedin has been pronounced ripe to become the head-quarters of the unbelief of the colonies. Atheism has found here a congregation, and its advocate, Mr. Bright, informs us that matters are now to be put on a footing for their regular instruction and edification. The new church is to be called that of " free thought," or, as we might more aptly name it, that of the Luciferists, for its members are far more faithful followers of the Prince of the Universe's outcasts, than are we, Catholics, of the Pope, because of our adherence to whom they stigmatise us as " Papists." The Sunday evenings' catechising with which the Rev. Dr. Stuart endeavors to make it up to the children of his flock for the loss of the Pater-noste)' patch, which seemed sufficient to him to constitute the Education Bill a very godly, Christian measure, and which we supposed to have deserved for that measure his Eeverence's "God-speed," until we found out that he was ready to bestow his benediction upon it with or without its recognition of This Sunday evenings' catechising, we say, will be balanced by a Sunday-school, where secular education will be out-secularised, positive blasphemy will be taught instead of negative, and a goodly tribe of children corrupted into very imps of Satan. The house, indeed, must have been well swept and garnished which has been found .so prepared for the erection of such a shrine, that all that was needed to elevate it was a few valet-like echoes of the scientific theories of Darwin and Huxley, of the vaporing of Tyndal, and of the patronage bestowed upon the Creator and the Saviour of the World by M. Renau, who, as a certain lady writer — Miss Thackeray, if we be rightly -informed—- remarked with infinite disgust, was the man for whom so gross and offensive a part had been reserved. , We abhor the whole undertaking with all our soul, but yet there is one thing in which we feel inclined to join with Messrs. Bright, Stout, and Co., it is the laugh in their, sleeve, which they must enjoy when they think of the admirable tool they have found more especially in the- Presbyterian ministers of Otago, who, in their anxiety to lay hold of- the. children oC Catholics, have '• bitten their nose to vex. their face,!' and flung their own within reach of the fumes of Hell.