A PAIR OF THEM!

New Zealand Tablet, Volume VI, Issue 304, 14 February 1879, Page 15

A PAIR OF

(From the Melbourne Advocate). It is not customary to remove, under any circumstances, a . i ingle brick from the huge fabric of misrepresentation on Avhich Protestant prejudice with icgard to Catholicity rests. If anyone doubt this Jet him see how the Keic Zealand Christian llecord shuffled out of the dirty business. After repeating, apparently on its own authority, the gravest charges against Catholic teaching and a Catholic institution, its only excuse for a proceeding so rash, so unjust, and disgraceful, was that it had taken the statements from a " carefully and ably conducted paper, whose statements, as a rule, arc thoroughly reliable." Could the N. Z. Christian llccord have been ignorant of the fact that tbis "carefully and ably conducted paper," meaning the Southern Croxx, was convicted, not so many months past, of gross plagiarism bj' the Aiy/ux, and that its equivocations and prevarications in explanation made its original sin still blacker ? Could the jV. Z. Christian Record have been unaware that the Press of this Colony held the Southern Croxx up to scorn for its barefaced act of piracy? We do not believe it. So great a scandal as this must have reached Now Zealand, and brought a blush to the face of the editor of the jV. Z. Chrixtlan Record. But if that gentleman's faith in the convicted newsgaper was still whole, why did he not get a copy of Gary's " Compendium of Moral Philosophy," and, having discovered that the Southern. Cnm had deceived and betrayed him, apologise for his rashness and for having boinc false witness 1 That would have been a manly and an honourable course, and a step becoming a Christian. Instead of that he sheltered himself behind his false witness, and attempted to bolster up the ruined character of that witness. The whole affair is, with one exception, the dirtiest we have met with in the so-called " religious journals," and anything so bad as it we do not often come across in the secular journals. If a report of it were widely circulated it could not but very much serve Catholic interests in Protestant society.