Current Topies.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume IX, Issue 431, 15 July 1881, Page 1

Current Topics.

AT HOME AND ABROAD.

Another of the Exeter Hall meetings has been CONTKADIC- that of the London City Missions, At this meeting TIONS. one of the speakers made it his boast that a certain missionary who had come in contact with many of the foreign Socialists, and members of revolutionary societies generally, who were to be found in England, declared that not one of them was a " Protestant Christian." Many of them, he said, were " Roman Catholics who intensely hated their priests," and more still were Atheists. From this the conclusion drawn by the speaker was that though " Popery" and Atheism had their plots, the " Gospel" knew nothing of such things. We may remark, however, that " Roman Catholics who intensely hate their priests" are hardly men whose plotting can be attributed to "Popery." If they hate their priests, it is evident they mußt still more hate their Pope and all his belongings. Catholics who are faithful to the teaching of their priests aie not to be found among the secret societies, and those men who, having once been Catholics, belong to such, have forfeited their right to the name. But have none of the Atheists alluded to ever been Protestant Christians ? Many of them certainly belong to the Protestant parts of Germany, and it is hardly credible that, at one time or another, the greater number of them were not Protestant Christians. Is Atheism, indeed, so widely lodged and methodically taught in Protestant Germany as this implies ? and if so was not that boast at a recent meeting of the Bible Society, that 11,000,000 Bibles had of late years been distributed in the country alluded to, rather a proof of the useless labours of the society than of ita success ? But we beg leave to say, further, that the " Gospel" has its plots ; it owned the men who plotted for the assassination of Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden, in 1792; it has been known in its day, moreover, to go hand in hand with those " Roman Catholics who intensely hate their priests," and Atheists, in aiding their plots. It did so notably in the Italian revolution which has already resulted in such an increase of infamy and misery of all kinds. But even of late we have seen the " Gospel" acting independently and pursuing such plots as suited its purpose on its own account. .Those Welsh poachers to whom our attention was lately drawn are all belonging to the "Gospel," Protestant Christians every one of them, as were their fathers in the days of " Rebecca.'' Again, the slight thrown by the meeting on the results of those eleven millions of Bibles given out in Germany was not the only slight offered by it to the works of the *' Evangelical" societies generally. These societies have been distributing Bibles by the million ; scattering tracts abroad as it they were some natural refuse obtained for nothing and even then fit only to be thrown away, visiting, preaching, rind praying multitudinously. And what is the result? Oat •f the immense population of London, said one of the peakers, only 200,000 were regular in attending any place of worship, and there were only 60,000 regular communicants. There was, on the contrary, a portion of the population who had all the irreligion of heathen tribes and lacked many of their virtues. There were 30,000 thieves, 150,000 gin-drinkers and an equal number who lived in vice. It might be as well, then, on the whole, if the societies were to refrain from the publication of their long rows of figures. It is clear, from such admissions as those we quote, that the work performed by them is vastly inferior when compared with the money they expend upon it. They only exhibit to the world their own inefficiency.

Those who have read M. Victor Hugo's romance of REVOLU- the Revolution— Quatre- Vingt-Treize — will rememtionart ber in what bright colours he paints the forces of humanity, the Republic — brave, humane and genial ; while on the other hand, the insurgent peasants of Brittany, fighting on behalf of their king and faith, are described as demons of cruelty. In contrast with M. Hugo's description we find a true account of the revolutionists given by the Revue des Deux Mondes in

some papers on the rising in the south of France, which took place under the Comte de Saillans. The decisive battle was fought, we are told, on the mountain of Saint-Bres, between tie choicest portion of the Royalists and the Republican army of the Gard. The army was victorious, and in consequence of their defeat the royalist party fled into hiding-places wherever they were to be found. Many women and children were with them, and a refuge seemed to offer itself to them in the wood of Paiolive. The larger number managed to creep back, under shelter of the night, into their houses, whence they pretended they had never moved. Those who failed to do so, and were taken by the patriots, were almost all of them slaughtered —on the highroads, on the outskirts of the woods, at the farms where they went to beg for food. Thus many bloody scenes took place, whose history, whose number, and whose horror will never be known. The town of Saint- Andre-de-Cruzieres was burned ; so also was the Chateau of Jales ; and many houses in Berriaa and Bannes. In all the villages of the district the tocsin was rung, and there was mixed with the ringing of the bells the sound of a fire opened upan those who had fled — on disarmed combatants, or poor wretches who had refrained from taking any part in the fight, and whose neutrality was now punished, while their houses were pillaged. The patriots continued for a time to improve their victory. De Saillans, with some companions, arrested as he was trying to escape, was brought to Vans, where the crowd killed all of them with swords, a»d tore their bodies asunder. The same day four other men were murdered in the same place, and the two sons of one of them were killed at the distance of a few miles away. The prior of Saint-Bauzeli, an infirm old man, who had refused to take the civic oath, and consequently lived in retirement, escaped with his widowed sister-in-law and her children to a cave in the woods, where, for fifteen days, they were supplied with food by the neighbouring farmers. They were warned that their place of shelter had been discovered, and went back at night to where their house had stood : they found it had been burned, and took refuge under the ruins. Here they were seized, and the old priest, when he had been made a sport of by a band of the possessed, was shot before the eyes of his nephew, a boy of ten years old. The Abbe de la Molette and a relation of his, who had, however, taken part in the royalist movement, were arrested and brought to Joyeuse. Among the ill-usage and inßults heaped upon them by the way they showed a high degree of courage. They were both cut to pieces by the people of the town in the presence of the soldiers, who stood by looking on as they had done also during the murders at Vans. Here, besides the men already mentioned, nine priests were put to death in like manner, several of whom had had nothing to say to the insurrection, and whose greatest crime was their refusal to take the constitutional oath. The youth of one of them, the Abbe Novi, who was only twenty-three, aroused the pity of Borne women, and they tried to save him by begging him, and making his father beg of him to take the oath. He answered that he would rather die. These priests were torn to pieces with a cruelty that was only equalled by the serenity with which they met their death. At Alais, again, frightful horrors were enacted, and again in presence of the troops. And at Tanargue, of two gentlemen shot, one is said to have seen his grave dug, and to have been buried alive in it. Such, then, were the men of the revolution, whom of late it has become the habit to celebrate as the friends and patrons of humanity, and such the genial soldiers painted for us by Victor Hugo.

Since the publication of the Revised Version of the the bible New Testament has called particular attention at misused. present to the Bible it will not be out of place for us to give some extracts on the subject which we take from the Month for April. They run as follows :—": — " As history alone, then, forbids her to think that the Gospel was put about in manuscript in the beginning, when the documents containing it had not yet been composed, so the Catholic Church teaches that its propagation now is not to be mainly owing to the perusal of printed books. She has absolutely no faith in the discharge of even correctly translated Bibles upon pagan shores, where Protestant missionaries were afraid to set their foot; nay, even if the hearts of these clergymen had not failed them, and the glory of nearer martyrdom had not shown so pale and faded to their sight, she would have

foretold little fruit from their labours among the savage race, if it was expected with advancing knowledge to read itself progressively into the dfccipleship of Jesus Christ. She had never believed, and does not believe now, that with the invention of printing was invented also a new and improved method of diffusing the Gospel and bringing all nations under the obedience of Jesus Christ ; and that whereas the Apostles (and Christ Himself) had fulfilled their mission by word of mouth, so that not the Bibles they distributed, but the sound of their living voice went out into all the ends of the earth, the same divine ministry was to be transacted in later times by the fussiness of Bible secretaries, and a system of scriptural colportage ; the most difficult part of the evangelist's office, viz., to persuade the unbeliever of the authority to which his intellect must bow, being thus not only improved away, but even put into the hands of the person to be converted, for the book he received was expected at once to authenticate, explain and answer objections against itself. To this new-fangled scheme of Gospel propagandism, unwarranted by her Divine Founder, and unforetold, making communion with Him the prize of a reading class and dependent on a feeling for grammar, she has never been able to make up her mind, but with all common sense rejects it. Even if the inspired pages are not utilized commercially, as in China, to thicken the soles of slippers, or to furnish wrappers for the grafts in the vast American forests ; even if they are not bartered to the whites for brandy and ' fire-water " by the graceless heathen, she waits for intelligence of a single people converted by the Bible alone, and has hitherto waited in vain. Nay, more : she has no difficulty and no remorse in characterising Biblical Associations as ' pests ' which work mischief to men's souls. But there must be no room for misunderstanding here. It must never be forgotten, when we are estimating the force of the Church's language in respect of Bible Societies, or the Bible generally as used by nonCatholics, that she is contemplating translations which are not only not authorised by her, and which are unfurnished with notes, but which she knows to misrepresent the original on many most essential points. . . . Against such blind guides as these are Catholics warned by the Apostolic See, that they be not led by them into the bottomless pit. Such reading as these books provide is most rightly called by Leo the Twelfth ' poisonous pastures ' on which it is death to feed ; and though, which we deny, non-Catholic versions held no moro than one grain of error in every bushel of truth, for this adulteration alone ought they, if offered in open market, to be seized by the proper authorities as wares deleterious to the public health."

Of the ease with which anti- Catholic controversy EASILY is undertaken and brought to a termination satisexplained. factory to the non-Catholic controversalist, we find an instance in a book belonging to the Dunedin Athenaeum. The book is the Dublin JRevitiv for October, '80, in which there occurs an article on M, Kenan's lectures, and the reviewer, in arguing for the authority of Rome writes as follows :—: — <; Authorities, which cannot be set aside except on sceptical methods which would overturn all belief in Christianity as a supernatural religion, attest the fact that St. Peter with his brother apostle St. Paul, founded the Roman Church. From the very first we find that this Church claimed a peculiar prominence, and that its claim was on the whole allowed. Look at the remarkable circumstances to which JI. Renan draws attention, viz., that the Corinthians, while St. John was actually living at Ephesus, turn not to Ephesus but to Rome for the decision of their dispute 2 ." On the margin opposite the last sentence we find written in pencil, " To Paul, who happened to be in Rome," But ' Paul,' nevertheless, happened to be in heaven at tho time, for the occasion alluded to was that in the Pontificate of St. Clement, at the end of the first century when St. John alone of all the Apostles remained alive. It was then that Rome intervened to restore order in the disturbed Church of Corinth. Bnt let us mark the ease with which our controversialist disposes of the difficulty and puts bis foot down at once upon the point urged in favour of the Pope, it is a vivid illustration of " Evangelical" methods. Meantime the remainder of the passage from the Beview is worthy of quotation, it continues thus :—": — " Nor is this an isolated fact ; others of a similar nature have come down to us, even in the scanty and fragmentary literature of the first two centuries. Such, for instance are the salutations of St. Ignatius to the Roman Church, as ... presiding over charity, — i c., over the whole body of the faithful bound together in charity — words which should be taken in connection with the marked tone of deference which runs through his letter to the Roman Christians, with his statement that they have " taught others,' and that he cannot lay down laws for them ' as if he were Peter or Paul.' Such again is the interference of Pope Victor in the Paschal controrersy, his attempt to sever the Asiatic dioceses from the ' unity of the Church,' and his proclamation that they were ' excommunicate. (Enseb., v. 24.) But we are not driven to rest our case on these facts by themselves. We have to look at them in the light of Christ's words which precede, promising that His Church is to have a supreme head, and in that of the first theological writers who succeed the

Apostolical Fathers, and who explain the principle on which the Roman primacy was based. The very first writer who furnishes us with any detailed information on Christian doctrine is St. Irenseus, who wrote about 180. He givee the splendid testimony te the authority of Rome, which we have already cited frem M. Renan. He says that with it every Church must agree ; he makes the preservation of the faith depend upon union with it ; he attributes its supremacy, not to any accidental reason, but to that ' more poweful principality,' which he traces, as is perfectly clear from the context, to its foundation by St. Peter and St. Paul. In a like spirit Tertullian speaks of our Lord's giving the keys to Peter, and through him to the Church, Scorp., 10,) of the Church as built on him, (Monog., 8,) of the Roman Church as that into which the Apostles St. Peter and St. Paul poured the whole of this doctrine with their blood (Prcescr. 36). The heresy of the age unites its witness to that of Catholic Fathers. The Clementine homilies, which were written by Kbionite or Judaizing heretics, do not dream of denying that the Church of Christ must have an earthly head, but they set the primacy of St. James, whom they call ' Bishop of Bishops' (Ep. Clem, ad Jacob.) against the primacy of the Pope, while they cannot help allowing (inconsistent as this admission is) that St. Peter, not St. James, was the • foundation of the Church' (Horn, xvii.,l9). Every one is aware how Tertullian, after he had left the Church for Montanism, supplies us with evidence for the contemporary Roman Church ; how he calls the Pope contemptuously " Pontifex maximus,' i.e., ' episcopus episcoporum ;' taunts him with ' peremptory edicts,' and argues (just as a Protestant might do now-a-days) against the power he may claim on the strength of the text, • Thou art Peter' (Pudicit., 1 and 21). All this, we repeat, is just what we should expect, supposing the Divine origin of Papal supremacy to be true. The Catholic hypothesis stands the one sufficient test to which an hypothesis can be put — viz., the test of verification. We have our Lord instituting the primacy in St. Matthew's Gospel ; we have faint and obscure traces of this primacy in its exercise, at a period when the whole history of the Church is faint and obsenre ; we have full statements of this primacy as of divine institution, and of the principles on which it rests, just at the epoch when Christian writers begin to express themseves with fulness on any of the articles of Christian belief. There is nothing left for us to desire, nothing left out, the absence of which ought seriously to perplex an honest Protestant who is enquiring into the claims of the Pope and the Church."

A whiter in a late number of the Seme des Deux A suggestive Mondes, who defends the memory of Charpentier glimpse from the charges bronght against him by Michelet OR two. and the Professor Waddington, and who shows in his defence that Mr. Froude is not alone of all antiCatholic writers in falsifying testimony, enables us also to catch an additional glimpse of the political rather than the religious nature of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. He represents Charpentier as having approved highly of this measure, but at the same time he quotes the following advice, given by him to a friend :—": — " If you are a Protestant proclaim it aloud : there are people enough who will approve of you in England, in Germany, in France also, alas ! It is not the part of an honest man to hide his thoughts. There is no mistake made about the religion of those who do not obey circumstances and the times more than God and their conscience. I have known sincere Protestants and I never ceased to like them." This is certainly not the langrage of a man who could approve of Protestants having been put to death merely because they were Protestants. But of what the toleration of Protestants themselves was, we find an example in a sentence quoted from Claude, the Calvinist, who disputed with Bossuet a hundred years afterwards. It throws also some light on the tenets of the Huguenots, whose persecution by King Louis XIV. is so frequently and so deservedly reprobated. It rufcg as follows : — " Documents that establish universal toleration, whicn includes toleration for Socinianism, are in everyone's hands, and we see the sad headway that is made in minds by these wicked maxims : it is time to have recourse to remedies."

But it is not only the idol Thomas Carlyle that behind the Mr. Froude's indiscreet publication has damaged scenes. in the eyes of worshippers. There has been a general crackin g of graven images thereby — there has been made audible in place of the breathings of genius " a croakery of crawling things," and it is hard to say whom we can any longer reverence as the dignified and faultless source from which wisdom and delight have flowed through the Press upon the British public. Another Asmodeus has shown us the interior life, and left us somewhat^,provoked and not a little humbled. If these be our heroes what must bo the general crowd ? Not even Wordsworth has been spared I All British authordom is dwarfed and made ridiculous before our gaze, and how much are we the better of it ? Unless it be a useful lesson to learn our own dulness, and that flaws are everywhere in human pretcntions, and only need the eyes to see them and the tongue to

place them upon record. But the matter is ridiculous enough too« John Stuart Mill, for example, whose name we associate with so much that is grave and deep ; who is ever brought before us in ponderous essays, and whom we find continually in the mouths of men of weight and authority, here comes upon us as very differently associated. He seems sadly out of his bearings to us when we find him described as accompanied by "a very will-o'-wispish iridescence of a creature" — his wife. Nor can we quite unmoved receive that his conversation was i mere matter of " thin ale :" his conversation too when he must have thought it worth while to pu t forth all his powers in a dialogue with Carlyle. And what a figure Harriet Martineau cuts. To have been a pioneer of Atheism, and, at least in imagination, guided the minds of half the statesmen and men of intellect in England merely for this, is an unspeakable fate: — "Her adorers, principally, not exclusively, 'poor, whinnering, old, moneyed women in their well hung broughams, otherwise idle,' did her a great deal of mischief ; and, indeed, as it proved, were gradually turning her fine, clear head (so to speak), and leading to sad issues for her. Her talent, which in that sense was very considerable, I used to think, would have made her a quite shining matron of some big female establishment, mistress of some immense dress shop, if she had a dressing faculty, which perhaps she hadn't but was totally inadequate to grapple with deep, spiritual and social questions, into which she launched at all turns, nothj^g doubting. . . . Solitude she only sometimes had, and in pcr 4 fcti©n, never; for it soon became evident she was constantly in spectacle there, to herself and to the sympathetic adorers, who refreshed themselves with frequent personal visits and continual correspondings ; and had, in sad effect, so far as could be managed, the whole world along with self and company, for a theatre to gaze upon her." John Stuart Mill small beer — Harriet Martineau an intellectual Miss Knagg ! These be your fountains, O deeply reading world of Britain. It is no wonder on earth that the Reminiscences of Thomas Carlyle have kicked up a row — but they are splendid backbiting for all that. Is there any sage to give to our children the intrinsic value of the present generation of writers, and to estimate for them the worth of their own critical and appreciative faculties ?

We learn, then, that the good people of Dunedin CHAEUrj have no part in the "sounding brass" or the itself. "tinkling cymbal." The lawyers ifc seems are at their wit's end, and cannot tell what to make of it ; but we all know whose " own " the lawyers are, and how could it be expected that they should behave any better ? It is well, however, that there is somebody in our law couits that keeps a tight hold on his soul, and can afford to allow charity to reign there. Who does the Crown Prosecutor imagine he is going to make ashamed of himself for being charitable ? To believe only good of your neighbour is the height of charity. Charity " thinketh no evil," and if a man will not think evil of his neighbour, even when he hears ifc from his neighbour's own mouth, it is plain his charity is peifect. He loves his neighbour as himself, and even something better. Into that man's soul nothing can drive evil. It is no wonder he should be an abomination to the lawyers ; such men would ruin them on this side of the grave, and they will be far from their company on the other side of it. They are lost to them for ever. But here is what the Crown Prosecutor told us the other day, in the Dunedin Supreme Court : — " At the same time I shall intimate that if the prisoner is to be tried on the other indictments application must be made to try him elsewhere than in Dunedin. Not alone in this case, but in other cases, experience has proved to me that it is impossible to get a conviction in Dunedin for embezzlement in the face of the clearest evidence. Your Honor had experience of this this session. In the case in question the evidence was of the clearest possible character, and there was the confession of the prisoner that he had embezzled the mosJtja mentioned ; yet the jury acquitted him." It is a delightfuKase— candour on the one hand, and the refinement of charity on the other I What is there to beat it ? It is a triumph of Christianity, and we doubt if the " Brotherhood of mankind " itself can show anything beyond it.

Of the effect to be produced on the. minds of AngliSben cans, who are engaged about the claims upon them thbough. of the Catholic Church, by the controversial work of Dr. Littledale, to which we had lately occasion to allude, the following passage is suggestive. We take it from a letter written to his bishop by the Rev. Edward W. Gilliam an American clergyman of the Anglican sect, who has lately become a Catholic ;it runs aa follows :— " lam not insensible to your kindness in having ordered for my special benefit, Dr. Littledale's 'Plain Reasons against joining the Church of Rome,' yet drew from the book no satisfaction. Entirely negative in character, it is, moreover a coarse, vituperative, brutal book, without piety, and without justice, a book whose spirit has nothing in unison with a holy and upright mind. Those texts which seemed to me to give an infallible authority to the Christian Church (a point on which I particularly sought

light) such as Christ promised to be with his Church to the end of the world, and to guide her into all truth through His Spirit which he would impart to her, those texts Dr. Littledale would explain by saying, that the Church, while it may fall into error at any particular time, is indefectible in the long run — an exegesis wherein I confess to seeing neither sense nor comfort. Further, the unfairness of his reasoning, which I was often able to detect, cast suspicion upon those statements that, from my lack of adequate historical knowledge, and from not having the proper books within my reach I could not verify. I refer to his declarations concerning the lapse of Pope Liberius in subscribing to the Arian heresy, and the corruptions of the Church during the middle ages. His evident want of fairness in other portions of his book threw suspicion on these statements. But they were made so confidently, and withal set forth so dark a picture, that I was staggered. The day, however, I called, to find you absent, I was in your library a moment, and by chance (as is said) saw there a book which, as you had given me the use of your library, I brought away. It was Moehler's " Symbolism." Moehler satisfied me with reference to any objections springing from the above statements of Dr. Littledale ; and besides, there breathes through his work such a spirit of piety and exact justice, that in reading his pages after Dr. Littledale's book, I felt as if passing from the slums of a city into one of its stately and elegant mansions. In respect, therefore, to the Anglican view of the Canon of Scripture and the Kule of Faith, my difficulties, the grounds whereof I read to you, and the answer whereto were these books, remain."

It can hardly be very reassuring to the Protestant the revised world, whatever may be their esteem for scholarveesion. ship, to find scholarship, and scholarship not as yet perfect according to the high authority of the London limes, interfering so markedly with their long received rule of faith, the Bible, as it has done. They are now called upon by it to receive readings of many passages widely different from those that have been so long known to them and their fathers, and on which they have so firmly relied. They are also called upon to give up altogether passages that have been advanced in support of particular views, or that have been considered of especial beauty, and what is, perhaps, still worse, they are told that some passages still left to them may net after all be genuine ; so that they must abide in a continual state of doubt as to whether they are to revere them as the word of God, or to look upon them as the mere invention of some adventurous scribe who had taken it upon himself to tamper with Holy Writ ;— but who, it must be acknowledged, succeeded admirably in imitating both its form and spirit. We find in one or two of our contemporaries a number of passages taken from, the Revised Version, and compared with those of the version, so far, authorised, and looked upon as the genuine Bible iv the English language, and the differences are very striking — quite enough, we suspect, to create a schism amongst the sects — which, however, according to the old saying, would be a carrying of " coals to Newcastle " — for we doubt if the dictum of the scholars will be universally obeyed, and if there be not many an honest man who, even when the permission of the secular law has been obtained for the National Church to make use of the text that brings it " nearer to the mind of God," will not insist on remaining faithful to the Bible of his youth, in spite of all the Greek and Hebrew in the world. It will continue for him th« " Holy Original," and he will innocently present to enlightened " Evangelicals " the shocking spectacle of a man holding, and even teaching, it may be, for doctrine the traditions of men, although he be himself an extreme " Evangelical." Depend upon it there is about to open a season when, in the religious world, there will be witnessed many a queer scene. Meantime, to come to the passages to which we have referred. The list that has reached us is a long one, and it is impossible for us to touch upon more than one or two of its contents, but so much will suffice fur an example of the work that has been done, and with which Catholics have no especial concern. We find, then, that out of the fifth chapter of St. John's Gospel there has been thrown the description of the troubling of the waters and the curative power conferred upon them by an angel's descent. This, it seems, is not Holy Writ at all, and all these three centuries while people have been reading it as such, they have been deceived by, probably, some monkish legend. The Protestant world has been shamefully beguiled here, according to these scholars, but at least, there will be a miracle tue less for them to defend, and that may atone for a good deal of their humiliation at the discovery. Their plight, however, seems to us far worse with respect to another passage in the same Gospel ; that relating to the woman taken in adultery, and of which the Times speaks as follows :—": — " In the case of the story in St. John's Gospel of the woman taken in adultery, we read in the margin ' that most of the ancient authorities omit John vii. 53 — viii. 11. Those which contain it vary much from each other.' The whole passage, accordingly, is placed in square brackets." Here, then, our Protestant friends are in the dilemna, or, familiarly speaking, in the pickle, of not knowing whether they are dealing

with the word of God or with mere human invention. Disrespect may be blasphemous ; reverence may tend towards the idolatrous. It would have been better on the whole had scholarship here waited for those coming centuries which the Times implies are to increase its knowledge, and lead to fresh changeß in Holy Writ — or writ partly holy, as we learn. The state of uncertainty in which the " Evangelical" world must henceforth find themselves can be neither profitable nor pleasant for them. Nor is this passage the only one left doubtful. But doubt and rejection are not all that are to be met with ; a complete change in the sense is also to be found. Take, for example, the following passage — one up to this much relied on by Protestant controversialists in arguing against Socinianism, and for the divinity of Christ : — OLD VERSION. NEW VERBION. I. Timothy iii., 16 : And with- I. Timothy iii., 16 : And without controversy great is the out controversy great is the mystery of godliness : God was mystery of godliness ; He who manifest in the flesh, justified in was manifested in the flesh, the spirit, seen of angels, preached justified in the spirit, seen of unto the Gentiles, believed on in angels, preached among the the world, received up into glory, nations, believed on in the world, , received up in glory. It will be seen that the new version completely wants the controversial force, and has no bearing on the Godhead of our Lord, or, rather, perhaps, tells against it. Here, then, is the Bible given to the Protestant world in a form materially altered — much of its contents, taken so far for inspired, left out as false ; much of them declared doubtful ; much of them changed totally in meaning — and without any assurance that further changes must not take place under a scholarship become more ripe, or, it may be, by means of the discovery of manuscripts. And yet the Bible is the infallible rule of faith ! the Bible, not only left to the interpretation of the ignorant and foolish, who must of necessity impress upon it their own stamp, but left so unguarded that it should become a mass of falsification, never to be thoroughly purged. Let them receive this who can. We say, for our part, the assertion is monstrous, and savouring of blasphemy.

Whatever may be the features in the prison AN management of Great Britain and Ireland that it important seems desirable to follow in the gaols of New considera- Zealand, it must be admitted that the class of men tion. engaged here as prison officers can hardly be improved by being placed on the level of men of the same calling employed at Home. We frequently find in the English papers paragraphs to a similar effect with that which runs as follows, and which we clip from the columns of an English contemporary of a late issue : — " A. warder, named James Reeks, was sentenced, at Portsmouth on Thursday, to three months' imprisonment for trafficking with a convict in October last, the convict being now on ticket-of-leave. The warder conveyed letters to and from the convict and his mother in London, and for a consideration of £19 offered to back up a petition to the Home Secretary praying for the release of the convict before the expiration of his term of imprisonment. Reeks held an exceptionally high character, and the governor of the prison said he placed such confidence in him that he did not now know whom he could trust amongst his officers." In connection with our colonial gaols, on the other hand, no case of this kind has ever been known to take place, and this tells very strongly in favour of the moral standing of our prison officers. It is to be hoped then, that, in making whatever changes are to be made in the prison system, so important a fact may be kept in mind by those with whom it lies to autho^e these changes, in order to prevent the deterioration of the class oi men in question, for such must be the effect of checking the due course of promotion m the prisons.