THE HON. ROBERT STOUT, PREMIER, ATTORNEY-GENERAL, AND MINISTER OF EDUCATION.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XII, Issue 37, 2 January 1885, Page 15

THE HON. ROBERT STOUT, PREMIER, ATTOR-NEY-GENERAL, AND MINISTER OF EDUCATION.

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HIB hon. gentleman adds to his many political offices the office of President of the Freethought Association. In this latter capacity he delivered an address in the Lyceum in this city on Christmas night. Most people, we think, after reading tliis address, will regret that one, whom the Christian population of this country has placed in such an exalted position as that of Premier etc., should have considered it his duty to insult them by wantonly outraging the Son of God, whom they revere arid love with all their hearts. In the headlong onslaught made on Christians by this spoiled pet of fortune, no one can fail to discover a great want of good taste and of common sonse as well as a lamentable ignorance of what his position and relations to the community at large demand from him. JS r or is this

all. Mr. Stout speaks of the p n-secution of Christ by the religious teachers of his day, as affording a lesson to his Freethought hearers, and as establishing a similarity between himself and our Divine Lord. This is the drift of his language, % and it argues a very subtle pride and a strange infatuation. Mr. Stout persecuted as Christ was ! Indeed ! All know how our Divine Redeemer was persecuted, but all may not know the nature of the persecution, to which the Hon. Mr. Stout has been subjected. This, however, will be sufficiently evident from the mere enumeration of high offices well remunerated to which the Christians whom he abuses have raised him. He, the man who endeavours to degrade the Bos of God to the level of Mahomet, Luther, and, indeed, himself; he, who would dethrone the. incarnate God, and have him regarded as not only a mere man, but as a base impostor, has been made Premier of a country whose inhabitants are almost without exception believers in the Divinity of Jesus Christ. This is the species of persecution to which the Christians of New Zealand have subjected Mr. Stout. And as if this were not enough of persecution, these same Christians have also raised hia jidus Achates, the member for Wanganui, and Vice-Presidentof the Freethought Association, to the position of a Cabinet Minister, to help, we suppose, the Hon. Mr. Stout to bear his heavy persecution, aggravated by a salary of fifteen hundred a year, with pickings. Our Hon. Premier is greatly to be commiserated, and cannot fail to secure the sympathy of every lover of liberty. But the dire persecution does not stop here. Our great and persecuted Premier is also Attorney-General and Minister of Education. What an aggravation of persecution do we not perceive here, particularly as he had himself the selection of his portfolios; and the public may rest assured that he selected that of Education, for example, on account of the persecution he would endure from the power it conferred upon him of making the education of the rising generation thoroughly godless ! There is one individual spoken of in history to whom the Hon. the Premier may be likened. This is Hama.n, j the Prime Minister and favourite of Assuerus. Haman had wealth, station, office, the favour of his sovereign, the applause of the people ; but in his eyes all these were as nothing so long as Mardochai sat at the king's gate and refused to give him divine honour. And so is it with our high and mighty Premier. He has high office, a large salary, popularity, nevertheless he considers himself a persecuted man so long as even one Mardochai is found to doubt his infallibility, and refuse to acknowledge him to be a reformer fully equal to Christ ; so long as one is found to charge upon him the offences which it is manifest to all he has committed. The two rev. gentlemen who on a recent occasion stood as a sort of sponsors for Mr. Stout have our sincere commiseration and sympathy. Their friend, the Premier, forgets their kind services, and charges upon their respective Churches very odious proceedings. It was only to be expected that he would accept every calumny and misrepresentation accumulated by enemies in reference to the Catholic Church ; but it certainly is a surprise to us to find so soon after the signal services rendered to him by two clergymen — one an Anglican the other a Presbyterian — that he hesitated not to publicly denounce their Churches. This he has done, and in a way little calculated to foster that brotherhood of man which ho says, is the sum total of the teaching of Christ. '