" ROT."

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XVII, Issue 45, 28 February 1890, Page 15

" RO T."

(Otago Daily Times, February 26.)

The members of the " Loyal Orange Lodge of the Middle Island, JNew Zealand," have assuredly little reason to offer up the famous petition tor a good conceit of themselves. Yesterday we published an address which these gentlemen are about to forward to the Queen, and which will have been perused with much amusement by the majority of the community. Tha production is apparently called forth by nothing in particular. There is no jubilee on ; the Irish National party have be?n doing nothing very dreadful ; the Vatican, bo far aB we know, is haibouring no particularly new or diabolical designs upon the '■ Protestanism of the Protestant religion." In fact, the address is merely an obiter dictum — a piece of friendly and casual correspondence— an edifying and hortatory epistle fondly intended for her Majesty's private ear. That the document will be read, marked, learned, and inwardly digested by the illustrious person to whom it ia addressed tha writers evidently entertain no doubt. 0 sanctasimplioitat I It is the sort of letter which •' Poor Mies J," had she been an Orangeman, might have addressed to the Iron Duke ; but the hero of Waterloo was exceptionally complaisant. To be serious, there can be no question of the Lodge's sincerity, indeed, if the paradox may be excused, they are hopelessly sincere. That obvious sincerity, moreover, considerably discounts the apparently collossal conceit and lack of comprehensive charity displayed in this precious address. What the writers really lack is something different : it is that saving eeuse of humour without which tact and good taste and reasonableness, and a modest appreciationiation of one's own importance cannot exist. Such a sense would have •aved the members of the " Loyal Orange Grand Lodge of the Middle Island. New Zealand," from writing a long letter to the Queen, in which the only petition is that " Your Majesty will in your wisdom consider the nature of this institution (apparently the Roman Catholic Church) in the light of history and of Bacred Scripture." It would have saved them from indulging at the same time in a fulsomelyexpressed adulation of the Queen herself, which is more suggestive of a fawning courtier than of an old English reformer. But the saving sense to which we refer is a gift, not a volun'ary acquisition, and for its absence the lodge must not be blamed. In that unfortunate absence, however, it is deeply to be regrettad that some other good sense does not prevent a body of generally respectable people from indulging in silly freaks which, so far as they are taken seriously, can only tend to accentuate religious and political differenoss, and to keep alive controversies of a most bitter and deplorable kind.