That Plebiscite Bill

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXIII, Issue 31, 3 August 1905, Page 18

That Plebiscite Bill

We take the following interesting item from the columns of our local evening contemporary t 1 Regarding the Plebiscite Bill now before the House, the executive of the Bible-in-schools Referendum League have decided that it would be very much more desirable that the Bill should be withdrawn, than that any modification, of the question to be submitted to the electors should be accepted in committee. 1 We had expected this. And those who heard us will rcajdily recall our wards now that our prophecy has come to paps. The sectarianising party will be satisfied with no form of reference but a mystification that will conceal as far as possible from the view of the electors the radical character of the proposed alteration in the Education 'Act, and the real source, nature, and conditions of the ' religious instruction ' which it is sdught to force upon oi«r public schools. ' The Council of the Churches,' said the Minister of Justice, ' may be acquainted with these Bible lessons, but I will undertake to say the ppfolic of New Zealand are not. And therefore,' he added, ' they would not be competent to vote at the suggested referendum. 1 'We have been treated,' says the Rev. P. B. Fraser (Presbyterian), ' to the cant about " trusting the people." 'It is not,' he adds, ' a question of trusting the people, but of distrusting religious agitators, who are prone to put false issues before the people, whio themselves are not competent to decide because they have not the data to enable them intelligently to do so. The appeal is not fto representatives chosen of the people and intelligently informed with, the data before them, bjut it is to the ignorance and religious prejudices, not to say passions, of the people that the appeal by referendum ie made.' In the official pronouncements of the Bible-in-scbools Conference, in the speeches and sermons of some of its sympathisers, and, quite recently, in the editorial columns of the League's chief advocate in the religious press, we hawe sufficient and melancholy indication of the spirit of religious piassion with which the sectarianising party would, in all human probability, endeavor to get their following to approach the ballot-boxes at the proposed plebiscite.