The Big-drum Movement

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXII, Issue 46, 16 November 1905, Page 1

The Big-drum Movement

The refreshing frankness of candidates all over New Zealand in reference to the Bible-in-schools scheme must have given serious pause to the leaders of that movement. Aspirants for Parliamentary honors have, of all men, to carefully feel the public pulse and to keep their weather-eye lifting for indications as to which way the local political cat is going to jump. And their general rejection of the shifting plans of the Bible-in-schools party ought to be a sufficient reminder that these are no longer — if they ever were — a live political issue, and that the public arc sick of clerical attempts to create and endow a Unitarian State cieed. For nearly thirty years the sectarianising party have been hunting many hares and catching none. The net result of their ' labois ' is well expressed m the French proverb .— ' Beaucoup de bruit, Peu dc fruit ' — which we may freely translate :—: — ' Noise galore, And nothing more.' • In Carlyle's ' Past and Present ' there is a passage which, though written of a people generally, may be aptly applied to the clerics of the Bible-in-schools League, who loaf and doze away the precious hours that they ought to employ in endeavoring to guide the little one's of their flocks along the road that leads to eternal life. ' The unredeemed ugliness,' says the Chelsea sage, ' is that of a slothful people Show me a people energetically busy— heaving, struggling, all shoulders at the wheel , their heart pulsing, every muscle swelling with man's energy and will— l will show you a people of whom great good is already predicable ; to whom all manner of good is certain if their energy endure.' Talk is cheap— we have said this before But when the Bible-in-schools clergy give up empty chmwagging, and get their shoulders to the wheel— heaving and struggling and muscle-swelling, as Catholics do— for the souls of the childien ; then, and not till then, will the public believe they are in earnest ; then, and not till then, will any good be predicablc of them— if only their energy endure.