The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, OCTOBER 20, 1921. THE BITTER TRUTH

New Zealand Tablet, 20 October 1921, Page 25

The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, OCTOBER 20, 1921. THE BITTER TRUTH

Sgjj§E|, OWADAYS the British people do not love HHnSm $ t^le ru * n ' mainly because it cannot be told ,%[||SB! f without discredit to them. If they were k the candid, honest, fearless individuals that they are constantly represented to be , by press and politicians, they would love ejL*_y&i the truth and recognise that even when *Vp» bitterest it is the royal road to freedom; just as hiding it or blinding people's eyes to it is the road to slavery. There is no more ominous sign of British degeneration than the plain fact that for the past seven years the man who has the courage to tell the truth is denounced by press and politicians as a seditious person, while it has become impossible to be a patriot in the common estimation unless one is at the same time a liar. So widespread is the degeneration already that it is positively astonishing at the present time to come upon an honest, outspoken expression of opinion regarding our progress towards ruin ; and therefore when we found in the Lyttelton Times, September 12, a frank criticism of the present situation by Rev. W. Bullock, Dominion Organising Secretary of the Church of England Men's Society, it impressed us as worthy of comment. » During the course of his remarks Mr. Bullock said: "As a nation thought so it would act, and its morals would have some relation to its education. What were they thinking in New Zealand to-day ? They were being taught that they could make men good and women kind by a system of laws and irksome prohibitions, by a few regulations of the State that were quickly becoming the religion of the bulk of the people. They were being led fco understand that if they could get 1 the children in the schools to salute the flag, then they would make them loyal. . . They were not loyal because they saluted the flag. Neither would they become so. That teaching was made in Germany. The flag was a combination of three crosses and who could explain! the cross without Christianity ? . . . Don't let us give the children a ritual without a reality, a fla? without the faith" that made it. . . -Siena are

not wanting that little cliques of men in this country merely make laws to suit, themselves. How much demand .was there for the Marriage Act? Who demanded it? . . . Signs are not wanting that we may shortly.be governed in this country, if we are not careful, by men who not only scorn Christ but hate Him." Now there is an honest and truthful opinion on the. vanity of New Zealand flag-flapping, on the foolishness which Mr. Parr, and his merry men try to impose on the children in the name of loyalty, of the invasions made by politicians on human liberty, of the subservience of unprincipled placemen to a noisy clique of bigots. While we admire the love of truth and the zeal that led Mr. Bullock to utter this salutary warning we can only regret that what he says is not repeated in season and out of season from every Christian pulpit in the Dominion; for a voice here and there crying in the wilderness is not enough to arouse the people to a sense of their duty towards themselves and to a realisation of. the fact that they are being robbed not only of their liberty but also of Christianity on which true liberty is based. The people of New Zealand have grown so accustomed to be driven like slaves that they will stand anything at present. There are many hundreds of thousands of sincere Christians who know In their hearts that schools from which God has been banished are ruining the young people, and yet these hundreds of thousands tolerate with a meekness that is more than cowardly the crime committed against them by our atheist statesmen who are much more concerned about sham loyalty than about true religion. The same Christians are fully aware that legislation that was intended as an attack on Christian belief was carried through by the same statesmen simply as the result of a bargain for the support of an association led by persons who make a living by stirring up sectarian hatred and promoting discord by their calumnies. If all these Christians knew their duty we should speedily have an end of -jobbery and injustice of this sort. * Surely it is high time that the Churches united in a common campaign against the common enemy. In the past we Catholics have had to fight a]one and unsupported for the cause of schools that are true to the ideals of Christian education. Those who failed to stand by us when union was required now recognise that their supineness has a present monument in the grass that grows on the pathways to their church doors, and here and there, with no great zeal so far and with no great results, they are moving to undo a harm that may have gone too far for remedy at their hands. The root of the evil lies in the State's usurpation of the rights of parents in the matter of education, and in its despotic attempts to impose on the sons and daughters of Christian parents schools that are a standing defiance of revealed religion. When are all the Christian Churches going to bring home to their folds what this State tyranny actually means, and what.evil results it has already had in New Zealand ? Tne country is run by atheists at present. The time has actually come when men who seem to hate the name of Christ make our laws and dictate to Christian parents how their children ought to be taught. Surely we are not blind to the results. Corruption in public and private life is notorious; the press is untruthful; politicians are unprincipled; divorce-made-easy has brought morality to the level of the stock-yard ; there is hardly a week ? thatthis little country is not terrified by reading the details of some horrible murder. And the only remedy that a hopeless Minister for Education can suggest is that the poor, deluded children shall be drilled at stated times before a sheet of bunting on the tip of a pole. When are the men and women who still retain a love for the religion of Christ going to prove that , they have a little backbone ? .