MORE MATERIAL FOR PROTESTANTS TO THINK ABOUT.

Auckland Examiner, Volume III, Issue 141, 12 March 1859, Page 3

MORE MATERIAL FOR PROTESTANTS TO THINK ABOUT.

To Editor of Examiner Sir.—l qbserve that Mr. George Vaile, like Rip Van Winkle, has risen from his long sleep, and runs to mingle his diminutive bark with the full cry of bigotry that has lately been raised in this City. Now, Mr. Editor, I submit t«> you that this is not fa r play. When you allow Mr. Vaile to enter the lists against us we are fearfully over-matched. Consider his experience as a controversialist, and you must acknowledge that one who has been instructed in the exercise of every battali ion of the church militant is likely to prove too skilful a fencer for any of the soldiers of one single regiment, no matter with what care they may have been disciplined. Consider too his personal advantages in combat, the ease with which he can expand himself for a fling, and then the peculiar facilities which nature has bestowed on him to enable him to defy the discharge of his adversary by imitating the hedgehog, in rolling up his little globular corporation, and pointing a bristle at every aggressor. “ The age of chivalry is gone ” said Burke, and really ’tis too bad that we must not only stand the onset of Evangelical knighthood from such disguised tillers as Fidelis Defensor, Fair Play, and A Lover of Liberty, but that we must also endure the shocks of every low menial whom the laws of chivalry expressly prohibit from appearing at the tournament. This appearance of Mr. Vaile at this crisis is rather unpropitious for the cause which he espouses, namely, the free circulation of the Scriptures, and the right of every one to interpret them as he pleases. A man who has travelled round the whole circle of Sectarian belief, even though crammed with texts from the Douay Bible, is a bad exemplification of that text which declares that there is one Lord, one faith, and one baptism. But Mr. Vaile is not the standard height to engage in this conflict; a man whose writing is as hard to be deciphered as the hieroglyphics of Grand Cairo, or the cuneiform characters of Nineveh, must prove anything but an agreeable correspondent to your compositors, Mr. Editor. If Colonel Rawlinson, or Mr. Layard, belonged to the Editorial Staff of the Examiner, they would experience no difficulty in deciphering Mr. Vaile’s cryptography, but for a mere English Editor, who has no pretensions to a knowledge of Oriental literature, to try to make his cabalistical communications intelligible, 1 think is a hopeless taski I trust that Mr. Vaile will imitate that prudent gentleman, the snail, whom he resembles in the color of his coat as well as in the shape of his body, that is having thrust out his horns and found some impediment to his further progress, that he will take a gentle hint and retire into his domicile. He will find that it requires much more breath than be can spare to run over the beaten path of religious controversy —it is not so smooth as that convenient promenade that bears his name, which he managed to construct at the public expence when his friends were in office. As my hand is in, Mr. Editor, I might as well take notice of two other correspondents who have favored us with their animadversions m your Journal of this morning, the former of whom styles himself, Freedom of Religion. Without entering into particulars I must dissent from his general conclusion. The Catholics, and the Catholics of Ireland more particularly, are too sensible of the obligations which they owe to freedom of speech and to the liberty of the press (for that liberty and equality which they now enjoy in conjunction with their fellow subjects of a different faith) to ever even conceive the desire of seeing the powers of either one or the other abridged, and as for the charge of their having formed an alliance with other Sectarians in order to participate of the bounty of the treasury 'tis only partially true, as he may learn from the fact, that the most respectable and independent members of the Catholic community in this City disdain to receive any aid from the Provincial Treasury for the education of their children, having built and endowed a school of their own. And I can inform him of a fact which is most significant of Catholic antipathy to state aid for the support of their Church, that the Catholic members of the Legislature of N,ew South Wales have lately voted against all state aid to religion in any shape. Your third fetter Mr. Editor, signed A Lover of Liberty, seems to smack of Presbyterian starch ; its conclusions are more erroneous than either of the other two, although its writer uses that ingenuity to convince, so peculiar to our clerical sophists. As I cannot spare time to analyze all his casuistry, paragraph by paragraph, I take his main argument which is, “ that the Bible Society being essentially a Protestant institution, and the Governor essentially a Protestant," that his Excellency having been invited by the Committee, was bound to attend. However, he qualifies his affirmation by stating in another place that he might preside as Colonel Gore Brown, without any possibility of giving offence. Is it not strange how soon a schism took place

between the Governor and the Evangelical crew that surrounded him after bis Excellency heard the Report read. He might have thought of the celebrated saying of Marshal Lannes, one of Napowhen he saw the Emperor surrounded by th 6 Cardinals and Legates whom the Pope had sent to setife the terms of the Concordat. If Napoleon had been always surrounded by such troops as these he might have been a Saint in Heaven, but he never would have been an Emperor in this world, and if Colonel Gore Brown had always been surrounded by Monitors of such intolerant principles as some of the Divines of the Auckland Branch of the Bible Society are known to be, Her Majesty’s Government would never have committed to his charge so important a trust as that which he now holds.

His Excellency’s regret at having presided at the Meeting might have befen suggested by the rentembrance of the devotion of the Catholic soldiery to their country’s cause In some well fouglrt field, in which their bravery and loyalty were equally pre-eminent. He might have reflected that Bible sellers are not exactly the sort of troops his mistress, the Queen, would prefer to vindicate her crown if any of its rights were invaded, and although Catholics acknowledge a spiritual allegiance to the Pope, their commanders have never found them deficient in loyalty to their Queen or country ; there is not a field from Vi • iera to Toulouse, from Waterloo to Balaclava, that does not record the heroic daring of Ireland’s Catholic sons. Even in the valley of death, at Inkerman, her heroic Nolan, a Catholic, was the first that fell, and died the foremost, with his country's war cry on his lips. I am, Sir, Yours &c., Bernard Reynolds. March 9th., 1859.