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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 27

[sub-leader of the Age]

For the purpose of comparison I republish the sub-leader of the Age of the above date:—

"The very best cause may suffer from the character of its advocates; and we are satisfied that the cause of a free Sabbath is being very seriously injured by the injudicious people who bring forward Mr. Thomas Walker as one of its champions. It is the grossest insult that can be offered to men like Bishop Moorhouse and the Rev. Chas. Strong to find such a man placed shoulder to shoulder with them in the controversy. Mr. Walker is only known as a sort of Infidel Cheap John, who carries about with him wherever he goes a wallet full of scraps of Voltaire, Volney and Tom Paine, and is prepared to prove to any-body who will listen to him that he was consulted at the making of the creation, and is perfectly familiar with all its secrets. "Having flown over many" knavish professions, "Autolycus tells us that he finally settled in that of rogue as the most profitable of all. Mr. Walker is not Autolycus, of course; but he is almost as much favored by fortune, for he finds people ready to pay for hearing his ribaldry and flattering his egotism as easily as that famous snapper-up of unconsidered trifles found yokels to buy his extravagant stories about fishes singing songs a hundred fathoms above the level of the sea, and usurers' wives being brought to bed of money bags. From figuring as a trance lecturer in the interests of Spiritualism, he now takes the platform as an avowed opponent of everything spiritual, turns upon his former friends with the usual violence of the renegade, and admits that he is an impostor by teaching down the things that he once taught up. That he should be able to gather an audience about him in such a city as Melbourne has always struck us as a circumstance of very unhappy augury. A moment's consideration should tell any thinking man or woman that the themes which he handles with such pertness and audacity have puzzled and outwitted all the commanding intellects of the day, and that problems which Spencer and Huxley and Tyndall have retired from in despair are not likely to be solved by a pinchbeck Bradlaugh, for whom the kangaroo and the savage have only just made room. page 2 Outside and behind the phenomena of nature there is a Power "absolutely inscrutable to the intellect of man; and as little in our day as in the days of Job can men by searching find this power out, "says the last named physicist, with true philosophic humility; but the philosopher of the Melbourne Opera House, unillumined by a single gleam of reflection, backs himself to prove right off that there is no such Power at all, and the universe can be explained without it. There cannot be a doubt that a large number of people who look upon the Sabbath question with sufficient coolness to take no active part one way or the other would recoil with horror at the thought of being suspected of sympathy with a cause of which a person like this Mr. Walker appears to be accepted as a champion. They would be goaded at once into active hostility to the side that espoused him, and we do not see how anybody could blame them. Excellent Christians and churchmen are found in abundance to declare for opening the Library and Picture Galleries to the public on a Sunday, and only a fool or a bigot can see any anti Christian feeling therefore in the agitation. But it is a very different thing when an avowed hawker of secondhand Infidel wares of the Walker type is given a prominent place among the agitators. Everybody knows what the motive of his hostility to the Sabbath of the Bible is, and his appearance in the field is properly regarded as an attempt to advertise himself and his business. Our own efforts have been anxiously directed to the preservation of a reverential attitude in the discussion, and above all things to prevent it from getting into the hands of charlatans and coxcombs. The movement is ostensibly set on foot for the benefit of the working classes, and it is most undesirable that they should be led to regard it in an irreligious spirit, or as a covert attack upon Christianity. As long as they have the arguments and opinions of men like Bishop Moorhouse and the Rev. Chas. Strong to guide and inform their efforts, there is no danger of such a catastrophe. Christians of the type that are rapidly bringing Christianity to mingle itself in the sisterly embrace of Philosophy, may be safely trusted to expose the tricks of the sophisters and mountebanks who trade upon the ignorance of the masses, as Autolycus did upon the witless clowns and sheep boys of Bohemia. We do not want to have Mr. Thomas Walker gagged, because this is a free country, and every man has a right to talk as much nonsense as he can get his neighbors to swallow; but for goodness' sake let no one run away with the impression that Mr. Walker, who was a Spiritualist yesterday, is an Atheist to-day and may be a Jumper tomorrow, is in any way a recognised agent or spokesman for the Sunday Society.

In answer to the above charges and imputations, I, the same day, delivered the following reply at the Age office:—