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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 77

The Manifestoes

The Manifestoes.

It is no easy task to deal concisely with a general charge of "onesided and unfair treatment" based on our attitude to the keen controversy which centred for three months in the manifestoes and counter-manifestoes of the Roman Catholic Bishops and the Bible-in-Schools Executive. In such a controversy it is almost inevitable that each party should consider that the other has treated it unfairly, and the criticism to which the Post is subjected is but an example of the general rule. We are accused of having described the first manifesto of the Roman Bishops as "in many respects a model of controversial dialectics," though it is said to have been "redolent of insult" to all who differed from the writers on the question of Bible-teaching in the public schools. In writing as we did, we expressed what we believed, and what we still believe, to be the verdict of the great majority of fair-minded critics, but to say that the manifesto was "in many respects a model of controversial dialectics" was not meant to imply, and does not imply, that it was in every respect a model of judicial balance or of controversial good taste or of doctrinal accuracy. We are certainly not concerned to defend every word that it contains, and we studiously refrained from a single syllable that could be considered to have any bearing, one way or the other, upon the doctrinal aspect of the discussion, it is, however, worth pointing out that the "insults" of which the manifesto is declared to be redolent had not, for the most part, the offensive personal turn which is ascribed to them. The present objectors have overlooked the fact, which did not escape the notice of the Bible-in-Schools Executive, that all the imputations of doctrinal bias were levelled at the Victorian Commissioners who compiled the text-book, and not at its champions in New Zealand. On a matter of doctrine the Post could of course take no line, and on the matter of taste, the objectors would feel less aggrieved if they appreciated the distinction referred to.

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As to the converse complaint that the Bible-in-Schools Executive was criticised for the use of such phrases as "cool audacity," "cynic ism," and "malicious falsehood," very little need be said. The objectors urge that the first two of these phrases were more than justified by the facts, and that the third was hypothetical only. The Post expressed no opinion whatever on the accuracy of these charges, but merely urged that such language should be kept out of a controversy in which the subject-matter was religion, and the disputants Christian ministers. The Post is still of that opinion, and the objectors should at least see that the opinion does not touch the merits of their case or the force of their argument, but only the propriety of their phraseology. The question is purely one of taste, upon which it is proverbially useless to dispute. But, in concluding this branch of the subject, it is surely permissible to take some credit for the fact that the worst that can be said of a series of articles spread over several months, and dealing with one of the most controversial subjects of the day, is contained in the charges now made by the party whose side they did not take. No misrepresentation of fact is alleged, no distortion of arguments, no imputation of motives—nothing but a general imputation of bias, from which the critics themselves would not profess to be absolutely free, and a difference on one of those questions of taste upon which the best of men must often agree to differ.

It is perhaps as well to add that a letter sent at the time for insertion in the Post in the usual way would have enabled both criticism and explanation to have attained full publicity weeks ago.