Ballast and Sail

'Men of solid and sober nature,' says Bacon, 'have more of the ballast than of the sail.' In the discussion of moral subjects, principles are of more value than wind-power; and an ounce of exposition is worth more than a ton of declamation. The Wahhabee Arabs (according to Lane) regard smoking as the next worst crime to wilful murder. Some of the Councils of the Churches seem to put art-unions in the same place in the moral order as the puritannical Moslems place the witching weed. That is their own affair. But it becomes our affair when they begin to set up a barrier to our liberty in regard to this or any such point of human conduct. We are then entitled to demand by what authority they paint up 'No Thoroughfare' upon a road which the vast majority of Christians regard as free and open. We could respect the Council of the Churches—even though we might not agree with them—if they showed their parchments; if they quoted chapter and verse of the divine law which (they say) bars our way; if they set forth in plain terms, and defended by fact and argument, the moral principles which (they contend) damn the church lottery as a 'vicious practice' and a deadly sin. Such a course would be a fair appeal to intellect and conscience. But it is precisely the course which has not commended itself to the Wellington Council of Churches—nor, so far as we are aware, to any cognate body of 'reformers' in New Zealand. We could even understand and appreciate their position if they recommended or exhorted us, in a Christian and fraternal way, to refrain from lotteries as a counsel of perfection—just as they might urge their congregations to refrain from flesh-meat or barley-bree. page 5 Even to delinquents—and much more to accused who are not conscious of any delinquency—kind words are as 'apples of gold on beds of silver,' or as 'a concert of music in a banquet of wine.' But the Wellington 'councillors' made it deplorably clear that their object was not to conciliate or convince, but to exasperate; not to appeal to reason and conscience, but to religious passion. Hence their ready resort to hard names, and question-begging epithets, and unproved assumptions—crowned by a preposterous falsehood as to the 'unanimity of moralists' of other sections of the Christian Church 'in their favor. Why, they were not even able to secure 'unanimity' at their own little meeting! By necessary inference, too, they claim acquaintance with the works of all those 'moralists'—a feat which alone would merit them a monument lofty enough to rake the stars out of the sky. The methods of our Wellington critics are those of the brawler, not of the reformer.