towards progress, because all sides, while catering for that popularity, unbacked by which all their efforts will be futile, will find it their interest to advocate at least a minimum measure of justice and increase of political and civil liberty to the masses. But amid this crash of creeds, let no fond and confiding friend of progress think his cause can advance without exciting their ire, indignation, or calumny-not a bit of it. To use a homely simile, religious quarrels are precisely analogous to those between a man and his wife, who, it is said, however much they may privately wrangle, immediately an enemy appears, at once patch up their differences and attack the foe in concert. Take an instance from that veracious print, the Watchman, who, refering to Mr. Fox's Bill for National Secular Education, says- We have taken pains to acquaint ourselves not only with the Bill itself, but with the known and avowed sentiments of its promoters, that we may form a correct judgment of its character;' and then, as if to give the lie to its own statements of its careful examinations, proceeds to say the Bill is anything except what the Bill propounds itself to be, and treats its readers to its own views of certain ulterior objects, which, it says, its promoters possess, and indulges in the usual scurrilities of religious prints as to infidelity and so on, which our readers will readily comprehend without further quotation. Now, in the division of religious parties before alluded to, there has started from what was once a united camp, a paper named the Wesleyan Times, and respecting the very article from which we have quoted, they have a rejoinder to the Watchman that says all we could say on the subject, and illustrates how much the cause of progress is promoted by theological squabbles. The article runs thus:-'It is but poor evidence of one man's piety that he dubs every other man who holds opinions different from his own an infidel, and it is a very equivocal manifestation of the character of a religious system that it, in all uncharitableness, shouts godless to everything differing from it.' Now in what this infidelity consists-except good sound education, independent of theology, be infidelity-we are rather at a loss to discover. Supposing Mr. Fox's Bill to be an echo of the Lancashire system-which it is not in several main points-is there anything like infidelity in what they propose to teach? The following quotation, which is from their published prospectus, shall answer:-"The children in the day schools shall be instructed in reading, grammar, writing, arithmetic, geography, and such other kinds of useful secular education as the growing intelligence of the people may demand; in addition to these a sacred regard to truth, justice, kindness, and forbearance in our intercourse with our fellow-creatures, temperance, frugality, industry, and all other virtues conducive to the right ordering of practical conduct in the affairs of life.' Now it surely does not require us to deny that the above is infidelity, and is quite sufficient evidence that any plans likely to foster or promote or produce intelligence will meet with opposition from any sect; in fact, all sects in this particular are in unison as in their hatred to Catholicism. They are not

particular what they say; their rabidness is exhibited in their want of logic-they respect not character, facts, or statistics: in fact, like Malays, they run a muck, and cut and hack at progress under whatever form they discover it. Take another instance to show how far-fetched and pointless are some of their sayings. A reverend gentleman is the perpetrator, and he endeavours to turn the very natural prejudice of man to pauperism as a justification for his endeavour to enlist the sympathies of the unthinking into opposition to a measure for the education of the masses. The rev. gentleman, after eulogising the independence of the people of this country, concluded his desultory speech thus:-' He had often admired their (the people's) independence of character, but this Bill went directly to subvert that independence; he objected to it because of its tendency to pauperism. The poor and destitute were now enabled to go and obtain relief from the parish because they had paid their rates and belonged to it, and now by Mr. Fox's Bill they were told to go and say, I have paid my education rate, and I claim to have my child educated by the parish.' May we also suppose a case-tithes, for instance, or church rates, Easter dues, Lent offerings, first fruits, and the thousand other disguises under which the class, of which the reverend gentleman in question forms a part, abstracts the bread and marrow of the industrious, whether believer or unbeliever. Are not the recipients of the above paupers ? Are they not to be muzzled because of the labourer being worthy of his hire, and so on? Is the working man only to be muzzled? Clergy ask for tithes are still to be considered gentlemen; peasants ask to have their children educated, and are to be considered paupers but we tell them they are playing a dangerous game. It is the national interest that every person should have the means of education, and when the State provides the means, the recipients are not paupers, because it is for the national good; but when against the will of the majority all sects are taxed and made to support a religious system adverse to their own, that is injustice, the recipients are then paupers, and the system will some day come tumbling about their ears.

Now, however theology may wrangle, their eyes are fully open to the steady advance of free thought in religion. They battle stoutly, and even make advances, as in the case of the Bishop of Exeter maintaining the efficacy of baptism to consist in the ordinance itself, independent of merit or worthiness in the individual. Similar attempts are observable elsewhere, in the tactics of which the Vicar of Leigh is an illustration, who endeavour, to forbid matrimony to those who have not been confirmed. And again, on the opposition to any alteration in the marriage laws, not because it is morally wrong, not because the results would tend to deteriorate the physical or intellectual powers of the nation, but because it is supposed to have been forbidden in the Bible-and beyond the limits and lines there laid down some people seem determined not to advance, how ever the wants, necessities, and aspirations of the age may pant for progression. The North British Review

for February, in commencing an article on this subject, illustrates the proverb 'harm watch harm catch,' for to suppose the advocates of this measure (or any measure of progress) argue or think from principle, seems never to be among the most distant or visionary of their conceptions. No, those who have for ages lived and fattened upon the system, who have step by step opposed inquiry, freedom, and progress, are the only persons who can be disinterested. Those who have suffered under the system, but who still wish to have no alteration or changes without discussion and investigation, and who even then are ready and foolish enough perhaps to pay for the abdication of usurped privileges, as they did the twenty millions for the suppression of the slave trade-they are the persons whom the clergy vituperate, insult, and bully. What says the reviewer ?- Mr. Stuart Wortley, the champion of this cause (marriage with a deceased wife's sister), indicated his intentions before the close of last sessions, and apart from his own zeal, there is a knot, or clique, of interested individuals too watchful to allow his intention to sleep.' Then again, in alluding to the agitation in the country on the subject, he says, 'The entire conduct of the affair has all the marks of a hole and corner, nay, an almost clandestine mode of action.' Precisely similar is the argument used by the Bishop of Exeter in his late most remarkable letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury. In a tone of reproach he says, 'Why do you have recourse to such a record of the sins and follies of some early Christians? Why do you send your readers to the pages of an infidel historian, and to that very portion of his work of which almost every sentence is a sneer against our holy faith? Why give authority to his infidel second-hand exaggerated statements, by making them your evidence of a fact, which the Fathers of the Church sufficiently avouch while they deplore,' and so on. So that it is plain there are truths abroad likely to shake the sentiments of the public not only as to the amount of authority the church possesses on matters theological, but probably as to the truth or fable of the actual doctrines and statements on which Christianity itself is founded. Truth requires no mystery-a prognostication of the return of a comet, or the occurrence of an eclipse, or the precise moment of high water in any given locality, are matters never controverted by investigation: on the contrary, the truth of the fact is demonstrated, but when any system requires this author to be blinked, the other not to be read, another to be published with certain (what they are pleased to term) objectionable passages omitted, that system must not only be rotten, but the fact cannot be disguised that its partizans know and feel it to be rotten, and that investigation and discussion will not do at all for it. The same facts are exhibited in what is termed the Methodistic life. Sincere, honest, and worthy men enlist the sympathies and love of those equally sincere and confiding; a system is evolved which in time makes the confiding many but the vassals and serfs of the priesthood. Progress, in its onward march, repudiates any special credence to the tenets of any individual, and proceeds to analyse and investigate the

authorities. This will not do for Methodist priests any more than it will for Roman or episcopalian; they follow in the same track as far as they dare in the nineteenth century: but what is the effect ? the wise, the good, the free, rejoice that they are persecuted, and the love of justice and fair play of the masses raises the persecuted to a higher pinnacle of prosperity and fame than they ever before enjoyed, or ever could have possessed. But let them beware how they ascribe this devotion to any love of, or absolute belief in, their creeds and dogmas, or any motive but the indestructible love of justice, rectitude, and freedom, that is natural to all men.

But the fact most significant of the spirit of the age and most pregnant with great results is the splitting of sections in theological bodies, which causes the enunciation of principles of progress, and secures the advocacy of men who, as martyrs and persons who have sacrificed their interests to their convictions, must give weight to such opinions as they hold, and the holding of which incapacitates them from holding offices in their various churchesand must correspondingly deteriorate and detract from the idea of infallibility with which the clergy would fain surround religious systems. Such men as Newman, Froude, and Foxton, who hold and avow the opinions they do, must strengthen the cause of free thought. But independent of the class who still hold the idea of the Bible being the basis of religious truth, merely considering it should be made to assimilate with the wants and advancements of the age, there is another and a large class who believe that what is good in the Bible has existed from, and is coeval with, the existence of man on this planet. This is a large class; it is composed of men, intelligent, deeply read, industrious and persevering in their examinations, and unceasing in their endeavours to publish the results of their convictions to their fellow men. Their fault (if fault it be) has been the necessity (philosophically speaking) of holding, concurrent with their ideas of right and wrong (which Is religion), an alteration in social economy-which is called communism, and is hated without knowing what it is, as in the palmy days of George III. the people of this country were taught to hate a Frenchman merely because he was a Frenchman—which revolution in the social views necessarily lays down, as its first principle, the equality of all men, which has compelled the advocates of liberal theological views also to hold political ones adverse to the interests of the powers that be. And this portion of their tenets has led to the idea, in unreflecting minds, that a freethinker is necessarily a republican, an atheist, and a socialist. Fully granting that if he be it is no crime, and that many are all these, still it does not necessarily follow. But as there exists a prejudice against them, it is adroitly used by the advocates of existing abuses, as a bugbear to frighten mankind from the use of their intellect, and to give a sanctity to those decaying institutions under which they have flourished amid the desolation that has annually been the mental and physical annihilation of the blind supporters of the system. The peculiar phase of the present religious appearances is that man is gradually pre

paring and qualifying himself to use that power, that self-government that is his inherent right. What a glorious era in the annals of history, that after years of tyranny and misrule in a country where there were but 200,000 voters and 300,000 placemen, on obtaining supreme power, the national voice forbade the punishment of death for political crimes. So in this country, in spite of the interested opposition of priestcraft, education and the enlightenment of the masses are working-slowly, it may be, but certainly-towards that consummation of freedom, political, social, and religious, to which the good and the great of all ages have looked forward as the realisation of their hopes, and the reward for the sacrifices they have made.

This article would be manifestly imcomplete without a short survey of the materials for future campaigns, as developed at the annual meetings of the religious bodies during May. As usual, the whole month has been absorbed with them, and pretty hard work it must have been for some of the parties who seem to be principals at all the meetings. On the whole, they do not seem to have had this year the oneness or the concentration formerly to be observed. There seems to have reigned a despondency-an unspoken dread, among the promoters, of something that might ooze out that would damage the collections. In fact, at two of these meetingss-one presided over by Lord Harrowby, the other by Fox Maule-amendments were proposed, which it was considered advisable to decline to receive; the chairmen seemingly having no hesitation to play the tyrant even for the brief space of a day. The attempt to suppress free speech at a public meeting, owing to the efficiency of the fourth estate (the press), has been bruited far and near, and doubtless heard with much grief by those friends of real religion who, being honest and sincere themselves, fancy their spiritual guides are equally disinterested-and who cannot conceive that there is ought to be blinked in their respective systems. Amiable confidence, it is true, but we fear misplaced. As regards infidelity, so called, if the statements made at the meetings be true, and the parties ought to know, it is in a very flourishing condition, and seems, by its progress, to be an everlasting satire upon Christian efforts. Did their cause manifest the same steady advance, both as to numbers and intelligence, they would detect at once the hand of God in it. As it is, they detect only the disinclination of their followers to have their hands dipped in their pockets so frequently. But it may be the threat is only used as a sort of theological Frankenstein, by the instrumentality of which their benighted followers seem to cash up freely enough. One society boasts of having distributed a million of Bibles; still, infidelity increases, and more money must be raised for more Bibles. They assert so strongly that the spread of Bibles is a necessity, if the cause of God is to go on, that, true, it is rather singular that by some miracle, like the few loaves and fishes that fed a multitude, a large lot of Bibles are not miraculously made for their use. And if done, if fair wages were paid by the same means to the starving Bible-producers, it would considerably add to the merit of the