In proposing to have the Pleasure Grounds of the new Crystal Palace thrown open during one half of the Lord’s-day, you involved yourself in a responsibility which no one called upon you to incur, except a small body of railway speculators, and a few theoretic and practical rejectors of the commandments of the Most High. Your coadjutors and instigators are those who never allow a word of Scripture to stand in the way of their views, their pleasures, their prejudices, or their love of gain. It has become popular of late years for prime ministers “to do evil that good may come.” The Maynooth grant was asked for by few. The Catholics themselves did not want it. There has rarely been a measure which met with such unanimous opposition; but still it was carried—_most tyrannically_ carried—in defiance of the voice of the nation: and, how has it worked? The believers in Roman Catholicism knew that it was intended as a bribe, and therefore an insult; and have resolved that they will not be converted into spiritual chattels, or have their zeal quenched or consciences silenced by Government pay. The money was taken from our pockets to purchase state patronage for the premier and his partisans, but the artifice has proved a perfect failure, for the followers of _Pio Nono_ have shown that they are not to be bought. Your measure, my Lord, concerning the Sabbath is as perfectly gratuitous as the Maynooth scheme. I. In wishing to grant a charter for the violation of the Lord’s-day, you, my Lord, tried to play the same game as your predecessors. The profit of a small company of railway kings was the chief thing sought; and to obtain their smile, you were willing to risk the favour of the King of Kings, to endanger the morals of the country, and consequently the Throne, the Constitution, and the Church; and you were also setting yourself in an attitude of defiance against the best and most patriotic of your countrymen. There might, my Lord, have been boldness in this effort of yours to undermine the Sabbath and trample upon the consciences of the majority of the nation, but the infatuation was equal to the courage. You have long been ambitious of power. The deep and settled opinion in your own mind for a long time has been, that both as a profoundly wise and apostolically religious man, you, my Lord, and you alone, were the _only_ person in the realm qualified to guide the affairs of this great empire. Your Lordship has for some years put yourself forward as the bulwark of the Church and of pure Christianity. All persons who differed from you have been viewed as heretics and sinners exceedingly; and you are, according to your own showing, a model saint, the moral hero and spiritual Wellington of religion and the Bible; and yet, after all these high pretensions, no sooner were you in power than your first effort on behalf of Christianity was to announce to the country that you were about to set the authority of your royal mistress