We have allowed most fully the plea of how little time, _comparatively_, could be afforded to the concern of mental improvement by the lower classes from their indispensable employments; and also that of the consequent fatigue, causing a temporary incapacity of effort in any other way. But this latter plea cannot be admitted without great abatement in the case of our neglected _young_ people of the working classes; for when we advert to their actual habits, we see that, nevertheless, time, strength, and wakefulness, and spring and spirit for exertion, _are_ found for a vast deal of busy diversion, much of it blended with such folly as tends to vice. If such is the manner in which the spare time of the week-days goes to waste and worse, the Sunday is welcomed as giving scope for the same things on a larger scale. It is very striking to consider, that several millions, we may safely assert, of our English people, arrived at what should be years of discretion, are almost completely destitute of any manner of conscience respecting this seventh part of time; not merely as to any required consecration of it to religion, but as to its being under any claim or of any worth at all, otherwise than for amusement. It is actually regarded by them as a section of time far less under obligation than any other. They take it as so absolutely at their free disposal, by a right so exclusively vested in their taste and will, that a demand made even in behalf of their own most important interests, is contemptuously repelled as a sanctimonious impertinence. If the idea occurs at all (with multitudes it never does) of claims which they have heard that God should make on the hours, it is dismissed with the thought that it really cannot signify to him how creatures, condemned by his appointment to toil all the rest of the week, may wish to spend this one day, on which the secular taskmaster manumits them, and He, the spiritual one, might surely do as much. An immense number pay no attention whatever to any sort of religious worship; and many of those that do give an hour or two to such an observance, do so, some of them as merely a diversification of amusement, and the others by way of taking a license of exemption from any further accountableness for the manner in which they may spend the day. It is the natural consequence of all this, that there is more folly, if not more crime, committed on this than on all the other six days together.