But are we to be satisfied with Arcadian pictures, or to seek to build on solid fact? We repeat Mr. Miall's question--what is the condition of the rural parishes? and for an answer refer, not to Blue Books alone, but to the knowledge of living men. How are 'the men whose whole and sole business it is to take care of the souls' of our villagers discharging their high function? Are they feeding them with the bread of life, or with 'the husks which the swine do eat,' in the shape of superstitious teaching, or of vapid formalism? Is it not in our village parishes that there are to be found the most stolid ignorance and the grossest superstition? Can there not be reckoned up by hundreds parishes in which spiritual deadness and intellectual stagnation are the prevailing characteristics of the population--or where the only ray of light issues from the mission-station of the despised itinerant preacher, and the only mental activity is due to the self-sacrificing efforts of a handful of, perhaps, persecuted Dissenters? These are the kind of questions which will be stirred up by Sir Roundell Palmer's statements, and other recent utterances of the like kind. Those statements are, no doubt, true of certain parishes, and the number of those parishes is, we are glad to believe, increasing; but that they accurately describe the majority of rural parishes we utterly disbelieve, and surprise must not be felt if, henceforth, there is less reticence than there has been in regard to the real working of the Establishment in those districts in which it is now alleged to be the greatest blessing. We have heard of those who represent the world as resting upon the back of a tortoise; and now the case of the English Establishment is based upon the agricultural labourer. Even a journal having so unclerical a bias as the _Pall Mall Gazette_ gravely declares that 'Without the parson of the parish the English parish itself would revert to that barbarism from which it is, even under existing circumstances, not so very distantly removed. The agricultural labourers of this country have been not altogether unjustly described as a class without hope; but whatever chance of kindness or consolation they may have in need, sickness, or the approach of death, depends in the main on the presence and the comparative affluence of the parish clergyman.'