I have never succeeded in adequately describing to Betsy Jane my feelings under escort to bonds and imprisonment, and perhaps worse; and if I failed in making the wife of my bosom appreciate the horrible anxiety under which I laboured during that walk, I must necessarily fail with the public. Not of course that I was alarmed on my own account, but I felt for my wife and family, and I was all of a tremble for Grubbington parish. Mrs. Starch, I mean Betsy Jane, has, since my return to the 19th century, insisted on my insuring my life. Perhaps had I been at the period of my lapse well insured, I could have faced the tribunal with greater equanimity. I put it plainly to myself,—here I am about to be judged, and perhaps sentenced to suffer excruciating agonies, in behalf of a Christianity which is not at all of my sort, or according to my liking. I am to be, possibly, gutted alive, or impaled, or fried like a herring, or flayed, and rubbed over with pepper and salt,—my nerves being unusually sensitive—all because I am supposed to be a member of a religious community which prays for the dead, uses superstitious ceremonial in the celebration of sacraments, and does not know anything of the principles of the Reformation! Am I prepared to undergo frightful tortures in witness to a faith which tolerates incense, lights, and vestments! Am I to relinquish for ever the prospects of croquet, archery, and other like clerical diversions, by submitting to the rack on behalf of a lot of Christians whose allegiance to the State is more than questionable? Suppose I am gutted, or impaled, or thrown to lions, or roasted on a gridiron, or burned in a tar barrel, what then? My bones or ashes will be collected, and “deposited in peace” in some vault of the catacombs; I shall be a saint, not the Rev. Edward Starch, but S. Edward, P. and M. My remains will be venerated by ignorant crowds of devotees. To these legs of mine will be given idolatrous worship, and a future Pope will, probably, send the severed joints of my backbone to be enshrined in gold in various Roman Catholic Churches in Christendom. My collar-bone may be encrusted in jewels at Toledo, my ganglions in Cracow. My little toes may be borne about by coped ecclesiastics in Austrian processions, and the exposition of my big toes may be the means of preventing a plague in Algiers. Now I may fairly ask myself am I justified in thus affording additional opportunities for the extension of superstition? If I could be quite certain that my relics would be disposed of in an Anglican manner, say, sent to the British Museum, why then the case would be altered. Or again, if I could be tried upon the principles of the Anglican Liturgy and the Thirty-nine Articles, cheerfully would I die, but for a religion which must be abhorrent to all readers of the _Times_, or the _Pall Mall_, or the _Guardian_, in as much as it closely resembles that of the 19th century ritualistic school:— NEVER!