It is perhaps to be doubted whether any Churchman, no matter how distinguished, learned, fashionable or popular, has the right to call London or any city which is under the Christian dispensation “pagan.” No one man can honestly say he has probed the heart of another,--and if this be true, as it undoubtedly is, still less can one man assume to judge the faith or the emotions of six million hearts--six million striving, working and struggling souls. That even a handful of the six million should still wander towards “fairy lamp” Churches, in the hope to find warmth and luminance for their poor lives in such flickering and easily quenched sparks of life, speaks volumes for the touching faith, the craving hope, the desire of ultimate good, which animates our “pagan” citizens. For, if after two thousand years of Christianity, some of them are still passionately asking to be taught and guided, still praying for strength and courage to fight against many natural besetting sins, and still seeking after such pure ideals of work and attainment as can alone make life worth living, it is not they, surely, who merit the term “pagan.” They should not be so much blamed as compassionated, if, when searching for God’s fair and open sunshine, they only stumble at the “fairy lamps,” and, angered thereby, turn altogether away into the outer darkness. Such a term as “pagan” can be applied with far more justice to their teachers and preachers, who, having all the means of help and consolation at their disposal, fail to perform their high duties with either power, conviction or effect. It is quite easy to say “Pagan London,” but what if one spoke of “pagan clergy”? What of certain ecclesiastics who do not believe one word of the creed they profess, and who daily play the part of Judas Iscariot over again in taking money for a new betrayal of Christ? What of the ordained ministers of Christianity who are un-Christian in every word and act of their daily lives? What of the surpliced hypocrites who preach to others what they never even try to practise? What of certain vicious and worldly clerical _bon-vivants_, who may constantly be met with in the houses of wealthy and titled persons, “clothed in fine linen and faring sumptuously every day,” talking unsavoury society scandal with as much easy glibness as any dissolute “lay” decadent that ever cozened another man’s wife away from the path of honour in the tricky disguise of a “Soul”? What of the spiteful, small-minded, quarrelsome “local” parsons, who, instead of fostering kindness, neighbourliness, goodwill and unity among their parishioners, set them all by the ears, and play the petty tyrant with a domineering obstinacy which is rather worse than pagan, being purely barbarous? Many cases could easily be quoted where the childish, not to say querulous, pettiness of the ruling vicar of a country parish has helped to narrow, coarsen, and deteriorate the spirit of a whole community,