ON ATHEISM.--"I had rather," says Sir Francis Bacon, "believe all the fables in the Legend, the Talmud, and the Koran, than that this universal frame is without a mind. God never wrought miracles to convince Atheists, because His ordinary works are sufficient to convince them. It is true, that a little philosophy inclineth men's minds to Atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth them back to religion; for while the mind of man looketh upon second causes scattered, it may sometimes rest on them, and go no further; but when it beholdeth the chain of them confederate and linked together, it must needs fly to Providence and Deity." [From the London Examiner.] UNSECTARIAN EDUCATION IN ENGLAND. Upon none of the various classes of official men who have been employed for the last twenty years in introducing or extending social and administrative reforms, has a more delicate, invidious, and thankless task devolved, than upon those who have had the charge of the preliminary arrangements for a system of national education. A growing sense of the importance of this great subject has been slowly manifesting itself since the close of last century. The Edgeworths diffused practical views of individual education. Lancaster demonstrated the possibility, by judicious arrangement, of imparting instruction to great numbers of children at once, and, by thus reducing the cost of education, of rendering it acceptable to the poorest. Before Lancaster entered the field some benevolent persons, among whom Nonconformists were the most numerous and active, had set on foot Sunday schools for the benefit of those whose week-day toil left them no leisure for mental cultivation. The High Church and Tory parties at first very bitterly opposed these Sunday and Lancaster schools; but finding the tide too strong against them, they set up Dr. Bell, as a Churchman, against Lancaster the Dissenter, and organized the National School Society in opposition to the British and Foreign School Society. Controversy, as usual, not only increased the numbers of those who took an interest in the discussion, but rectified and improved public opinion on the matters at issue. The _Edinburgh Review_ took the lead, and for a considerable time kept it, as the champion of unsectarian education; and the wit and wisdom of Sydney Smith did invaluable service in this field. The result was, that, very gradually, by means of individuals and private associations, opportunities of education were extended to classes who had not previously enjoyed them; improved methods of tuition were introduced; and the good work went on in an imperfect, scrambling, amorphous way till after the passing of the reform bill, and the establishment of the Whigs in power. From this time we have to date the first regular efforts--poor enough at first, lamentably inadequate still, but steadily and progressively increasing--to countenance and extend general education by the government and legislature.