How comes it to pass that in these days the pulpit of the Establishment has failed to be this? Mr. Christmas, a clergyman of the Established Church, in a volume recently published, seeks to answer this question. To use his own language, “the author had long felt that through some cause or other the Church had not secured that hold on the attention of the multitude without which her ministration could be but partially effective.” Why, even in these few lines we see a reason of the failure which Mr. Christmas mourns. Clergymen live in a world of their own, and will not look at facts as worldly men are compelled to do. Now, as a matter of fact, the Church of England is not the church, but merely a section of the church; and yet you cannot go into an episcopalian place of worship but you hear what the church says—what the church holds—what the church commands—when common sense tells every one that the speaker is merely referring to the Establishment in England, and that even if he were appealing to the custom and tradition of that body of believers which, in all countries and ages, constitutes the church, the inquiry is of little consequence after all—the appeal, in reality, being to the Bible, and the Bible alone, which, in the well-worn language of Chillingworth, is the religion of Protestants. Thus is it so much preaching in the Church of England fails to reach and attract the masses. The ministers will deal in fictions—will exclaim, “Hear the church”—will wander away from topics of human interest into questions with which the educated (and still more the uneducated) mind has no sympathy. The middle-class public go to hear—for it is the genteel thing to go to church—but they sit silent, passive, exhausted by the long preliminary service, wearied, and unmoved. What wonder is it that the more independent and manly—the men who do not fear Mrs. Grundy—who are not afraid of conventionalisms, either stop at home, or leave the Establishment for the more living service of dissent? Mr. Christmas observes:—“Few will venture to say that the style of preaching most valued among nonconformists is inferior to that heard from the pulpits of the Establishment.” The reason is not far to seek: dissent has no ancient prestige to plead; dissent has no rich endowment to fall back on; dissent lives on and is strong in spite of the cold shade of aristocracy, or of the sneer of the bigot or the fool; dissent depends upon the pulpit. If that be weak and cold, and dull and dim, dissent melts like snow beneath the warm breath of the south. Dissent reminds us more than the Establishment of the earlier period of Christianity, of the Carpenter’s Son who had not where to lay his head; whose apostles were fishermen, and whose kingdom, to use His own emphatic declaration, “was not of this world.” The public mind is shocked and estranged when it hears the Chancellor of the Exchequer, as he did the other day, defending