While at New Orleans I heard Dr. Beckwith, the Bishop elect of Georgia. His church is about a mile and a half from the St. Charles’s Hotel, in one of the best suburbs of the city. In going I asked a gentleman, who was seated next to me in the street car, the way. He replied that he was one of the doctor’s congregation, and would be my guide. This led to some conversation; he said ‘that of late years, in New Orleans and elsewhere in the States, the Episcopal Church had begun to exert itself, and was now doing wonders in bringing people into its communion.’ I told him that only a few days before I had seen it stated in an editorial of a New York paper, ‘that the Episcopal Church was now quite the church of the best society in the United States; and that if one wished to get into good society, it was wise to join this communion.’ He replied ‘that statements of this kind read well in newspapers, and that of course there were some people who could be influenced by such considerations; but that in his opinion the most effective reasons for attracting people to the Episcopal Church was the character of the Church itself, and of those who did belong and had belonged to it. It was an historical church, with a grand theological literature of its own, and that, indeed, almost the whole literature of England appeared to belong to the Episcopal Church; and it had, which he thought the most potent reason of all, a definite creed and a dignified ritual.’ Dr. Beckwith’s congregation consisted of about a thousand very well-dressed people. As is usual everywhere in Episcopal churches in America, there was an offertory; and I saw, as its pecuniary result, four large velvet dishes piled full of greenbacks, placed in the hands of the three officiating clergymen. Nobody gives less than a quarter of a dollar note. The Bishop elect preached. He is a very good-looking, able, and eloquent man. He ridiculed the idea of a ‘psalm-singing’ eternity, and affirmed that the possession of knowledge would be an immeasurably nobler means of happiness. But if we concede this, there will still remain the question whether the exercise of the feelings of the heart would not confer on the majority of the human race far more happiness than the exercise of the powers of the intellect. I looked into another large Episcopal church on my way to Dr. Beckwith’s, and found in it several young men teaching Sunday classes.