A large concourse of people flocked on this day to Ely House Chapel, to hear the Bishop’s Thanksgiving sermon; which was preached from the text,――‘Let them give thanks whom the Lord hath redeemed and delivered from the hand of the enemy,’ Psalm cvii. 2. The ‘Holbourn’ congregation had to listen to a highly-spiced discourse. Indeed, the prevailing taste of all the discourses was a sharp attack on Popery, its ends, and its cruelty in establishing and maintaining them. The Bishop, Fleetwood, stated that, had the rebellion been successful, London would have seen the slaughter of the whole of the royal family, in order to have no other but a Popish succession possible. The most mischievous and calumnious party cry that he had heard was ‘The Church in danger!’ ‘I have lived myself,’ he said, ‘in and about this city, six or seven and twenty years, and been as careful and diligent an observer how things went with relation to the Church, as I could.’ The prelate declared that neither in William’s nor Queen Anne’s reign, nor in the existing one, had there been the slightest foundation for the cry. There was no such cry during the last three or four years of Queen Anne’s reign, because there were men then in power at Saint James’s ‘some of the greatest of whom are now actually in the service of the Pretender.’ When the bishop alluded to the unhappy persons who had suffered for their active Jacobitism, he let drop words which, somewhat strange, perhaps, as coming from a Christian prelate, enable us to see into some of the practice of London hitherto unknown. ‘The marvellous compassion, the strange and hitherto unpractised charity of public prayers and tears bestowed upon the few State Criminals that have fallen of late, by the hands of Law and Justice, this new and unusual tenderness, I say, was shown rather for their sufferings than their sins, by such as approve their cause.’ [Sidenote: _KING GEORGE’S RIGHT TO THE THRONE._] Nothing was more clear than the king’s statement, published soon after his accession,――that he had succeeded to the crown of his ancestors. His hereditary right was there proclaimed. The bishop, in his sermon, told his hearers of many ways in which the king did _not_ ascend the throne. Among them is this: ‘Nor did he come by what they call Hereditary Right.’ The king was called, according to the prelate, by the Nation represented in a free Parliament, ‘not,’ he quaintly remarked, ‘not by gratitude for any benefits or service past.… He was called to the Throne by all the Nation, King and Parliament; and also afterwards by _Queen_ and Parliament, if that will please some people better.’ When the congregation dispersed, Ely Place was resonant with the diverse comments such passages were calculated to elicit. The press was as active as the pulpit, but not exactly in the same way. [Sidenote: _A NONJURING CLERGYMAN, TO BE WHIPT._]