“Has image-worship passed away? Do priests work for the pure love of God, or do they look upon their vocation as a means of making a livelihood more to their taste than some others? Is the priestly office the guerdon of merit and ability? Or is it still the perquisite of those who have money and family influence at command? Do priests exercise universal charity and kindly feeling? Have they given up thinking that none but themselves and a few like-minded individuals will be allowed to enter Heaven? Do they feel as much reverence for goodness in the lowly, as they do for grandeur in high places? Do they discourage the presence in their churches of disreputable persons, if these persons happen to be rich, and are able to be used as pecuniary aids? In a word, are the churches possessed of truly Christ-like qualities, without which none can be a Christian?” John Saville had by this time worked himself into a perfect glow of enthusiasm, while I certainly felt correspondingly humiliated, for I was not in a position to return an affirmative answer to all his questions. Did I not remember seeing a man who had not thrown off the effects of the previous night’s intoxication officiating in a prominent position, with the priest’s approval, in one of our Established churches? Have I not witnessed many another instance of priestly tolerance of evil for Mammon’s sake? Have I not recently met with a specimen of clerical intolerance which would do credit to the religious persecutors of old? Candidates for confirmation are requested to confess their crimes to themselves, and to turn from the error of their ways, before they can consider themselves fit to take their stand as Christians. The sins and crimes are presented to the eyes of the penitents in the form of printed questions, and one of these questions runs thus: “Have you ever entered a _Dissenting Chapel_?” I saw this myself in the year 1889, and was compelled now to admit the conviction that to discard Christ and to discard Christianity may be two very different things. It seemed marvellous, when I came to think of it, how a thinking people like the New Amazonians should, after all these ages, have singled out Christ as the one pure and shining light of earth, so godlike as to be worthy of being at once translated to companionship with the Giver of Life, seeing that His professed devotees have, since the earliest times of the Church, done more to bring His cause into disrepute than all His enemies. “You admit yourself worsted?” smiled Mr. Saville. “I confess as much,” I replied. “But how comes it that you, a man, should so enthusiastically uphold the only Constitution in the world which has, so far as I know, successfully resisted man’s striving for supremacy?”