The sin was charged, the appeal pressed, only on the preacher's undergraduate hearers. Beneath the gallery, the Heads of Houses sate, remorseless; nor from the pulpit was a single hint permitted that any measures could be rationally taken for the protection, no less than the warning, of the youth under their care. No such suggestion would have been received, if even understood, by any English congregation of this time;--a strange and perilous time, in which the greatest commercial people of the world have been brought to think Usury the most honorable and fruitful branch, or rather perennial stem, of commercial industry. 177. But whose the fault that English congregations are in this temper, and this ignorance? The saying of mine,[133] which the author of this book quotes in the close of his introduction, was written by me with a meaning altogether opposite, and far more forcible, than that which it might seem to bear to a careless interpreter.[134] In the present state of popular revolt against all conception and manner of authority, but more especially spiritual authority, the sentence reads as if it were written by an adversary of the Church,--a hater of its Prelacy,--an advocate of universal liberty of thought and license of crime: whereas the sentence is really written in the conviction (I might say knowledge, if I spoke without deference to the reader's incredulity) that the Pastoral Office must forever be the highest, for good or evil, in every Christian land; and that when _it_ fails in vigilance, faith, or courage, the sheep _must_ be scattered, and neither King nor law avail any more to protect them against the fury of their own passions, nor any human sagacity against the deception of their own hearts. 178. Since, however, these things are instantly so, and the Bishops of England have now with one accord consented to become merely the highly salaried vergers of her Cathedrals, taking care that the choristers do not play at leapfrog in the Churchyard, that the Precincts are elegantly iron-railed from the profane parts of the town, and that the doors of the building be duly locked, so that nobody may pray in it at improper times,--these things being so, may we not turn to the "every-man-his-own-Bishop" party, with its Bible Society, Missionary zeal, and right of infallible private interpretation, to ask at least for some small exposition to the inhabitants of their own country, of those Scriptures which they are so fain to put in the possession of others; and this the rather, because the popular familiar version of the New Testament among us, unwritten, seems to be now the exact contrary of that which we were once taught to be of Divine authority. 179. I place, side by side, the ancient and modern versions of the seven verses of the New Testament which were the beginning, and are indeed the heads, of all the teaching of Christ:-- _Ancient._ Blessed are the Poor in Spirit, for their's is the kingdom of Heaven.