Influences calling themselves religious are tried, and chiefly, all honour be to them, by the evangelicals who, filled with horror at what they hold to be the ultimate fate of such masses, go fearlessly and perseveringly among them, preaching earnestly, if not always rationally, their special tenets. Heaven, as a material place, they still paint in the poetic terms which represented to the Oriental mind the highest spiritual happiness, and is offered as a reward to men imbued with the materialistic spirit of the age, and living coarse and sensual lives. Hell, as a place of physical suffering, is so often threatened that it becomes to many people the most likely thing that they shall go there. The story is perfectly true of the clergyman who, preaching to one of these oft-threatened congregations, tried to show them that sin (according to his explanation removal from God) was hell, and that the awfulness of hell did not consist in being a place where the body would be uncomfortable, but in being a state from which all good and God were absent. Walking behind some of his hearers afterwards, he overheard, ‘Parson says there be’ant no hell, Dick. Where be you and I to go then?’ Imagine feeling homeless because there may be no hell! But even if the talk of hell still awakens some fear and dread, it is again only a material horror--it but exaggerates the importance of the body, and projects into an after-death sphere the selfish animal life already being led. This will not cultivate spirituality. No! religion thus materialised is a dead-letter; it will not feed the spiritual needs of the people. We have forgotten the words of the Divine Teacher about casting pearls before the swine, and the swine have turned again and rent us. As an old Cornish coachman said the other day in answer to a question about the services of a church which we happened to be passing, ‘Ay, yes, there’s a great advance in church activity, no doubt of that, but little in spirituality somehow. The people’s souls have been preached to death.’ The religionists have taught until the people know all and feel nothing; they have talked about religion till it palls in the hearer’s ears. They have blasphemed by asking _pity_ for our Lord’s physical sufferings when His thoughts and being were at _one_ with God; when He was exulting (as only noble souls can faintly conceive of exultation) in His finished work.