There are few exceptions to the general rule, that the industrious man is the virtuous. "By the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread," is the universal decree of Nature; and every violator of this law of health shall be unhappy in the precise ratio of its violation. Hence it follows that when men are compelled either to be idle vagrants, or give up their minds mechanically to a worship which appears to them at once useless and irrational, they cannot do otherwise than prefer the former; and being thus compelled to be idle, they are virtually forced to be vicious, which leads to the reverse of happiness. The profligacy and crime arising from this weekly idleness, is amply set forth in those scenes of drunkenness, debauchery, gaming, and quarrelling, which are of constant Sunday occurrence in our beer and gin palaces: but as the various poisons vended in these sinks of ruin pay high duties to government, and are, next to its oppressive ally, a rapacious priesthood, the surest means of keeping the multitude in poverty and ignorance, that virtuous and salutary legislation which would suppress or regulate them according to public health and good morals, is not to be expected from our present lawgivers, aristocratical and clerical, who feel a deep interest in the ignorance and debasement of the laboring classes. The orthodox Paley, who "_could not afford to keep a conscience_" alludes to such places of public resort, when he says, "the laboring classes" (being doomed to idleness) "consume their time in rude, if not criminal pleasures--in stupid sloth or brutish intemperance." He might have added, that vast numbers of young men who have ended their career by an ignominious death, have dated the commencement of their vicious courses from what the pampered harpies in black are pleased to call "sabbath breaking," or "profanation of the Lord's day." And who is to blame for all this? Verily none but that powerful phalanx of hypocritical delusionists, who pretend to be delegated from the immaterial, invisible "Persons," who rule the upper regions; and who, in confederacy with hereditary lawgivers on earth, have, amongst other conventional impositions, not only deprived the wealth producers of their right to spend the seventh part of their time in the way most suitable to their circumstances, but enforced idleness during that time, which, coupled with that lurid ignorance called religious instruction, most commonly leads to vice and debasement. With a dissimulation and effrontery that is matchless out of the sacerdotal order, they pretend an interest in the laboring man's ease and welfare; that he requires the seventh as a day of rest, which day should be dedicated to the "Lord" but as their Levitical authorities are derived from the rankest species of priestcraft that ever degraded man, they will no longer pass in the present age; for those must be mentally blind who do not see, that in all times, whatever was ostensibly dedicated as