which, if a cause at first of delayed action by the people, speedily proved themselves to be a stimulating force of no small energy. The English movement within the railways for Sunday coaching had long preceded the Scotch attempt. But coming in the rear of other prevailing habits, it failed in exciting that indignation which was its rightful due; and so long as the iniquity was limited to the south, the people of Scotland, strong in their imagined security, and slow of uptake as to any new thing—though quite learned enough to know the force and meaning of the _Tua res agitur dum proximus paries ardet_—failed to take active alarm for a very considerable time. In regard also to England, it of course must be allowed that the religious classes there did certainly feel aggrieved, and took some quiet steps, even within the companies—though of a very courteous, timid, and hesitating kind—to induce these companies to abstain from their railway trading. But with that certain peculiar spirit in public religious things, which, pious and excellent as in itself it is, so often evaporates there in mere adjuration and protest, instead of embodying itself in earnest “contending for the faith,” the _struggle_ in England, saving here and there in the pulpit and press, ceased altogether as a public thing; and the very men who had maintained the controversy for a time within the railway companies, mistakingly deeming it Christian to cease from godly strife, withdrew from that field whenever the first success was effected by the enemy. They sold out their stock, under the baseless notion that they would become partakers of the iniquity by remaining at their posts and endeavouring to bring their fallen shareholders to righteous dealing; thus leaving these parties undisputed masters of the Lord’s day, and henceforth acting on the gainsaying public merely by their Lord’s-day Society’s very excellent tracts and meetings, though the very last things of the very existence of which the Railway Stock Exchange was ever likely to become cognizant.