When our Lord remarked, “The harvest is plenteous,” He pointed to the multitude of _un_converted souls; and surely England is not without its full proportion of such, towards whom the most anxious thoughts and zealous exertions of the Christian minister are naturally to be directed. The intelligent Christian, the well-affected churchman, may be ready to make every charitable allowance for the imperfections of our Church—though charity is not the virtue of these days—but the criminal, the profligate, the sceptic, over whom it is most desirable, yet most difficult, to obtain an influence for their good, are proverbially the most acute in discerning the defects of their appointed teachers, in noting any inconsistency between the lesson and the instructor. Suspicion is the very atmosphere they breathe; and to rejoice in iniquity, especially where there is a profession of religion, is, alas! too natural and agreeable to them. In whatever degree then the teacher of truth shall expose himself to the imputation of a want of veracity amongst the irreligious, deplorable is it to contemplate the decline of a wholesome influence which must ensue. The writer has himself witnessed a lamentable instance of this result in one of the most accomplished men of late times, now no more, whom he wishes it were allowable to name. Could some of our controversialists look into a conclave of youthful profligates, led on, it may be, by some ingenious sceptic, they would blush to hear the comments on their own writings; the bitter and triumphant questions—What is it which these our discordant and subtle instructors really believe? Do they believe anything? They subscribe, and reap the profit. Let them tell us what this Subscription and these Articles of Faith really mean, and then it will be time enough for us to consider about attending to their instruction. Add to this the obvious reasoning of the dissenting part of our population. The best amongst them cannot but see some justification of their own separation from a Church whose teachers are proclaiming throughout the land, from an hundred pens, the discordance of their sentiments as to their own Confession of Faith: not mere shades of difference reconcileable with a general agreement in its object, but a division for instance on, to them certainly, a leading question. Was the Reformation a good or an evil? The more worldly amongst them of course hail with delight what they will designate as the quibbles and evasions of men apparently eager to escape the trammels of a subscription solemnly made, which during three centuries has occasioned troubles, and persecution, and separation, and exclusion in the Christian fold, and is yet further than ever from establishing its professed purpose—“Consent touching true religion.”