prosperity _not to Bibles, but to causes adequate to counteract and overcome their adverse influences_. THE MORAL BENEFITS OF INFIDELITY. An additional argument to prove the Bible is not a moral necessity to teach the practical duties of life is the fact that that class of persons known as "infidels," who entirely reject the book as a guide or as a moral instructor on account of its very defective and contradictory system of morals, are admitted by leading orthodox journals and representative men in the nation to possess better moral characters and habits, and to lead better moral lives, than Bible believers. As a proof of this statement, we will here present the most wonderful and humiliating concessions of that leading religious journal of the nation, "The New-York Evangelist." On this subject it speaks thus: "To the shame of the Church it must be confessed that the foremost men in all our philanthropic movements, in the interpretation of the spirit of the age, in the practical application of genuine Christianity, in the reformation of abuses in high and in low places, in the vindication of the rights of man and in practically redressing his wrongs, in the moral and intellectual regeneration of the race, _are the so-called infidels in our land_. The Church has pusillanimously left not only the working oar, but the very reins of salutary reform, in the hands of men she denounces as inimical to Christianity, and who are doing with all their might, for _humanity's_ sake, that which the Church ought to be doing for _Christ's_ sake; and if they succeed, as succeed they will, in abolishing slavery, banishing rum, restraining licentiousness, reforming abuses, and elevating the masses, then must the recoil upon Christianity be disastrous in the extreme. Woe! woe! woe to Christianity when infidels, by force of nature or the tendencies of the age, _get ahead of the Church in morals_, and in the practical work of Christianity. In some instances they are already far in advance. In the vindication of truth, righteousness, and liberty, they are the pioneers beckoning to a sluggish Church to follow in the rear." To this we will add the testimony of another orthodox writer (the eminent Catherine Beecher) as to the superior practical morality of infidels as compared with that of Christians. She says, in her "Appeal to the People" (p. 319), "It has come to pass that the world has been improving in practical virtue, while the Church has been deteriorating. The writer, in her very extensive travels and intercourse with the religious world, has had unusual opportunity to notice how surely and how extensively this fact has been observed and acknowledged by the best class of clergymen and laymen." She says one of the most laborious Episcopal bishops of the Western States declares, that "the world is growing better, and the Church is growing worse." She next cites the testimony of an eminent lawyer and church-member who is carrying on an extensive