longer to bow down and kiss the big toe of his sacred majesty. His scepter has departed, his spiritual power is gone, his temporal power is waning. And the same spirit of agitation is operating as a leaven in the Protestant churches also. All the orthodox churches are declining and growing weaker by their members falling off. The Methodist Church has recently lost more than two hundred of its preachers; and the Baptist Church, according to the statement of a recent number of "The Christian Era," has lost twenty-two thousand of its members within a period of five years. The agitation in the churches is driving thousands from their ranks, while many who remain are becoming more liberal-minded. The orthodox Quaker Church has, in many localities, "run clear off the track." It has abandoned its old time-honored peculiarities in dress and language, once deemed by them sacred, and essential to true godliness. The use of "thee" and "thou" is laid aside by many of its members; and even leading members have given up the "shad-bellied coat," and the round-crowned hat with a brim broad enough to "cover a multitude of sins." They no longer wait for "the Holy Ghost" to move them to preach; but, as a member once remarked, "they go it on their own hook, like the Methodists, hit or miss." Music, once regarded by many of them as an emanation from "an emissary of the Devil," is now admitted into many of their churches. Thus it will be seen they are making some progress. The _light without_ is benefiting them _more_ than "the light _within_." All the orthodox systems committed a fatal error at the outset in assuming that their religions were derived directly from God, and consequently must be _perfect_ and _unalterable_, and a _finality_ in moral and religious progress. Such an assumption will cause the downfall, sooner or later, of any religious body which persists in propagating the error. Religious institutions, like all other institutions, are subject to the laws of growth and decay. Hence, if their doctrines and creeds are not improved occasionally to make them conform to the growing light and intelligence of the age and the principles of science, they will fall behind the times, cease to answer the moral and religious wants of the age, and become a stumbling-block in the path of progress. Common sense would teach us that the doctrines preached by the churches two hundred years ago must be as much out of place now as the wooden shoes and bearskin coats worn by the early disciples would be _for us. Their spiritual food_ is by no means adapted to _our moral and religious wants_. We are under no more moral and religious obligation whatever to preach the doctrines of original sin, the fall of man, endless punishment, infant damnation, &c., because our religious forefathers believed in these doctrines, than we are morally bound to eat beetles, locusts, and grasshoppers, because our Jewish ancestors feasted on there nasty vermin, as we learn by reading Lev. xi.