The earl of Stafford was sacrificed by the crowned Jesuit who divided his time between prayers for the theological interests of his subjects and plots for the subversion of their political liberties. The dogma of self-denial has not prevented our financial pharisees from amassing fortunes that would dwarf the spoils of a Roman triumphator; but the hospitality of Mæcenas has not survived the religion of Nature. Our philosophers have to study the problems of life in a personal struggle for existence; our poets have to choose between starvation and hypocrisy. Patriots are left to the consoling reflection that virtue is its own reward. The endowers of theological seminaries seem to rely on the mercy of Christ to cancel the odium of their shortcomings in the recognition of secular merit. Kepler, Campanella, and Spinoza perished in penury. Locke and Rousseau, the recognized primates of the intellectual world, were left to languish in exile, admired and neglected by a host of “friends”—Christian friends—in every city of the civilized world. Schubert, Buerger, and Frederick Schiller, the idols of a poetry-loving nation, were left to fight the bitter struggle for existence to an extreme of which all the records of pagan antiquity furnish only a single parallel. Anaxagoras, the founder of a philosophic school counting its disciples by thousands, was left to languish in exile, till the rumor of his extreme distress brought the most illustrious of those disciples to the sick-bed of his neglected teacher. “Do not, do not leave us!” he cried, in an agony of remorse; “we cannot afford to lose the light of our life!” “O Pericles,” said the dying exile, “those who need a lamp should take care to supply it with oil!” But how many lights of our latter-day lives have thus been extinguished before their time! Not one of the plethoric British aristocrats who spiced their leisure with the sweets of poetry ever dreamed of relieving the cruel distress of Robert Burns, or of cutting the knot of the financial embroglio that strangled out the life of Sir Walter Scott. E.—REFORM. Time is the test of truth; and the fallacies of the “Brotherhood in Christ” plan have been abundantly demonstrated by their consequences. Instead of being a bond of union, the doctrine of renunciation has been found to be a root of discord and rancor, and in times of need the fellowship of its converts has proved a most rotten staff. Even the wretches who betrayed their friends to the spies of the Holy Inquisition had no difficulty in palliating the infamy of their conduct with the sanction of scriptural precepts. For centuries the appeals of martyrs to the cause of freedom and Freethought have been answered with the advice of Christian submission to the “powers that be,” and our modern pharisees rarely fail to reprove the “worldliness” of a poor neighbor’s lament for the loss of his earthly possessions.