With true Protestant condescension Alison adds: “Debased as their religion is by the absurdities and errors of the Catholic form of worship, and mixed up as it is with innumerable legends and visionary tales, it yet preserves enough of the pure spirit of its divine origin to influence in a great measure the conduct of their private lives.” Among rural populations more than elsewhere the divine power of the Christian religion is made manifest. To the poor, the frugal, and the single-hearted those heavenly truths which have changed the world, but which were first listened to and received by fishermen and shepherds, appeal with a force and directness which the mere worldling and comfort-lover cannot even realize. In the presence of nature so silent and awful, yet so vocal, everything inclines the heart of man to hearken to the voice of God. Mountains and rivers; the long, withdrawing vales and deep-sounding cataracts; winter’s snows, and spring, over whose heaving bosom the unseen hand weaves the tapestry that mortal fingers never made; summer’s warm breath, and autumn, when the strong year first feels the chill of death, and “tears from the depth of some divine despair rise in the heart and gather to the eyes”—all speak of the higher world which they foreshadow and symbolize. But in the hurry and noise of the city, with its extremes of wealth and poverty, of indulgence and want, of pride and degradation, the pleading voice of religion is not heard at all, or is heard only as a call from the shore is heard by men who are madly hurrying down some rapid stream. It is evident, therefore, that the easiest and surest way of getting at the relative moral influence of the Catholic and Protestant religions is to study their action upon rural populations. We have already established on the best authority the incalculable moral elevation of the Catholic rural populations of Switzerland and the Tyrol over the Protestants of the same class in Sweden. Let us now turn to Great Britain. Kay, after having given a table of criminal statistics for England and Wales for the years 1841 and 1847, makes the following remarks upon the facts there presented: