One cause why infidelity gained ground among the middle and the lower classes was, that owing to the increase of population, the growth of the metropolis, and the defects of our Church Establishment, no provision had been made for their religious instruction. Every one belonged to a parish, but in populous parishes a small part only of the parishioners belonged to the Clergyman's flock; his fold in very many places would not have contained half, and in some, not a tenth of them; they were left therefore as stray sheep, for false shepherds and for the wolf. This was the main cause of the increase of dissenters among us, and their increase occasioned an increase of infidelity. Many of their ministers and more of their students, revolting against the monstrous doctrines of Calvinism, past from one extreme to the other, more gradually indeed than their brethren have done in Germany, in Geneva and in New England, for they halted awhile on Arian ground, before they pitched their tents in the debateable land of Socinianism, where not a few of them afterwards crossed the border. The principle of Nonconformity itself led naturally to this consequence; it scornfully rejected that reasonable and well-defined submission to authority required by the Church of England, which is the true Catholic Church; and thus it encouraged and indeed invited tutors and pupils at their Academies to make their own immature and ill-instructed reason the test of all truths. A good and wise man has well remarked that “what men take for, or at least assert to be, the dictates of their conscience, may often in fact, be only the dictates of their pride.” With equal truth also he has said that he who “decides for himself in rejecting what almost all others receive, has not shewn himself at least in one instance to be a ‘wise man;’—he does not ‘know that he is a fool.’”