Do not, I beseech you, pass lightly by the doings of these men, most sublime Lord Bishops, most serene peers of the realm, smug buyers of county votes. These ideas are spreading all around you. Few possessed them fifty years ago among the agricultural poor; but there, as elsewhere, democracy is getting educated, is awaking to the reality of things, and will make its feelings known to you in a manner you little dream of one of these days. Your Olympus will prove but a molehill when the earth shakes with the onset of the millions on whose necks you have sat all these ages. Titles are a mockery, hereditary dignities a contempt, in the eyes of men who live face to face with the hard realities of existence. A new life is abroad in the world. The image-breaker is exalted above my Lord Bishop in all his glory of lawn sleeves and piety in uniform by men like Wanless and his friends. They want to know, not what part "my lord" professes to act, what creed this or that snug Church dignitary chants or drones; but what his life is worth? What are you? in short, is the question, not what you give yourself out to be; and, depend upon it, if the answer is unsatisfactory, you and your hypocrisies will disappear together. Nothing struck me so forcibly in my intercourse with Wanless as the extraordinary bitterness with which he spoke of the English Church. To it he seemed in his later life to have transferred the greater part of his hatred of the landed gentry. He viewed it as an organised blasphemy, and worse than that, as the jailor, so to say, by whom the chains of a miserable captivity had been rivetted for ages on the limbs of the toiling poor. The ground for this attitude of mind on the part of the labourer was easily discovered. He read his Bible much, and endeavoured to fit its precepts and the example of its greatest characters to the life around him, and of course he failed. The more he tried to bring together the presentment of Christianity afforded by the modern Church and teaching of the New Testament, the more he saw their divergencies. This set him pondering, and he soon came to the conclusion that this modern institution was not Christian at all, but Pagan. It was a department of State, paid by the State, and employed by it for the purpose of deluding the people into the belief that the existing order of life was divinely appointed. How effectively it had done this work, he said, let history show. The clergy had aided and abetted the gentry in all their robberies of the people; it had been the instrument of many flagrant thefts of endowments left for the education of the poor; there never had been a reform proposed calculated to benefit the people that had not been ardently opposed by this organised band of hypocrites, and no class of the community was so habitually, so flagrantly selfish as preachers. Take them all in all, Thomas Wanless declared, the people who preached for a trade, be they dissenters or Anglican, gave him a lower