make cushions, choose a professional minister, and organize collections, &c. And _when_ done, how does it suit the tastes and sympathies of the poor? Do they not feel themselves out of place, and suspect the means are made of importance disproportionate to, and even obstructive of, the end? Christianity appears to them entrenched behind a barricade of forms and creeds, and genteel requirements, which its followers have erected. The world without catches but a distant and imperfect glimpse of its benign features. Religious men prefer standing behind their entrenchments to an aggressive movement in front, or if they do advance it is with incumbrances great as those which impede an English army marching over the plains of India. Costly temples, with elegant spires, are becoming increasingly necessary to the proclamation of Divine truth, and, in not a few cases, pious men half sink under the sacrifices thus incurred, or the load of debt contracted. There is something quite affecting in the fact, that while the masses of the people are getting farther and farther off from the agency of religious institutions, Christians who are ever denouncing the external pomp and show of Popery are, as it were, _concentrating_ their attention on genteel and elegant places of worship, and in all their arrangements for the celebration of religion approximating to the Romanist standard. And this—when a portion of such superfluous expenditure would provide means for carrying the Gospel into the ranks of the poor—is boasted of as a mark of taste—of Christian earnestness—of religious progress! Fatal delusion! {21} Men’s susceptibilities are the same as ever they were—but how to awaken them? The religious world will find it in the career and directions of their great Exemplar, _not_ in the bearing of the Pharisees. The grand truth embodied in the aphorism of our great dramatist— “One touch of Nature Makes the whole world kin,” has a spiritual as well as a social meaning. To recur to our former illustration. A child with love in her heart and sympathy in her eye, may subdue the will when reason and authority utterly fail. By approaching the masses in this spirit, the religious world may gain access to their affections, and will, no doubt, find that the Gospel retains its pristine omnipotence. But if they are to be treated as the patrimony of organized religious societies and institutions, to be “cribbed, cabined, and confined” at their pleasure, and admonished from afar off on the sinfulness of Sunday recreation—if the enormities of Popery are more zealously denounced, and hair-splitting differences agitated, by ministers and their flocks, than THE TRUTH preached “_in the love of it_”—farewell to all hopes of making any substantial progress in evangelizing the great bulk of the working classes! {22}