In the third place, the Directors undertook that on Sunday no spirituous liquors should be sold in their grounds.” After an interview with the Directors, Lord Derby acquiesced in the stipulations proffered by the Crystal Palace Company, suggested a few trifling variations, and promised to grant the required Charter. The announcement of this decision or promise—for it can scarcely be regarded as a _fait accompli_—has excited not a little alarm amongst a section of the religious world. The Lord’s Day Society have taken up the matter very warmly—publishing pamphlets and holding public meetings in condemnation of the arrangement. The Evangelical Alliance, a wide-spread organization, at its recent Conference in Dublin, adopted a strongly-worded resolution and memorial to the Prime Minister to the same effect. These acts of organized bodies have been vigorously followed up by journals representing respectively the Evangelical clergy of the Establishment, Wesleyans, Free Churchmen, and a portion of the Dissenting community; who call upon their readers, in every capacity, and by every means, to resist the proposed “wholesale violation of the Lord’s Day.” {6} The strength of this disapprobation and alarm may be gathered from one or two quotations. A widely-circulated religious magazine denounces the proposal as “sinful,” and calculated to “lead to sin on an extensive and alarming scale,” and calls “upon all religious and moral men, throughout the United Kingdom, to lift up their voices like a trumpet, and to cause them to be heard on this great and vital question.” A very influential newspaper in the North predicts that “the measure will have a most fatal operation on the religious interests of the country,” and urges a general expression of public opinion “to prevent the Minister from persevering in his intention to grant a Charter containing permission to open the Crystal Palace on Sunday.” A Clapham clergyman, in a pamphlet very loosely put together, {7} says, “The projected _aggression of pleasure_ in 1853, is to me a greater object of dread than the _aggression of Popery_ in 1850, because it falls in with the taste of the vast majority of mankind.” A metropolitan Dissenting journal speaks of the question as one involving a principle “that would speedily extend itself to other institutions,” and expresses its belief that the recognition by the State that the Sabbath ends at one o’clock, would be “a far deeper stab to public morality, and afford a greater triumph to Popery and Infidelity, than any act of the British Government since the days of James II.” Ministers of religion, of every denomination, are therefore called upon to protest against the threatened evil, and Sunday-school teachers to petition against a measure aiming a deadly blow at those institutions. Another London paper is even more emphatic, not to say intemperate, upon the subject, describing “this new guild of