world’s goods in Christendom, rejoices to call itself the poor man’s Church,—turns round, and, in his coarse, rough way, says, “Ladies and gentlemen, I am much obliged to you. I see your little game. Pray don’t take any trouble on my account. Please to leave me to go to the bad in my own way. Give me the right to the free inquiry you claim for yourselves, and don’t quarrel with me on account of its results.” Really it seems to me the Secularist has the best of it. I may regret his conclusions. I cannot blame his independent spirit. Of the men who talk in this way it may be said, at any rate as regards the metropolis, Robert Dale Owen was the teacher and apostle. Owen was the first to proclaim to the masses that there was no such thing as moral responsibility; that a man’s character was formed for him partly by nature at his birth, and partly by the external influences to which he was exposed. As man, there was for him no choice of right or wrong. Any religion, and emphatically that of Christ, which proceeds upon the supposition that man can lay hold of eternal life, can accept the offer of God’s mercy, can believe and live, is false and to be rejected with disdain. Owen was a man of blameless life—a man who made great sacrifices of wealth, and time, and labour, on account of his ideas. As his last apologist has well stated, “his condemnation of religion was not the result of libertine excesses, nor of a philosophical conceit, but followed honestly from the shallow theory he had adopted.” Amongst the poor, ignorant, superficial denizens of our crowded cities he was hailed as the regenerator of manhood, and made many converts. Nor are they to be blamed. Owen met with an attentive hearing from such as Brougham and Bentham, Earls Liverpool and Aberdeen, Jefferson and Van Buren, the Duke of Kent and the King of Prussia; actually, we believe, he was presented at Court. It is true in his old age he became a believer in spirits, after all, and was buried in the little churchyard of Newton, Montgomeryshire, in the sure and certain hope of a glorious resurrection to eternal life; but by that time the truth or falsehood he had proclaimed had sunk into many minds, had been re-uttered by many tongues, had been commended to the working classes by no less a master of language and argument than George Jacob Holyoake. Certainly, in the hands of the latter, Owenism, under its new name of Secularism, lost none of its power. The master was apt to be egotistic—dogmatic—much given to repetition—very diffuse. Mr. Holyoake’s enemies cannot conscientiously say he is that. His friends, many of them the cleverest of London men, claim for him talents of no common order. A shop in Fleet Street was opened—the _Reasoner_ was established—and Mr. Holyoake went all over the land to emancipate the human mind, spell-bound by priestcraft, and to roll back the double night of ages and of ignorance. In a little while