intelligent enjoyment which have been mentioned, to meet with disorder. Certainly, the drunkenness and disorder of London have been greatly diminished by the opening of places of resort for the working classes where mind as well as body may be fed. Every thing in the past justifies the extension of the experiment, and on the grandest scale. To the poor man, these things are not so much exhibitions as they are to us who can more frequent them. They partake of the dignity of events, stir up the fountains of manhood, perhaps long stagnant, and make him feel life’s meaning and life’s worth, and thus they expand his soul. Now, it is worth while seriously to consider—Is this _different_ from the object which God proposed in the institution of the Sabbath day? It stops far short of that object; but, as far as it goes, does it not travel in the same direction, and aim at the lifting man up from the brutish condition into which a too slavish daily toil would plunge him, to feel how much a man is better than a brute? God, in the Sabbath institution, seeks to make him feel that man is so much better than a brute, that he can talk to God as a Friend, and love Him as a Father. No human effort can teach man that;—no Sabbath observance, even of the strictest sort, can make man observe the Lord’s day, as the Lord counts observance; but when men, in the mass, are gone so far from the Sabbath that they systematically prostitute and pollute it, does God frown on human institutions, which work, however slowly and dimly, towards the realization of the benefit? Does He not say of all such, “_Forbid them not_, _for he that is not against us is on our side_?” If through the unconscious influence of Christianity, which has leavened even our speculating fraternities, “the earth is helping” the Kingdom; if the back-water of the mill-wheel of the Church has come round, and is adding its strength to the current; let us look on it lovingly and hopefully, as a state of things to be fostered and led onward to what is better, in no wise to be resisted and banned. And if men want to see this thing which is to elevate and educate them on the Lord’s day—the great mass of the people being notoriously averse to the Sabbath of the Church—we should not say, roughly and fiercely, “You shall not,” but recognize it, as far as it goes, as a sign of progress, hoping that, by all the humanizing influences which are brought to bear on them, we may regain a hold on them, and lead them on to a true appreciation of the Christian idea of the Sabbath. The gist of the matter seems to lie here:—at present, we have but slight hold on the working classes; they care not for our Sabbaths, and find no pleasure in our worship. Is it right, on the ground that it would be a formal breach of that Sabbath which is now really and flagrantly violated, to refuse our consent to a movement which will secure for them some portion, at any rate, of benefit on the Lord’s day?