A very tangible mode of settling the question which body has done most to evangelise the people would be to inquire how much each has spent? The “Society for the Liberation of Religion,” in a tract they have put forth, grounded on the Census report, states that the achievements of voluntaryism during the half century have been “astonishing.” On the authority of Mr. Edward Baines, they assume that of the 16,689 dissenting chapels opened since 1801, “only” 10,000 are separate buildings, and that the cost of each has been “but” £1,500—in other words, that dissenters have spent £15,000,000 on their meeting-houses during the last fifty years! That would, indeed, be an “astonishing” result, but it is not half so surprising as the perfervid imagination which dictated the calculation. In point of fact, it is equivalent to saying that the dissenters have provided three millions of permanent sittings, at the rate of five pounds per sitting. The real truth, however, is that they have not supplied more than two millions and three quarters of new sittings of any kind; and when it is considered in how many cases opening a new meeting-house means hiring a room or building, in the popular phrase, “on tick”; when it is further borne in mind that the average cost of churches is not above £5 or £6 per sitting, it will be admitted that five or six millions sterling would be a remarkably liberal sum to put down for the amount really raised by dissenters for the purpose of self-extension during the half century. On the other hand, the sum which must have been spent on churches cannot have been less than ten or twelve millions—of which one-half has been raised during the ten years 1841–51. The expenditure on church extension at the present moment is at least five times as great as that of all the dissenters put together.