With reference to our choice, as the recipients of Church money, of labourers whose “wages are seven shillings a week,” and “who have a wife and four children to maintain thereon,” you say, “Here is an excuse for the employer to give deficient wages!” In reply to this, I beg to inform you that the wages in this neighbourhood never fluctuate: they have continued at this fixed amount during the ten years of my incumbency.... Your argument, as applied to my parishioners, is this: Because they have scanty wages in that county, therefore they should have no alms; because these labourers of Morwenstow are restricted by the law from any relief from the rate, therefore they shall have no charity from the Church; because they have little, therefore they shall have no more. You insinuate that I, a Christian minister, think eight shillings a week sufficient for six persons during a winter’s week, as though I were desirous to limit the resources of my poor parishioners to that sum. May God forgive you your miserable supposition! I have all my life sincerely, and not to serve any party purpose, been an advocate of the cause of the poor. I, for many long years, have honestly, and not to promote political ends, denounced the unholy and cruel enactments of the New Poor Law.... Let me now proceed to correct some transcendent misconceptions of yourself and others as to the nature and intent of the offertory in church. The ancient and modern division of all religious life was, and is, threefold—into devotion, self-denial and alms. No sacred practice, no Christian service, was or is complete without the union of these three. They were all alike and equally enjoined by the Saviour of man. The collection of alms was therefore incorporated in the Book of Common Prayer. But it was never held to be established among the services of the Church for the benefit of the poor alone: it was to enable the rich to enjoy the blessedness of almsgiving for their Redeemer’s sake: it was to afford to every giver fixed and solemn opportunity to fulfil the remembrance, that whatsoever they did to the poor they did unto Him, and that the least of such their kindness would not be forgotten at the last day. “Let us wash,” they said, “our Saviour’s feet by alms”.... But this practice of alms, whereunto the heavenly Head of the Church annexed a specific reward—this necessity, we are told, is become obsolete. A Christian duty become, by desuetude, obsolete! As well might a man infer that any other religious excellence ceased to be obligatory because it had been disused. The virtue of humility, for example, which has been so long in abeyance among certain of the laity, shall no longer, therefore, be a Christian grace! The blessing on the meek shall cease in 1844! ... Voluntary kindness and alms have been