They think differently in England. To the seriously-inclined middle classes the oratorio supplies the place of the opera. And it behoves you to consider what a vast power in the state those serious middle-class men and women are. It is all very well for us, men and citizens of the world, yet living in a comparatively contracted circle of acquaintances as cosmopolitan as ourselves; it is all very well for us, who see “no harm” in sitting at home and reading the newspaper, while our wives go to church; who support Sunday bands, Sunday steamboats, and Sunday excursion trains, and are agitating now for the opening of museums, and galleries, and palaces on the Sabbath; who talk lightly on serious topics, and call clergymen parsons; it is all very well, I say, for us, travelled, and somewhat cynical as we may be, to pretend that the “serious” world is an amalgam of bigotry, hypocrisy, and selfishness, and to ignore the solemn religious journals that denounce hot dinner on Sundays, or a walk after it, or the perusal of a secular book on the sacred day, as intolerable sins. Yet how many thousands—how many millions—of sober, sincere, conscientious citizens are there, who are honestly persuaded of the sinfulness of many things which we consider harmless recreations! who would shrink back in horror, if they heard a tithe of the conversations that go on every night in hundreds of well-conducted London drawing-rooms! who look upon dancing as an irreligious and Babylonish pastime! whose only light reading consists of tracts, missionary chronicles, and memoirs of sainted cheesemongers, and the beatified daughters of dairymen! I declare that I never see a theatre in a country town—where, at least, two-thirds of the population consist of such as I have described—without wondering at the lunacy of the person who built it, without marvelling at the idiocy of every fresh speculator who enters on the management. We may pretend to despise the Puritan world, write books and farces against them, and quiz the “Record” or the “Wesleyan;” but it is folly to ignore the vast numerical strength of these same Puritans. They purchase such books as “Memorials of Captain Headly Vicars” by thousands; they subscribe thousands of pounds yearly in an almost insane hope of converting heathen barbarians to a better faith; they give away millions of tracts; they flood the platform and the auditory of every public meeting. It won’t do to ignore them. Cromwell’s Ironsides and Sir Harry Vane’s Fifth-Monarchy Men have made too deep a mark upon the people of England to be lightly passed over.