No--_that_ was positive enough, and mighty; but I repeat it, it was not enough. He felt it so himself; for he grew daily more and more cynical, more and more hopeless about the prospects of his class and of all humanity. Why not? Poor suffering wretches! what is it to them to know that "God is great," unless you can prove to them God is also merciful? Did he indeed care for men at all?--was what I longed to know; was all this misery and misrule around us his will--his stern and necessary law--his lazy connivance? And were we to free ourselves from it by any frantic means that came to hand? or had he ever interfered himself? Was there a chance, a hope, of his interfering now, in our own time, to take the matter into his own hand, and come out of his place to judge the earth in righteousness? That was what we wanted to know; and poor Mackaye could give no comfort there. "God was great--the wicked would be turned into hell." Ay--the few wilful, triumphant wicked; but the millions of suffering, starving wicked, the victims of society and circumstance--what hope for them? "God was great." And for the clergy, our professed and salaried teachers, all I can say is--and there are tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of workmen who can re-echo my words--with the exception of the dean and my cousin, and one who shall be mentioned hereafter, a clergyman never spoke to me in my life. Why should he? Was I not a Chartist and an Infidel? The truth is, the clergy are afraid of us. To read the _Dispatch_, is to be excommunicated. Young men's classes? Honour to them, however few they are--however hampered by the restrictions of religious bigotry and political cowardice. But the working men, whether rightly or wrongly, do not trust them; they do not trust the clergy who set them on foot; they do not expect to be taught at them the things they long to know--to be taught the whole truth in them about history, politics, science, the Bible. They suspect them to be mere tubs to the whale--mere substitutes for education, slowly and late adopted, in order to stop the mouths of the importunate. They may misjudge the clergy; but whose fault is it if they do? Clergymen of England!--look at the history of your Establishment for the last fifty years, and say, what wonder is it if the artisan mistrust you? Every spiritual reform, since the time of John Wesley, has had to establish itself in the teeth of insult, calumny, and persecution. Every ecclesiastical reform comes not from within, but from without your body. Mr. Horsman, struggling against every kind of temporizing and trickery, has to do the work which bishops, by virtue of their seat in the House of Lords, ought to have been doing years ago. Everywhere we see the clergy, with a few persecuted exceptions (like Dr. Arnold), proclaiming themselves the advocates of Toryism, the dogged opponents of our political liberty, living either by the accursed system of