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hearted member of the church, I do feel that the past conduct of 

 a large majority of the Bishops and Clergy in reference to this 

 question of intemperance is indeed much to be regretted. After 

 taking a lively interest in the common welfare of my fellow 

 working men, for upwards of a quarter of a century, and ob- 

 serving the effects of the drink curse which has been forced upon 

 them, producing, as it has, the truly awful amount of poverty, 

 misery, crime, cruelties, murders, disease and sending 60,000 

 or 70,000 human beings to a drunkard's grave year by year, and to 

 think of the bearing of all this upon their eternal condition, 

 viewing it in the light of the New Testament, and the teaching 

 of the book of Common Prayer, it overwhelms my soul. This 

 brutalizing system on the one hand, the neglect of the church on 

 the other, are the main causes of the masses being forced into 

 heathenism or even something worse, for not only immorality, 

 but infidelity, is rife throughout the country, and how could we 

 expect any other result 1 When preaching recently at St. Andrew's 

 Church, Ancoats, the Bishop of Manchester stated "that in a Man- 

 chester parish containing 1,233 houses, the clergyman found as the 

 result of personal inquires, that the heads of 907 families openly 

 professed that neither they nor their households attended any place 

 of worship. Ninety-three families called themselves Church of 

 England people, 94 families called themselves Eoman Catholics, 

 and the rest were made up of different denominations, the 

 Wesleyans being strongest with 54 families. The fact that 906 

 families out of 1,233 never attended public worship, was, the 

 Bishop remarked, a scandal and a peril to society." 



A justice of the peace for the county of Be'Vks stated at 

 a public meeting at Wallingford, "that he had been a great 

 employer of labour abroad, and had travelled a great deal, and 

 was sorry to have to come to the conclusion that the English 

 working classes were the most degraded people he had ever met 

 with." We are worse than the heathen nations. Sir Rutherford 

 Alcock recently said " He could conscientiously aver that he saw 

 more degradation, violence, misery and brutality in a single day 

 in the streets of London than of twenty years of life in China." 

 A Clergyman, who had spent many years in heathen lands, told 

 me he found on his return that he had left civilization behind 

 and come home to barbarism. What a disgrace to our nation, 

 with an established Church professing to provide the needful 

 means of grace, with a school in every parish, and during 

 the last quarter-of-a-century — with the exception of the last few 

 years — our country has passed through such a period of prosperity 

 as few countries in the world ever did, and yet we are in this 

 lamentable condition. In fact it has counteracted to a great extent 

 the eff'ects of the gospel of Christ and proved to the world that Chris- 

 tianity in England, in the 1 9th century, has failed to grapple eff'ec- 

 tually with immorality and sin. AVithin the last few days at a village 

 I have known for many years, I asked one of the oldest and most 

 respectable residents, who has known the place well for fifty or sixty 



