measures in their

Labour Parliament' at Manchester. What wisdom there? Mr Ernest Jones talks of subscriptions (from workmen whose wages are now too low) for the annual purchase of 500,000 acres of land: so that in ten years a million of families may become owners of five-acre farms. Mr Petzler would have ten millions of the working-classes to emigrate at an appointed time in order to strike terror into the masters. Mr Petzler may not know the number of the population; but are the men of the North fools or children to listen seriously to such idiotcy? Let them plan as they will, or subscribe, or toil, or sacrifice, twenty shillings will never be more than one pound, and one man with a pound can always starve out twenty with only a pound among them. The road to salvation for the labourer is through his obtaining legislative power. Then, education and capital found him by the State, he will be freed from the tyranny of the private capitalist. Only in the Republic will there be a fair wage for fair work. The political must precede the social.

MISCELLANEOUS NEWS.

Instead of chronicling all the petty 'events' of the month, we prefer giving some characteristic miscellanea, from which its history may be judged.

PARLIAMENT.-The Great Reform Bill is abandoned, and Oxford University is to be thoroughly reformed. The Premier accuses a clerk in the Foreign Office of disclosing State secrets; says he knows who he is, and knows too that he has repeatedly spoken freely of confidential matters. But he does not know the man's name. The man to whom he points gives him an unqualified contradiction. It seems our Prime Minister can lie on small matters as well as large. But there is no disgrace in lying in Parliament.-Mr Bright calls Ministers to account for unseemly levity (unseemly in members of a government) at a parting dinner to Napier. He accuses Molesworth of change of principle. Graham hides under a half jocular plea of the possibility of his having been rather winy, Palmerston calls Bright the Rev. Member and says he holds him in perfect contempt, Molesworth retorts with a charge of narrow-mindedness and illiberality. That advanced liberal, Mr Hume, opposes a bill to prevent stoppages in payments, on the ground of its being inexpedient to interfere for the protection of the workman. Mr Bright assures us that he has no predilection for Republicanism. It is well to know these things.-Mr Whiteside brings in a bill to protect nuns in the disposition of their property; Mr Moore very fairly asks why nuns should be less under restraint than wires.These are some of the most notable sayings and doings of 'our representatives' during the last month.

ALICE LEROY is a good-looking Belgian girl, a dress-maker. She is persuaded to come to a house of business' in London: the persuader is a pimp, the house is a brothel. Once in the bawd's custody, she is safe. She is imprisoned in the house till wanted; then held down on a bed by this woman,' while a gentleman' violates her. She is only one of thousands; the bawd one of many who are known to carry on this trade, and find their patrons among the clubs and members of Parliament. Any amount of bail would be

given, says the counsel, for the bawd and her agents: they are so respectable. The bawd of course gets off: to recommence her business elsewhere under a new name. And her customers legislate on marriage, and protection of women. A QUALIFIED ELECTOR.-Jeremiah Smith, Mayor of Rye, has just been tried, convicted, and sentenced to imprisonment, for wilful and corrupt perjury before an Election Committee of the House of Commons. The remarkable part of the case is not the perjury, but the conviction. In fact it was so astonishing that a respectable man could be prosecuted for such an every-day affair, that Mr Curteis, late M.P., had no hesitation in laying it upon private malice!-denouncing the prosecutor as 'some sneaking coward.' Mr Smith will come out of jail for the next election, and will be more careful. Of course he would not allow universal suffrage: the people are not qualified. JUSTICE. In 1849, £10 was left to the poor of Great Bardfield, Essex, to find bread for them that year, and £250 as a charity for ever. The money has remained in Chancery during four years, and the legatees are not aware of any cause of delay. The funds left by this will, in the hands of the Court, are upward of £70,000; and the longer the postponement, the more costs incurred. In fifteen cases of larceny (not committed by Chancery) brought to trial in the last Norfolk Circuit, the aggregate value of the property stolen did not exceed twelve shillings.

SOLDIERS' FAMILIES.-200 of the wives and children of the Rifle Brigade are left destitute in Portsmouth. The regulations limit the number' of married soldiers to six per 100 men.' 'Leave to marry is granted as vacancies take place.' With regard to the families of those who have not thought fit to wait for some married whore-master colonel's permission, the usual course is to forward them to the parishes of their husbands during the period their husbands are absent on duty.' For what can soldiers want wives with all the license allowed them in a garrison town? What inducements for the military life! The cat-o'-nine-tails, marriage in your turn, and the parish or private alms for your family while you are fighting for the Queen!

'PARDONS.'-Smith O'Brien, Martin, and Dogherty are pardoned: that is to say, are set free, but must remain in exile. For their sakes we will be thankful even for that boon. And as thankfully glad for the same reason that the same commutation of sentence at last releases Frost, Williams, and Jones from Lord John Russel's vengeance. But the Chartists of 1848: Cuffay, Lacy, Dowling, Fay, and Mullins? And Ellis, transported in 1842? Let us ask also for their release.

IS IT WITHOUT SIGNIFICATION ?-The American Consul in London has given a dinner to the chiefs of the European Democracy: Mazzini, Worcell, Ledru-Rollin, Kossuth, and the Russian Herzen.

THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.

Extracted from the Introduction to Theodore Parker's Sermons on Theism, Atheism, and the Popular Theology."

IFTY-THREE YEARS after the birth of Christ, according to the most ancient chronological canon which has come down to us, there came to Rome an obscure man, by name Saul, which he had altered to Paul; a sailmaker, as it seems, from the little city of Tarsus in Cilicia. Nobody took much notice of it.

He came from a hated nation,—the Jews were thought the enemies of mankind; he was a poor plebeian, a mechanic, and lived in an age when military power and riches had such an influence as never before, or since. He was apparently an unlettered man, or had only the rough, narrow culture which a Hebrew scholar got at Tarsus and Jerusalem. He had little eloquence; 'his bodily presence was weak, and his speech contemptible.' He came to the most populous city in the world, the richest and the wickedest.

The city was full of soldiers; men from Parthia and Britain, who had fought terrible battles, bared their scars in the Forum and the Palace of the Cæsars. Learned men were there. Political Grecce had died; but Grecian genius long outlived the shock which overturned the State. Of science Greece was full, and her learned men, and men well born with genius, fled to Rome. The noble minds from that classic land went there, full of thought, full of eloquence and song, running over with beauty. Rough, mountainous streams of young talent from Spain and Africa flowed thither, finding their home in that great oceanic city. The Syrian Orontes had emptied itself into the Tiber. There were temples of wondrous splendour and richness, priests celebrated for their culture and famed for their long descent.

But the popular theology was only mythology. It was separate from science, alienated from the life of the people.

The temple did not represent philosophy, nor morality, nor piety. The priests of the popular religion had no belief in the truth of its doctrines, no faith in the efficacy of its forms. Religion was tradition with the priest; it was police with the magistrate. The Roman augurs did not dare look each other in the face on solemn days, lest they should laugh outright, and betray to the people what was the open secret of the priest.

Everywhere, as a man turned his eye in Rome, there was riches, everywhere power, everywhere vice. Did I say everywhere? No; the shadow of riches

Published by John Chapman, 142, Strand.

is poverty, and there was such poverty as only St Giles's Parish in London can now equal. The shadow of power is slavery; and there was such slavery in Rome as American New Orleans and Charleston can not boast. Did I say there was vice everywhere? No: in the shadow of vice there always burns the still, calm flame of piety, justice, philanthropy; that is the light which goeth not out by day, which is never wholly quenched. But slavery and poverty and sin were at home in that city: such slavery, such poverty, and such sin as savage lands know nothing of. If we put together the crime, the gluttony, the licentiousness of New Orleans, New York, Paris, London, Vienna, and add the military power of St Petersburg, we have an approximate idea of the condition of ancient Rome in the year fifty-three after Christ. Let none deny the manly virtue, the womanly nobleness, which also found a home therein; still it was a city that was going to destruction, and the causes of its ruin were swiftly at work.

Christianity came to Rome with Paul of Tarsus. The tidings thereof went before him. Nobody knows who brought them first. It was a new 'superstition,' not much known as yet. It was the religion of a 'blasphemer,' who had got crucified between two others, malefactors.' Christianity was then 'the latest form of infidelity. Paul himself came there a prisoner, but so obscure that nobody knows what year he came, how long he remained, or what his fate was. 'He lived two years in his own hired house,'-that is the last historic word which comes down to us of the great Apostle. Catholic traditions tell us of missions to various places, and then round it off with martyrdom. The martyrdom only is probable, the missions obviously fictitious. Probably he was in jail to the end of his days, when the headsman ferried that great soul into Heaven ;—and very seldom was it, so it seems, that he took over so weighty a freight as Paul made for that bark. The sailmaker brought the new religion. It was an idea, and action also; belief in men and life out of them. It had nothing to recommend it, only itself and himself. Paul offered no worldly riches, no honour, no respectability. A man who joined the church' then did not have his name trumpeted in the newspapers; did not get introduced to reputable society; did not find his honour and respectability everywhere enhanced by that fact.

Christianity had these things to offer:-scorn, loathing, contempt, hatred from father and mother, from the husband of the wife's bosom,-for probably it was the wife that went first, it is commonly so,-and at last it offered a cruel death. But it told of a to-morrow after to-day; of a law higher than the statute of Nero; of one God, the Father of all men; of a kingdom of Heaven, where all is sunlight and peace and beauty and triumph. Paul himself had got turned out of the whole Eastern world, and the founder of this scheme of religion had just been hanged as a blasphemer. Christianity was treason to the Hebrew State; to the Roman Church the latest form of infidelity.

Doubtless there were great errors connected with the Christian doctrine. One need only read the epistles of Paul to know that. But there were great truths. The oneness of God, the brotherhood of men, the soul's immortality,

the need of a virtuous, blameless, brave life on earth,-these were the great truths of Christianity; and they were set off by a life as great as the truths, a life of brave work and manly self-denial and self-sacrifice.

The early, nay, the earliest, Christians had many an error. How does wheat grow? With manifold straw; and there are whole cart-loads of straw for a single sack of wheat-corn. The straw is needful; not a grain of corn could grow without it; by and by it litters the horses, and presently rots and fertilizes the ground whence it came. But the grain lives on; and is seed-corn for future generations, or bread-corn to feed the living.

Christianity as an idea was far in advance of Judaism and Hebraism. As a life it transcended everything which the highest men had dreamed of in days before. Men tried to put it down, crucified Jesus, stoned his disciples, put them in jail, scourged them, slew them with all manner of torture. But the more they blew the fire the more swiftly it burned. Water the ground with valiant blood, the young blade of heroism springs up and blossoms red: the maiden blooms white out of the martyr blood which her mother had shed on the ground; and there is a great crop of hairy men full of valour. Christians smiled when they looked the rack in the face; laughed at martyrdom, and said to the tormentors- Do you want necks for your block? Here are ours. Betwixt us and Heaven there is only a red sea, and the axe makes a bridge wide enough for a soul to go over. Exodus out of Egypt is entrance to the promised land. Fire is a good chariot for a Christian Elias.'

In a few hundred years that sailmaker had swept Rome of Heathenism: not a temple remained Heathen. Even the statues got converted to Christianity: and Minerva became the Virgin Mary; Venus took the vow, and was a Magdalene; Olympian Jove was christened Simon Peter: everybody sees at Rome a bronze statue of Jupiter, older than Paul's time, which is now put in the great cathedral, and baptized Simon Peter; and thousands of Catholics kiss the foot of what was once 'Heathen Jove.' The gods of Rome gave way to the carpenter of Nazareth; he was called God. The Christian ideas and great Christian life of Paul of Tarsus put all Olympus to rout.

Then in thirteen or fourteen hundred years more there slowly got built up the most remarkable scheme of theology that the world ever saw. Hebraism went slowly down; Heathenism went slowly down. Barbarism, a great storm from the North, beat on the roof of the Christian House, and it fell not ;—No, barbarism ran off from the eaves of the Christian Church, to water the garden of Italy, Spain, France, Germany, England; they were blessed by that river of God which fell from the eaves.

But Hebraism, Heathenism, Barbarism-as forms of religion-did not die all at once; they are not yet wholly dead. No one of them was altogether a mistake. Each of them had some truth, some beauty, which mankind needed, and there they must stand face to face with Christianity till it has absorbed all of their excellence to itself: then they will perish. Individual freedom was the contribution which German Barbarism brought, and we have got much of that enshrined in our trial by jury, representative democracy, and a hundred other forms. Deep faith in God and fidelity to one's own conscience,-these