are

by them, will be received by jeers, will be retorted by insults. How can we account for so frequent, such malignant transformations? Only by the perpetual existence and action in our midst of an engine of religious corruption. "While men slept" the enemy has been sowing the tares. Day is not enough -night is made tributary to this infernal industry. But how shall we explain it that men, brought up in the principles of justice and integrity, and afterwards giving evidence that their "nurture and admonition" were not in vain, should thus make shipwreck of the hopes that had been built upon them? Let the public historian speak. "The simple fact of annexing certain penalties to the profession of particular opinions, and rewards to the profession of opposite opinions, while it will undoubtedly make many hypocrites, will also make many converts. For any one who attentively observes the process that is pursued in the formation of opinions must be aware that, even when a train of argument has preceded their adoption, they usually much less the result of pure reasoning than of the action of innumerable distorting influences which are continually deflecting our judgments. Among these one of the most powerful is self-interest. When a man desires very earnestly to embrace a certain class of doctrines, either in order to join a particular profession, or to please his friends, or to acquire peace of mind, or to rise in the world, or to gratify his passions, or to gain that intellectual reputation which is sometimes connected with certain opinions, he will usually attain his desire. He may be firmly resolved to make any sacrifice rather than profess what he does not believe, yet still his affections will endow their objects with a magnetism of which he is perhaps entirely unconscious. He will reason not to ascertain what is true, but to ascertain whether he can conscientiously affirm certain opinions to be true. He will insensibly withdraw his attention from objections on one side, and will concentrate it with disproportionate energy on the other. He will preface every conclusion with an argument, but the nature of that argument will be determined by the bias of his will."*

Such, we doubt not, is the explanation of many cases of perversion amongst us, which, while they have riven our hearts, have staggered our understandings. The

*Lecky. History of the Rise and Influence of Rationalism in Europe. Vol. ii., p. 3-4.

case is the more without excuse, inasmuch as whatever may be the defects of Nonconformity, persons reared in its bosom must have become accustomed to them, and may be supposed to suffer less than others from their offensiveness; while their position, from hereditary as well as personal influence, gives them a right to speak with the authority of privileged censors, and boldly to enact the part of reformers. If the dissenters are not sufficiently refined, or numerous, or wealthy for them, it is not the way to mend the matter for the people in the easiest circumstances either to desert the standard themselves, or send their children to schools where they will be taught to look upon the co-religionists of their parents with contempt. Such a course is arch treason to the cause.

If such cases of aberration are found among those whom we have the best right to expect to be our friends, we cannot wonder that in other cases the process of alienation is frequent and easy. The pure morals by which dissent has conferred respectability upon persons in comparatively humble circumstances, prove a power of elevation which raises them higher in the social scale. Now, for ten men who hold fast their principles under poverty and contempt, it is difficult to find one who can retain them in the sunshine of prosperity and amidst the blandishments of polished sympathy and respect. The fable of the wind and the sun is never more aptly illustrated than in the ease with which some individuals who have clung with boldness to their principles in the foul weather of adversity and depression, have let them slip in the relaxing atmosphere of a sultry and emasculating

success.

"The glorious summer of this sun" has made many a man unbutton the doublet of Nonconformity, in which he once honestly battled for the truth against all the buffetings of squires and parsons, the levying of charges on his goods, and even the terrors of the magistrates' bench.

The more steadily, however, we “look on this picture and on that," the more honestly we compare the merits of the Church of England and Nonconformity, the greater is our amazement that people whose favourite ideal of virtue is that of the "Englishman and the gentleman" can tolerate the comparison without loathing: still more, that they can endure the humiliation of the transformation in their own persons. "Hyperion to a Satyr" feebly expresses the contrast of so much that is noble on the one

hand and shameful on the other. "It is difficult indeed," says a distinguished author,* "to overrate the debt of gratitude that England owes both to her own Non-episcopal Churches and to those of Scotland. In good report and in evil, amid persecution and ingratitude and horrible wrongs, in ages when all virtue seemed corroded, and when apostasy had ceased to be a stain, they clung fearlessly and faithfully to the banner of her freedom. If the Great Rebellion was in England for the most part secular in its causes, it is no less true that its success was in a great measure due to the assistance of the Scotch, who were actuated mainly by religion, to the heroic courage infused into the troops by the English ministers, and to the spirit of enthusiasm created by the noble writings that were inspired by Puritanism. Neither the persecutions of Charles, nor the promised toleration of James, ever caused them to swerve. Without their assistance English liberty might, perhaps, have been attained; but no one can say how long its triumph would have been retarded, or what catastrophes would have resulted from the strife. For it is to Puritanism that we mainly owe the fact that in England religion and liberty were not dissevered: amid all the fluctuations of its fortune, it represented the alliance of these two principles, which the predominating Church invariably pronounced to be incompatible.

"The attitude of this latter Church forms, indeed, a strange contrast to that of Puritanism. Created, in the first instance, by a court intrigue, pervaded in all its parts by a spirit of the most intense Erastianism, and aspiring at the same time to a spiritual authority scarcely less absolute than that of the Church which it had superseded, Anglicanism was from the beginning at once the most servile and the most efficient agent of tyranny. Endeavouring by the assistance of temporal authority and by the display of worldly pomp to realize in England the same position Catholicism had occupied in Europe, she naturally flung herself on every occasion into the arms of the civil power. No other church so uniformly betrayed and trampled on the liberties of her country. In all those fiery trials through which English liberty has passed since the Reformation, she invariably cast her influence into the scale of tyranny, supported and eulogized every attempt to violate the constitution, and wrote the fearful sentence of eternal condemnation upon the tombs

*Lecky's History, vol. ii., p. 177.

of the martyrs of freedom. That no tyranny however gross, that no violation of the constitution however flagrant, can justify resistance; that all those principles concerning the rights of nations on which constitutional government is based are false, and all those efforts of resistance by which constitutional government is achieved are deadly sins, was her emphatic and continual teaching.... When Charles I. attempted to convert the monarchy into a despotism, the English Church gave him its constant and enthusiastic support. When, in the gloomy period of vice and of reaction that followed the Restoration, the current of opinion set in against all liberal opinions, and the maxims of despotism were embodied even in the oath of allegiance, the Church of England directed the stream, allied herself in the closest union with a court whose vices were the scandal of Christendom, and exhausted her anathemas not upon the hideous corruption that surrounded her, but upon the principles of Hampden and of Milton. All through the long series of encroachments of the Stuarts she exhibited the same spirit. The very year when Russell died was selected by the University of Oxford to condemn the writings of Buchanan, Baxter, and Milton, and to proclaim the duty of passive obedience in a decree which the House of Lords soon after committed to the flames. It was not till James had menaced her supremacy that the Church was aroused to resistance. Then, indeed, for a brief but memorable period, she placed herself in opposition to the crown, and contributed to one of the most glorious events in English history. But no sooner had William mounted the throne than her policy was reversed, her whole energies were directed to the subversion of the constitutional liberty that was then firmly established, and it is recorded by the great historian of the Revolution,* that at least nine-tenths of the clergy were opposed to the emancipator of England.

All through the reaction under Queen Anne, all through the still worse reaction under George III., the same spirit was displayed. In the first period the clergy, in their hatred of liberty, followed cordially the leadership of the infidel Bolingbroke; in the second

Macaulay: who says in another place, "The Church of England continued to be for more than one hundred and fifty years the steady enemy of public liberty, through times of oppression, persecution and licentiousness, while law was trampled down, while judgment was perverted, while the people were eaten as though they were bread." Essays, vol. i., p. 60, edition 1861.

effort; and for his growth into a perfect Christian manhood. By the first change he lost a burden and found a joy. By the second he lost despair of God's work in him, and waxed confident of warm sympathy and Almighty help in the most difficult and sublime work he had to do. At once his soul put on strength as the summer morning puts on beauty. Purposes that hung drooping, and all but dead, blossomed forth with large promise. Plans that had dropped out of hand, as foolish and vain in one so weak, were grasped tightly with a sure and certain hope of realization not far off. With a song in his heart and courage in his eye he undertook to put out, utterly and for ever, the fires of temper. They need not burn, they ought not to burn, and by God's help they should not burn. God's love, he felt, would enable him to love his enemies, even though as determined and as bitter as Horatio Nelson Godes: to pray for and do good to them that despitefully used him, and to treat with real and unvarying kindness shopmates who were jeering at his purest acts and turning into ridicule all his unselfish and manly deeds. Such a baptism of life gave ease, and freedom, and apparent play, to his spiritual nature. He was bright as a summer's day, and fruitful as a loaded vine. He revelled in goodness as bees in honey-laden flowers. Maggie drank in fresh pleasure as day by day she beheld the gradual unfolding of his character.

Fred Williamson became strong in his strength, and glad in his joy; and better still, hearts were at last softening at the factory towards him, although the signs of such relenting were dim and few.

Surely such a fair scene should be protected from all disturbance. So lovely a garden should be closed for ever against the tempter's steps? The enemy should be watched and not suffered to scatter his evil tares in so promising a field of corn. So fruitful a summer-tide, why should it give place to the sombre tints of autumnal decay and the chaste but severe beauty of wintry snows? Ought not George Mostyn's path to be henceforth amongst pleasant scenes and prospects ever bright and fair?

No doubt! And if you or I, gentle reader, had been charged with the direction and general make-up of his life it would have been so arranged. But such it was not in fact. It is not in man that walketh to direct his own steps; still less, if that is possible, is it in him to shape his fellow man's life than his own. Wise as we are, and far-seeing as we proclaim ourselves to be, we do not cer

tainly know what is best for us for two days together.

These are no hollow words; big in sound, but void of meaning. It is fact. Every man who in his youth has made a programme of life for himself, has often had his plan altered, and if his life has been lived in God, he sees it has been altered with infinite wisdom and tender love. Each human being is a mighty complexity of forces and conditions, and the one circumstance that will fit all these, and most perfectly develop the best, and nothing but the best, is seen only by the omniscient eye of God. To you it would seem that George had fought often enough in the "tented field." Not so, however; his soldier's work was not finished when under the leadership of that skilled Christian general, Simeon Goodman, he battled his way out of the castle and grounds of Giant Despair. Another and a tougher foe awaited him, not far off, and though clad in different mail and adopting different tactics and speaking a different language, yet a warrior who has slain or wounded, in these later days, as many of the Lord's recruits as the great giant himself.

Do not expect anything terrible in the appearance of George's new enemy. Our foes are as unlike those figures of Apollyon and his allies pictured in the Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and the big Illustrated Bible, at which we, in our childhood, looked with so much awe and wonder, as the drawings of the earth and heavens made by the ancients were unlike the sun and moon, planets and stars. No, they are dressed in the latest fashions, have polished and affable manners, approach us with winning ways, and actually count themselves, and not infrequently are regarded by us as our friends. Christ Jesus said to Peter, His apostle, "Get thee behind me Satan." And if George's fresh foe had been named according to the character in which he then really stood to George, he would have had the same name.

But the name by which he was known in the factory was Joseph Bradley. He was a "new hand" at Baldstone's, taken on in the latter part of the year 1862, and had been associated with George in several "jobs." He was the child of godly parents, the subject of many prayers and of much effort, all loving but some of it inconsiderate, and of doubtful utility. In the Sunday school at Wexborough, a village situate at the foot of the romantic and lovely hills of Charnwood Forest, he was notorious for putting puzzling questions, starting difficulties, looking a long way beyond the present lesson, or some

thing that appeared to him not to agree with it, and in various other ways beneficially stimulating the wits of his teacher, and engaging the attention of his fellow-scholars. It was seen that he had not too much reverence, and liked to poke fun at any more glaring inaccuracies of the occupant of the pulpit, and specially at any foibles of that preacher who always preached so long that "the pudding got cold." He roamed over the hills for miles, and felt his young spirit free and strong; and sometimes he settled into deep thought as he looked on the wide and varied scenery stretching before him as he sat on the heights above Wexborough. Seven years at a neighbouring town, noted then for its radicalism in politics, its vigorous agitation of sceptical questions, and its organised efforts to suppress intoxication, made a good carpenter of him, extended without deepening his knowledge, choked what little reverence for sacred things he had, and left him a confirmed sceptic. He was far from this when he sat in the chapel at Wexborough, the Sunday before he left home, and heard the minister of the day preach from the words, "Remember thy Creator in the days of thy youth." His heart was soft then; he vowed he would never forget God who had been so kind to him. He told his father and mother his purposes, and with fervour he prayed as he rode on to the town where he was to be apprenticed, "My Father, thou shalt be the guide of my youth." But how changed now! For a while he went with his master, who was a Christian man, to Yar Road chapel, and was walking in the fear and love of God. His active mind still urged him on to lines of enquiry for which he was not prepared, and he questioned and doubted, and doubted and questioned. He needed wise, loving and sympathetic treatment, and that was just the thing not to hand. His master said in reply to one of his enquiries,

You ought not to ask such questions. It's wicked to doubt God's word. You should take it just as you find it. Don't let me hear anything of the sort again." 'But," said he, "I only ask because I want to believe. I don't want to doubt; I want to believe."

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But it was in vain. Long had it been settled in the mind of his employer that faith was the first of duties, and doubt the worst of sins; and therefore all enquiring Joseph Bradley could get from him besides his trade and his wages was a plentiful supply of censure and denunciation. Not so with the sceptics, one

of whom worked in the same shop. They had an open hand, an attentive ear, and were ready to confirm and increase his doubts; doubts that might, under wise and loving treatment, have easily led to the fullest and clearest faith.

Fashioned largely by their untoward hands he came to London, bold, daring, without reverence, and in imminent danger of losing his purity; but withal generous, hating meanness, loathing affectation and formalism, and ready to appreciate a manly, genial, and transparent bearing. Restless in intellect he was ceaselessly urging his way to mysteries that are sealed, and passing by hurriedly, and blindfold, those more momentous ones whose seals were broken by the touch of the Lord Jesus Christ. The food of intellectual doubt had borne him far beyond the turbid streams of unbelief, drifted him down the widening river, into the trackless sea of scepticism, almost out of view of the Divine hand that would even yet, if only he would grasp it, guide him back to the crystal waters of truth.

Not many days was Joseph Bradley at Baldstones, before he discovered George Mostyn, and set his trap to ensnare him with all the eagerness of an apostle seeking to convert the heathen. He besieged him on all sides and on every favourable opportunity. He endeavoured to batter down his faith in the scriptures, suggested doubts on every imaginable subject bearing upon the spiritual life, insinuated the insincerity of all preachers of the truth, quoted the names of the leading scientific writers of the day who had any sceptical bias, talked of the uselessness of prayer, until by sheer force of sticking to his self-appointed task he had ledGeorge captive, and made him question everything from the existence and power of God to the reality of his own experiences. At first he cast off every suggestion of the tempter with ease. They were against his experience and knowledge, but at length he got him to listen to discussions at the corners of streets and on Paddington Green, not then as now covered with grass and flowers, but with groups of people listening to orators of various qualifications, or to controversies on even more various themes: controversies conducted on the one hand by very weak but eager Christian young men, who had only one reply to all objections and one solution for all difficulties-(a very good one indeed, but still not enough to satisfy every one-viz., "One thing I know that whereas I was blind, now I see") and on the other by sharp clear hardheaded and voluble men, well-skilled in