desire that the heathen may be converted to Christianity, and we catch ourselves saying, “Does he mean this sort of thing?” When we pronounce the word Christianity, it calls up recollections and associations that do not exactly harmonize with the scene around us.  We think rather of the fishermen of Palestine, on the lonely sea-shore; of the hunted fugitives of Italy and Scotland; we think of it as something lowly, and suited to the lowly,—­a refuge for the forsaken and the defeated, not the luxury of the rich and the ornament of the strong.  It may be an infirmity of our mind; but we experience a certain difficulty in realizing that the sumptuous and costly apparatus around us has anything in common with what we have been accustomed to think of as Christianity.

Sometimes, the incongruity reaches the point of the ludicrous.  We recently heard a very able and well-intentioned preacher, near the Fifth Avenue, ask the ladies before him whether they were in the habit of speaking to their female attendants about their souls’ salvation,—­particularly those who dressed their hair.  He especially mentioned the hair-dressers; because, as he truly remarked, ladies are accustomed to converse with those artistes, during the operation of hair-dressing, on a variety of topics; and the opportunity was excellent to say a word on the one most important.  This incident perfectly illustrates what we mean by the seeming incongruity between the ancient cast of doctrine and the modernized people to whom it is preached.  We have heard sermons in fashionable churches in New York, laboriously prepared and earnestly read, which had nothing in them of the modern spirit, contained not the most distant allusion to modern modes of living and sinning, had no suitableness whatever to the people or the time, and from which everything that could rouse or interest a human soul living on Manhattan Island in the year 1867 seemed to have been purposely pruned away.  And perhaps, if a clergyman really has no message to deliver, his best course is to utter a jargon of nothings.

Upon the whole, the impression left upon the mind of the visitor to the fashionable church is, that he has been looking, not upon a living body, but a decorated image.

It may be, however, that the old conception of a Christian church, as the one place where all sorts and conditions of men came together to dwell upon considerations interesting to all equally, is not adapted to modern society, wherein one man differs from another in knowledge even more than a king once differed from a peasant in rank.  When all were ignorant, a mass chanted in an unknown tongue, and a short address warning against the only vices known to ignorant people, sufficed for the whole community.  But what form of service can be even imagined, that could satisfy Bridget, who cannot read, and her mistress, who comes to church cloyed with the dainties of half a dozen literatures?  Who could preach a sermon that would hold attentive