an act of charity to be done by a Samaritan; ministers of the Gospel fling the thunderbolts of the Lord; ignorant hearers catch and exaggerate the spirit,—­boys, girls, and women shudder as one goes by, perhaps more holy than themselves, who adores the same God, believes in the same Redeemer, struggles in the same life-battle, and all this because they have been taught to look upon him as an enemy of God.

There is a class of religious persons against whom this vehemence has been especially directed.  No one who can read the signs of the times can help perceiving that we are on the eve of great changes, perhaps a disruption of the Church of England.  Unquestionably there has been a large secession to the Church of Rome.

Now what has been the position of those who are about to take this step?  They have been taunted with dishonest reception of the wages of the Church; a watch has been set over them:  not a word they uttered in private, or in public, but was given to the world by some religious busy-body; there was not a visit which they paid, not a foolish dress which they adopted, but became the subject of bitter scrutiny and malevolent gossip.  For years the religious press has denounced them with a vehemence as virulent, but happily more impotent than that of the Inquisition.  There has been an anguish and an inward struggle little suspected, endured by men who felt themselves outcasts in their own society, and naturally looked for a home elsewhere.

We congratulate ourselves that the days of persecution are gone by; but persecution is that which affixes penalties upon views held, instead of upon life led.  Is persecution only fire and sword?  But suppose a man of sensitive feeling says, The sword is less sharp to me than the slander:  fire is less intolerable than the refusal of sympathy!

Now let us bring this home; you rejoice that the faggot and the stake are given up;—­you never persecuted—­you leave that to the wicked Church of Rome.  Yes, you never burned a human being alive—­you never clapped your hands as the death-shriek proclaimed that the lion’s fang had gone home into the most vital part of the victim’s frame; but did you never rob him of his friends?—­gravely shake your head and oracularly insinuate that he was leading souls to hell?—­chill the affections of his family?—­take from him his good name?  Did you never with delight see his Church placarded as the Man of Sin, and hear the platform denunciations which branded it with the spiritual abominations of the Apocalypse?  Did you never find a malicious pleasure in repeating all the miserable gossip with which religious slander fastened upon his daily acts, his words, and even his uncommunicated thoughts?  Did you never forget that for a man to “work out his own salvation with fear and trembling” is a matter difficult enough to be laid upon a human spirit, without intruding