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does the argument amount to? It amounts to this, that you must deprive our labouring population – whether old or young – of all games and amusements whatsoever, in order to increase their morality. Nothing more or less can be made of the argument than this; and although I am aware the sentiment will sound heterodox in the ears of many, I hesitate not to express my deliberate conviction that much of the demoralization amongst all classes is to be traced to the denunciation of every recreation, however innocent, as wicked. I do not accuse those who widely differ from me on this subject of any wilful intention to produce the injurious result to which I allude. I believe their intentions to be good, but I also believe that experience in all ranks of life proves their theory to be founded on a fatally false estimate of human character. Everything is pronounced wicked, and the consequence is that really innocent amusements such as chess, draughts, &c., are abandoned for really demoralizing pleasures – “the pleasures of sin”. To stigmatize as wicked every innocent pleasure on earth is to drive the youth of our land in sheer disgust away from the path of virtue, and is, moreover, an exhibition of spirit answering precisely – though it may be under a directly opposite name – to that odious spirit of domineering over the conscience of the people so long practised by the Church of Rome. The exhibition of this spirit is the exhibition in essence, of the Papacy itself in its worse form. Many who have been the victims of the evil of this austere system have been less to blame than those, their seniors, who have by their untruthful and unamiable interpretation of scripture weakened the influence of religion upon the sensitive minds of youth who have come under their control. Men and women – old and young – may be ‘illiterate’ but the most illiterate have wit enough to recede with instinctive aversion from instructors who begin with their first lesson to teach them that religion is gloomy and morose, and forbids every earthly amusement, except, perhaps, a few privileged games that no one cares to play at. Any attempt to get people to go across the street to hear such people as these read the Bible to them will surely prove a failure. If they doubt it, let them try the experiment. You must get a man’s heart and secure his favour before he will sit down and listen to the Bible from your lips with any profit to himself. Men and women – young people especially – have many of them not a chance under the system that too commonly prevails amongst us. My wonder is, not that they are too often bad, but that they are not worse. There are many who differ from me, I know, in all this, but I am happy to know that there are -