ecome a religious man, and his religion was of the simpler and more unsophisticated type which comes to a man who knows little of dogma, but much o

of the New Testament. In due course the thoughts that burned within him found utterance and infected some of his fellow workmen. Almost before he was aware a certain following ga

society were canvassed among these navvies with a freedom that would have made parson and squire alike shiver with horror had they known. But they did not know. How could they? Such creatures as navvies were not, strictly speaking

s them with his tracts. But his visit was a failure, and his reception rough. Thomas declared that he felt sorry for the poor fellow, and yet could not refrain from joining in the laugh at his expense. One sturdy northerner, to whom he handed a tract, protested loudly that he "hadn't done nothing to be summonsed for," and when the curate blandly explained that it was a tract, he blessed his stars, and swore that he "took the chap for one of the new peelers." Another was of an opinion that "the parson had a mighty easy job of it," and suggested his taking a turn at the p

gst well-bred, comfortable people "of good society" than to save souls. The sweet order of a gorgeous ritual, the vanities of richly-embroidered garments, squabbles about archaic rites as worthless as an Egyptian mummy-these things are more valuable to the modern pars

tried to fit together the various parts of the human life that lay around them, and failing to do so, as better than they have failed, they came to the conclusion that they and their class were cheated by the rest. Democracy, communism, subversive ideas of all kinds, therefore, found currency among them, as in ever-growing volume they find currency now. Imagine if you can these men trying to evolve the prototype of a modern Lord Bishop, in lawn sleeves and pompous state

little dream of one of these days. Your Olympus will prove but a molehill when the earth shakes with the onset of the millions on whose necks you have sat all these ages. Titles are a mockery, hereditary dignities a contempt, in the eyes of men who live face to face with the hard realities of existence. A new life is abroad in the world. The image-breaker is exalted above my Lord Bishop in all his glory

of course he failed. The more he tried to bring together the presentment of Christianity afforded by the modern Church and teaching of the New Testament, the more he saw their divergencies. This set him pondering, and he soon came to the conclusion that this modern institution was not Christian at all, but Pagan. It was a department of State, paid by the State, and employed by it for the purpose of deluding the people into the belief that the existing order of life was divinely appointed. How effectively it had done this work, he said, let history show. The clergy had aided and abetted the gentry in all their robberies of the people; it had been

argument that there were many good men a

as Papists, Mohamedans, or Hindus, just as certainly as in church or chapel. It is their nature to, and they cannot help it. But their very goodne

ment attracted Thomas's attention in a dim way, and he was amused at the frightful din made by the conversions to Romanism which accompanied that curious upheaval of medi?valism. Not that he understood much of the meaning of what was going on. It was not worth discovering, he said; but he was amused over it, and roundly declared that for this and all other ills of the Church there was but one cure-to take away its money. "Let these parsons try living by faith," he would often exclaim. "If they believe in God as they say, why do they not trust him for a living? Thei

lord bishops and their brood when events bring them face to face with the people? I do not admire Charles Bradlaugh's teaching on many points; but I cannot deny the power that he and such as he wield on the common people. It is a power that increases with the spread of education; and what does it betoken? Only this; that in time, for one man among the peasantry who now thinks like Thomas Wanless there will be tens of thousands. The churches and chapels themselv

than his reading, and much of his political economy, as well as of his code of social morals, was taken from the Bible. To my thinking he could have gone to no better book, but I

s of indebtedness. "A limit of time should be fixed," he said, "beyond which the debtor should be free from his debt, unless he had committed a crime." The national debt itself he would have treated on this principle; and few things excited his wrath more quickly than any mention of the heavy burden which the consolidated debt continued to be to the English people. In national matters he would have had no debt remaining beyond 30 years, on the principle that it was a crime to cast the burdens of the present on posterity. Freedom to borrow indefinitely was in his eyes, moreover, the cause of much abominable robbery and crime. Next to the Church, however, the object of his dee

of the work in hand kept the men permanently together, Thomas must in time have appeared as the leader of a formidable school of democrats. But the navvy is here to-day and gone to-morrow, and the seed which Thomas sowed was scattered far and wide ere two years were

eatures. They lacked honesty and independence, and would beg like pariahs one hour from a man whom they would treacherously murder the next in their drunken furies. More than once he had the greatest difficulty in keeping clear of the devastating fights with which these wild men of the west were in the habit of finishing up their drunken revels, and once he, and the more respectable men who fo