two
classes--those who have been educated and those who have had to
educate themselves. The former class might apply to their own case the
language once employed by Dr. Newman to describe himself and his
brethren of the Oratory:

'We have been nourished for the greater part of our lives in the
bosom of the great schools and universities of Protestant England;
we have been the foster foster-sons of the Edwards and Henries, the
Wykehams and Wolseys, of whom Englishmen are wont to make so much;
we have grown up amid hundreds of contemporaries, scattered at
present all over the country in those special ranks of society
which are the very walk of a member of the legislature.'

These first-class free-thinkers have an excellent time of it, and, to
use a fashionable phrase, 'do themselves very well indeed.' They move
freely in society; their books lie on every table; they hob-a-nob with
Bishops; and when they come to die, their orthodox relations gather
round them, and lay them in the earth 'in the sure and certain
hope'--so, at least, priestly lips are found willing to assert--'of
the resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ.' And
yet there was not a dogma of the Christian faith in which they were in
a position to profess their belief.

The free-thinkers of the second class, poor fellows! have hitherto led
very different lives. Their foster-parents have been poverty and
hardship; their school education has usually terminated at eleven; all
their lives they have been desperately poor; alone, unaided, they
have been left to fight the battle of a Free Press.

Richard Carlile, as honourable a man as most, and between whose
religious opinions and (let us say) Lord Palmerston's there was
probably no difference worth mentioning, spent nine out of the
fifty-two years of his life in prison. Attorney-Generals, and, indeed,
every degree of prosecuting counsel have abused this kind of
free-thinker, not merely with professional impunity, but amidst
popular applause. Judges, speaking with emotion, have exhibited the
utmost horror of atheistical opinions, and have railed in good set
terms at the wretch who has been dragged before them, and have then,
at the rising of the court, proceeded to their club and played cards
till dinner-time with a first-class free-thinker for partner.

This is natural and easily accounted for, but we need not be surprised
if, in the biographies of second-class freethin