way. The reader may remember that a little while ago
some of these people figured in a police-court. They had refused all
proper medical aid for a child, and it died in consequence. They have
great faith, these poor people. They have great scorn also for people
more benighted than themselves. They speak contemptuously of the time
when they knew no better, when they trusted in forms, and attended on a
one-man ministry, and were humbled and dejected on account of sin, and
called themselves miserable sinners, and confessed that they had done the
things they ought not to have done, and left undone those things which
they should have done. All that sort of feeling and talk is all wicked
in their opinion; for theirs is the glorious liberty of the sons of God
and joint heirs of heaven. Religion has no difficulties for them, no
mysteries; nothing beyond the reach of man, heights to which he cannot
ascend, depths which he cannot fathom. To come together and declare
their unspeakable joy is all that they have to do. For this the beginner
is as competent as the grey-headed believer, the sister as well as the
brother, the ignorant man as well as he who has had a college education.
Triumphantly they ask--

"When the Lord would speak,
Think ye he needs the Latin or the Greek?"

Of course not. And thus in turn they all preach and pray with a zeal
which literally is not according to knowledge. If a man cannot say he
lives without sin, they set him down as no Christian. At one time they
held that as the Spirit of God only teaches one thing, that if true
so-called Christians disagreed in Church matters, one of them was a child
of the devil; and as they were not at all backward in applying this
doctrine, they were split up as fast as they gathered together. They
have a great deal of the Methodist leaven amongst them, and at prayer, or
while speaking is going on, express their feelings in a way which, to a
stranger, may be considered unnecessarily noisy. Their leaders seem to
be a small tradesman in the Southwark Road, and a little, pale, wizened
female, whose utterances and prayers are of the most extraordinary
character--a sort of sing-song, now rising and then dropping, in a way
which in a secular personage and on secular subjects would be ludicrous
in the extreme. But they profess to have no leaders. They have elders,
who are simply elders. They become such by lapse of time alone.

As to their organizat