se, males,
chiefly of the lower section, I should imagine, of the middle class.
There is music; then the Doctor reads a chapter of the Bible, and takes
it to pieces; then there is more music; then a prayer, and a half-hour's
sermon, from a regular text, according to the fashion of the orthodox,
but generally coming to a very unorthodox conclusion. Indeed, the former
come off hardly at the Doctor's hands. He demolished them as easily as
if they were so many men of straw; President Edwards, Richard Baxter, Mr.
Spurgeon, the apostles, and their great Teacher, all look very small by
the side of the clear, logical, learned, fluent, sarcastic, infallible
Doctor, who is the heir of all the ages under the sun; who talks of
Zoroaster, and Vedas, and Shasters; who is as familiar with Brahma and
Buddha as if he had assisted at their birth, and who knows what's o'clock
in Sanscrit better than you or I, my good sir, in ordinary English.
After the sermon comes the collection, and the congregational
dinner-hour, for the sale of the beer for which, the neighbouring publics
open just as the Independent Religious Reformers, exhausted by the
Doctor's omniscience, require the refreshing fluid.

"Hae, sirs!" said an elderly female in a remote part of Scotland, as for
the first time she saw a black man; "hae, sirs, what canna be done for
the penny!" Assuredly some such feeling must be entertained by the
listener who for the first time hears Dr. Perfitt in his rostrum in
Cambridge Hall. For a pound a year you may have this pleasure every
Sunday, and become one of the Independent Reformers. What more can man
desire?

SOUTH PLACE, FINSBURY SQUARE.

The religion of humanity has been for a time dominant in South Place,
Finsbury Square. Its oldest and original teacher in connexion with the
place was the late W. Johnson Fox, M.P., a popular writer and eloquent
orator, who did much in his day and generation on behalf of freedom in
trade, in politics, and religion, and did it well. Nor did he labour in
vain as regards himself. Born in an humble position, he became a student
at Homerton College and an orthodox Dissenter. In a little while he
joined the Unitarians, and then left them for a freer and fuller
religious creed and form of worship. He had many friends. His letters,
signed "Publicola," in the _Weekly Dispatch_, were the delight of the
working classes; and his Anti-Corn-law orations charmed all, and there
were tens of thous