nd midnight sin;
our public buildings, with their outside elaboration and inside
mysteries; our places of amusement, with their gilded fascinations
and shallow delusions; our clubs, bar parlours, prisons, cellars,
and workhouses, with their amenities, frivolities, and severities,
have all been commented upon; but the most important of our
institutions, the best, the queerest, the solemnest, the oddest--the
churches and chapels of the town--have been left out in the cold
entirely. All our public functionaries have been viewed round,
examined closely, caressed mildly, and sometimes genteely
maltreated; our parochial divinities, who preside over the fate of
the poor; our municipal Gogs and Magogs who exhibit the extreme
points of reticence and garrulity in the council chamber; our brandy
drinkers, chronic carousers, lackered swells, pushing shopkeepers,
otiose policemen, and dim-looking cab-drivers have all been
photographed, framed, and hung up to dry long ago; our workshops and
manufactories, our operatives and artisans, have likewise been duly
pictured and exhibited; the Ribble has had its praises sung in
polite literary strains; the parks have had their beauties depicted
in rhyme and blank verse; nay--but this is hardly necessary--the old
railway station, that walhallah of the gods and paragon of the five
orders of architecture, has had its delightful peculiarities set
forth; all our public places and public bodies have been thrown upon
the canvas, except those of the more serious type--except places of
worship and those belonging them. These have been neglected; nobody
has thought it worth while to give them either a special blessing or
a particular anathema.

There are about 45 churches and chapels and probably 60 parsons and
priests in Preston; but unto this hour they have been treated, so
far as they are individually concerned, with complete silence. We
purpose remedying the defect, supplying the necessary criticism, and
filling up the hiatus. The whole lot must have either something or
nothing in them, must be either useful or useless; parsons must be
either sharp or stupid, sensible or foolish; priests must be either
learned or illiterate, either good, bad, or indifferent; in all,
from the rector in his silken gown to the back street psalm-singer
in his fustian, there must be something worth praising or
condemning. And the churches and chapels, with their congregations,
must likewise present some points of beau