hen the
great Dr. Abernethy told a gouty, dyspeptic, rich patient to "live on
sixpence a day and earn it," his advice was more wholesome than the most
dexterous rigmarole.

Nothing could better show than the conduct of the clergy that
Christianity _is_ played out, if it means the teaching of the Sermon on
the Mount. Those who preach it cannot practise it; what is more, they do
not mean to. The late Archbishop of York, while Bishop of Peterborough,
wrote a magazine article on this Sermon on the Mount, in which he urged
that any Society that was based upon it would go to ruin in a week. He
was paid at that time L4,500 a year to-preach this Sermon on the Mount,
and he did so--in the pulpit; then he mounted another rostrum, and
cried, "For God's sake don't practise it."

"Blessed be ye poor" and "Woe unto you rich" are texts with which the
Church has bamboozled the multitude in the interest of the privileged
classes. The disinherited sons of earth were promised all sorts of fine
compensations in Kingdom-Come; meanwhile kings, aristocrats, priests,
and all the rest of the juggling and appropriating tribe, battened on
the fruits of other men's labor. The poor were like the dog crossing
the stream, and seeing the big shadow of his piece of meat in the
water. "Seize the shadow!" the priests cried. The poor did so. But the
substance-was not lost. It was snapped up and shared by priestcraft and
privilege.

The people have been told that the gospel is a cheap thing--without
money and without price. That is the prospectus. But the gospel is
frightfully dear in reality. Religion costs more than education. England
spends more in preparing her sons and daughters for the next world than
in training them for this world. Yet the next world may be nothing but
a dream, and certainly we _know_ nothing about it; while this world is
a solid and often a solemn fact, with its business as well as its
pleasures, its work as well as its enjoyments, its duties as well as its
privileges. To keep people out of hell, and guide them to heaven (places
that only exist in the map of faith), we spend over twenty millions a
year. This is a sum which, if wisely devoted, would remedy the worst
evils of human society in a single generation. It would found countless
institutions of culture and innocent recreation; and, by means of
experiments, it would solve a host of social problems. Instead of doing
this, we keep up a huge army of black-coats to fight an i