ited and deluded. You may raise up great generals. You
may have another Wellington, and another Nelson, too; for this country
can grow men capable of every enterprise. Then there may be titles, and
pensions, and marble monuments to eternize the men who have thus become
great;--but what becomes of you, and your country, and your children?

You profess to be a Christian nation. You make it your boast
even--though boasting is somewhat out of place in such questions--you
make it your boast that you are a Christian people, and that you draw
your rule of doctrine and practice, as from a well pure and undefiled,
from the lively oracles of God, and from the direct revelation of the
Omnipotent. You have even conceived the magnificent project of
illuminating the whole earth, even to its remotest and darkest recesses,
by the dissemination of the volume of the New Testament, in whose every
page are written for ever the words of peace. Within the limits of this
island alone, every Sabbath-day, twenty thousand, yes, far more than
twenty thousand temples are thrown open, in which devout men and women
assemble to worship Him who is the "Prince of Peace."

Is this a reality? or is your Christianity a romance, and your
profession a dream? No; I am sure that your Christianity is not a
romance, and I am equally sure that your profession is not a dream. It
is because I believe this that I appeal to you with confidence, and that
I have hope and faith in the future. I believe that we shall see, and at
no very distant time, sound economic principles spreading much more
widely amongst the people; a sense of justice growing up in a soil which
hitherto has been deemed unfruitful; and--which will be better than
all--the churches of the United Kingdom, the churches of Britain,
awaking as it were from their slumbers, and girding up their loins to
more glorious work, when they shall not only accept and believe in the
prophecy, but labour earnestly for its fulfilment, that there shall come
a time--a blessed time--a time which shall last for ever--when "nation
shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any
more."

John Bright

THE HOMES OF ENGLAND

The stately homes of England!
How beautiful they stand,
Amidst their tall ancestral trees,
O'er all the pleasant land!
The deer across their greensward bound,
Through shade and sunny gleam:
And the swan glides past them with the soun