Religious Matters in England.
An English clergyman gives the following interesting statistics: “There are five millions of our fellow-country people who are living in open neglect of the means of grace. If all the people in what is called Christian England who neglect the means of grace were to be formed into a line standing shoulder to shoulder, they would stretch over 1,450 miles, or it would make nearly four rows reaching from London to Edinburg; and it would take eighteen weeks for them to pass a given spot, at sixty a minute, six days of a week, of twelve hours each. Thus millions in this country are to all practical purposes heathens. In Manchester there are 150,000 who habitually absent themselves from any place of worship. In Birmingham there are 100,000 persons who never darken the doors of God’s house.” Look also at Liverpool. There we find a public house to every 260 of the inhabitants; and the apprehensions for crime are as one to every fifteen of the population. In Manchester there is a public house for every 150 of the population, old and young, while there is but one sanctuary (including all sects, large and small, old and new) for every 2,500 of the people. No fewer than fifty-four public houses have sacred music on the Sabbath, and thus souls are lured to perdition to the strains of the “Hallelujah Chorus” and “The Heavens are Telling.” In that town 150,000 of the inhabitants never enter God’s house, and Sabbath after Sabbath are living in the desecration of the Lord’s day. Thus in “Christian England” we have a vast amount of heathenism, and, what is worse, practical atheism.