ENGLAND'S RELIGIOUS CONDITION.
PAPERS were read at the Church Congress recently which confirm, in a remarkable manner, the truth of Mr. Bright's epigram "that the working class care as little for the dogma, as the upper classes for the practice, of Christianity." Canon Barry, reporting on "the religious condition of the nation as represented by the upper classes of society," says that "unlimited skepticism, the positive license of a conscious ungodliness, and a resolute self-trust and self-will are their only rule of life." The Bishop of Bedford, who reported on the industrial classes, stated that, without much speculative unbelief or hostility to religion, "the feeling of the masses is that of simple indifference." The speakers had, of course, no intention of vindicating Mr. Bright, and their testimony is all the more valuable on that account. Their gloomy picture of the two extremes of society is hardly relieved by the account given in another paper on the religious condition of the middle classes. They contain, we are told, the religious might of the nation, but they "display deplorable moral weakness in reference to commercial transactions." The admission that the most religious part of the community is deeply tainted with commercial dishonesty is, at any rate, courageous, and if it be true, it complicates the knotty problem which the Church Congress has set itself to face.—Pall Mall Gazette.