DR. J. H. RYLANCE, of the Church of Saint Mark, New York, lays the cause of Tammany's triumph and the defeat of the "reform" forces to the following, among other things. What he says is worthy of considcration by those who would reform men by law:—
"As citizens of an intelligent and powerful Christian commonwealth at the close of the nineteenth Christian century, it was really a very strange political life that we were living.
"It was a time of very promising appearance and of larger expectations; the severest laws for the suppression and extirpation of all vice and crime were inscribed on the State statute-books. Only men of the completest competency, and of an unimpeachable virtue, were to hold office, while the courts of law and the police were to be made terrors to all evil-doers.
"The ancient Mosaic Sabbath, with sundry vexatious features added by the Puritan 'fathers,' was to be imposed upon a Christian community; all recreations and cheerfulness indulged in or exhibited on the first day of the week were to be treated as criminal. All signs thus betokening the very speedy coming of the kingdom of God.
"Just so. And if statutes and law courts and policemen with very ardent but blind fanaticism, inspiring tracts and lectures and pulpit effusions could bring it, God's kingdom might possibly be here.
"The period of 'reform' was the time when our police courts were crowded with petty offenders against Puritan enactments, and was not therefore a time for real hopeful promise. It was, on the contrary, an unreal, deceptive, hypocritical period.
"All that has been done or attempted by our Puritanical farmers has been well meant, but the zeal that has impelled them to the adoption of many of their measures has not been 'according to knowledge,' while the spirit of temper which some of them have exhibited has not been according to the 'sweet reasonableness' of Jesus.
"I try to console myself with the thought that our rising generation of reformers may be taught something by rebuffs; that they may have to 'walk prudently, not as fools,' in the prosecution of their high aims. And with this reflection I am somewhat comforted that a policy which sent forth hired men as spies to entrap petty shopkeepers into crime on a Sunday morning—the crime of sabbath desecration in selling a button or a bit of bread—which dragged before a magistrate for punishment a poor mother who bought a drop of milk for her sick child on the Lord's day—a policy which sets a detective in a man's way at every turn—such a policy deserved a rebuke, and we may be the better for the rebuke.
"We shall have done with making hypocrites, with putting a tyrannous pressure upon men to forswear themselves, with making law a thing for scorn, by making unreasonable and cruel demands upon the obedience of citizens, so tempting to sweeping evasions of the law, and so undermining and corrupting the conscience of the community. One thing I pray for, and that is that the religion of Jesus Christ shall not much longer be held responsible for such follies and fanaticisms."