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from burial with their own rites in parish churchyards. The churchyards are not the property of the parishioners, but the property of Almighty God, who kindly allows only those who are church people and orthodox, to be buried within the sacred precincts. It is a heinous sin in a clergyman to give away one foot of the soil for the interment of those who are God's enemies, or who are not sheep of His fold!

Argument would be lost on any one possessed of such a craze as that we can only suppress our instinctive smile, and hope that the next generation will not inherit such deplorable foolishness.

As you well know, I am still a staunch friend to the Church of England,-not merely from old affection to the Church of my fathers, but because I believe it to be, with all its faults, the best existing organization for national religious education; and, while under the absolute control of Parliament, it is the best protector of religious liberty, and capable of indefinite reformation and expansion. And it is as a true friend of the Church that I bewail bitterly the unchecked growth of that superstition and sacerdotalism of which Bishop Wordsworth is the living embodiment; but I could do no less than spend my remaining years in trying to overthrow and destroy it, if there were no more hope left of purging the Church from these malignant follies.

For

The notion that, because the churchyard is solemnly set apart for the burial of the dead, it therefore ceases to belong to living men, and belongs only to God, even if so fantastic a theory were allowed to stand as poetical and picturesque, would tell directly against the Bishop's exclusiveness. if the soil be no longer man's, but God's, surely all who belong to God have equal right to lie in its bosom. Does not the Bishop's own Bible tell him that God says "all souls are mine?" the soul of the righteous, and the soul of the sinner alike, aye, even the soul of the Dissenter. Had the churchyard in consecration been transferred by law to the privileged members of a church or corporation, the exclusion of aliens might have been legally justified. But if it has become "God's acre," how dare these self-constituted vicegerents for God not only usurp an authority nowhere entrusted to them, but act in open and direct violation of the Divine rights of God's all-embracing love?

O my deluded countrymen! richly do you deserve the slavery in which you are bound, and the tyranny under which you groan! Why have you not long since struck the follies of superstition from off your shackled limbs, and

sprung into your rightful freedom? Why have you not boldly shewn your faith in God, and your defiance of priestcraft, by burying your dead beneath the shade of your own peaceful groves, under the green sod which your own love, and the sacred treasure you deposit there, alone can consecrate? When timid and bigoted priests have refused to perform their worthless ceremonies, why have you not chosen the head of your household, and ordained him God's High Priest to speak in your name the words of hope, and prayer, and praise-fit music to the march of death? Why have you not, in the grief which has been insulted, flung from you the empty privilege of Christian burial, and laid your beloved dead to rest with your own hands in your own ground, every inch of which is part of God's acre, and made all the more holy and dear to you by the treasure which it holds ?

You might well trust God, I trow, with the dear departed thus buried, when mothers can trust Him with their sons whom the wild fierce waves have engulphed-no priest, no prayer, no word of hope heard over their watery grave. You might well trust your fellow men to treat even with greater reverence than they do the mounds of the churchyard the little spot which your love has consecrated; for the hearts of rough men grow tender, and their rude voices grow low, when signs of mingled grief and affection appeal to their better

nature.

If you are afraid to do this; afraid to lose some fancied security for your dead; afraid to forego the magic mumblings of your priest; afraid to go against the stream of custom, or defy the criticisms of your neighbours-you richly deserve the heavy disabilities under which you lie, you are playing into the hands of those who would bind you hand and foot, and you have only yourselves to thank for the insolent assumptions of the hierarchy to rule over you in life and in death.

Bitterly do I add that you deserve all you get for your superstition, since you have systematically and persistently resisted and tried to silence every one who has risen to set you free. Instead of helping and cheering your liberators, you have driven them out of your coasts, and stoned them with stones. I have been speaking thus to the outside world, to the mass of English men and English women. To you, my friends and much loved supporters, I would speak in other strains.

To you it belongs to work night and day as best you can to liberate your neighbours from superstitious fear. Nothing

less than this will give freedom of mind and action; nothing less will bring arrogant clergy to their right minds, and set them once more in their proper place as ministers and servants, and not as lords over God's heritage.

I confess I look to future and speedy.legislation as the remedy for the great grievance respecting the burial of Dissenters. I look also to the noble example of such men as the Dean of Westminster, who buried in the Abbey Church of St. Peter's, one whom Bishop Wordsworth would—if he had dared to face public odium-have shut onr from the most obscure churchyard-our late friend Sir Charles Lyell.

But failing these resources of law and example, I, for one, look forward to Cremation as the best solution of the churchyard difficulty. I cannot do more than just allude to it to-day; but however remote this great reformation may be, the clergy who follow Bishop Wordsworth will be its bitterest opponents, since it will rob them of their power of exclusion from the churchyard.

If ever we can say of Churchmen, and Dissenters, and heretics, and of all sorts and conditions of men, that "they were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death they were not divided," it will only be when we have cast out the demons of superstitious fear, of the conceit that we alone are God's beloved, and of the malice and uncharitableness which are the offspring of that fear and that conceit; for it is only "perfect love that casteth out fear."

UPFIELD GREEN Printer, Tenter Street, Moorgate Street, E.C.

Society and the Individual.

A SERMON

PREACHED AT THE LANGHAM HALL, 43, GREAT PORTLAND STREET, W., DECEMBER 12, 1875, BY THE

REV. CHARLES VOYSEY.

EPHESIANS iv., 25. "We are members one of another." THERE is a great deal of confusion in the average mind respecting the proper relations of society to the individual, and of the individual to society.

On the one hand, the claims of society over the individual are not only believed to be paramount, but the language used in support of those claims implies that the individual exists only for the sake of society. On the other hand, there are those who claim that the rights of the individual are supreme, and that every interference with individual liberty is in itself an outrage.

Much may be said in favour of both these conflicting views. But before one can come to anything like a just verdict upon the contention, it is necessary to examine impartially the conflicting claims, and to look at the known facts of the case.

Now, as society is merely an aggregate of individuals, each possessing interests of his own as well as those he shares in common with all the rest, our enquiry must naturally begin

Rev. C. Voysey's sermons are to be obtained at Langham Hall, every Sunday morning, or from the Author (by post), Camden House, Dulwich, S.E. Price one penny, postage a halfpenny.

with the individual; and we must ask, What are his legitimate claims, and what his duties to the society of which he is a member?

1st. He has an unquestioned right to live, a right to food, clothing and shelter, a right to everything needful for his bodily health.

2nd. He has a right to culture, a right to be taught, trained, and otherwise assisted in the entire work of self-improvement, that all the faculties of his mind, and the sensibilities of his moral and spiritual nature may be normally developed.

3rd. He has a right to exercise whatever powers he may possess in the pursuit of any useful calling for which he may be fitted.

4th. He has a right to hold, and, within certain limits hereafter to be defined, to proclaim whatever opinions seem to him to be reasonable; and

5th. He has a right to be as happy as he can be without trespassing on the rights of others, or diminishing their happiness.

Thus far, every individual has indefeasible rights, whether or not there is a future life for him beyond the grave. But if the individual be immortal, which society manifestly is not, the individual has the further right to the preservation of all within him that is needful to his eternal interests, whether or not those interests clash with the transient interests of society. It makes, indeed, all the difference to the position, and, therefore, to the claims of the individual, whether he be immortal or not.

If this life be all it is manifest that the interests of the society of which he is only a single member, must transcend his own private interests as a man, in direct proportion to the number of other individuals which form the whole society. In such a case he would exist only for the community, and not for himself; and every private interest must fade before the overwhelming claims of the body corporate. If, however, society is the transient, while the individual is the permanent and immortal, the respective interests change places, and the claims of the individual overwhelm those of society, ie., whenever the claims of the latter clash with the eternal interests of the former.

It is hardly necessary to say that the phrase "eternal interests" is not used in the old orthodox sense of salvation from Hell and going to Heaven. I mean by it only those

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