be if religion were withdrawn? What could we say to each other in our grief or care to excite the smallest hope in a desponding breast? The only book open to us is the book of history, page after page written in lines of blood, and if not blood, of tears; its pictures-shattered hopes and broken hearts; its Alpha and Omega-suffering and death. Without religion the record of human life is unspeakable woe, and cannot be reconciled with either intelligence or morality. Those who do not believe in a future life are painfully and pre-eminently consistent in saying there is no Righteous God. Are there not thousands of cases in which absolutely incurable evil is perpetrated if there be no future? Some few of our race may be spared, but the overwhelming majority have to endure some great loss or calamity which in this life can never be compensated for, never on this side of the grave bear good fruit, unless it can be brought under a religious aspect. Human sympathy is indeed precious; one of the most precious adornments of human lot, as well as its most lifegiving food; but it loses nearly all its healing power if divorced from trust in God; if solid grounds for present contentment be snatched from beneath its feet; if hope in the future be ruthlessly silenced. Manfully will we bear any trouble for those we love, aye, even for the great world of men and women whom we have never seen-bear it with patience, too, if not with a burning glow of pride, when we know it is for their good; to help, we know not how, in perfecting the race on earth, in perfecting, we hope, the race in heaven. But what we cannot bear, what we hate and rebel against, is suffering for naught, suffering to gratify molcular changes, or because by an accident we stand in the way of some infernal but senseless force which does not know what tender creatures it has produced, or how they writhe under its giant trampling on their loves and hopes. It is not in man to endure such wrongs as ours but for a high and holy purpose which we may be quite sure cannot be defeated. But it is in perfect harmony with the dignity and the aspiration of man to bear everything which a loving will has seen best to permit, and to say, "It is the Lord, let Him do what seemeth Him good." Other comfort than this, my sorrowing friends, I have none to give. I point you to Heaven and say, "There, in God alone, is the solution of this life's woe; in Him alone is the promise of absolute good in return for every pang." And if you would supplement your own patience and hope by seeking the sympathy of your fellow-men, go to those who have passed through their furnace of affliction safe and blessed by His presence; go ask the souls that would have been drowned in their own sorrows and despair, but for the loving hand which upheld them and carried them to the Heavenly shore. They will all tell you the same tale, dressed it may be in various garb of word and metaphor. "Blessed is the man that trusteth in Him." "Lo! the poor man cried and the Lord heard him and saved him out of all his troubles." Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord delivereth them out of all. The Lord delivereth the souls of His servants and all they that put their trust in Him shall not be desolate." 66 CARTER & WILLIAMS, General Steam Printers, 14, Bishopsgate Avenue, Camomile-street E.C Importance of Right Opinion in Religion. A SERMON, PREACHED AT ST. GEORGE'S HALL, LANGHAM REV. CHARLES VOYSEY. JOHN VII. 32., "The truth shall make you free.". HERE is a tone of thought spreading far and wide among really good people, if not the very best among us all, which needs the most careful examination. The essence of it may be thus briefly expressed :-" It does not matter what people believe, the only matter of importance is how they live and act." Around this nucleus of truth has gathered a variety of collateral ideas more or less untrue and misleading, and it seems to me necessary in the highest degree to scrutinize it minutely and to distinguish between what is right and what is wrong in the thought which clusters round it. At first sight, every one with a proper bias of mind will echo this sentiment with hearty approval, recognising at once the infinitely superior importance of right action over correct opinion. Indeed, as Free-thinkers, we have some right to boast that this seed of wholesome thought was first sown by our hands. It was from the unorthodox and the heretics and so-called "Infidels," that this generation first heard of the comparative supremacy of true virtue, and the comparative insignificance of religious belief. It was we Rev. C. Voysey's sermons are to be obtained at St. George's Hall, every Sunday morning, or from the Author (by post), Camden House, Dulwich, S.E. Price one penny, postage a halfpenny. who first amended the Scripture saying, "Without faith it is impossible to please God" into "It is impossible to please God without righteousness of heart and life." We are not likely to go back from this advanced position, or to be content to resume the one we have with so much difficulty abandoned. If, when we say "It does not matter what people believe; the only matter of importance is how they live and act," we only mean that by comparison with right action right opinion is worthless, and if by our reiteration of the sentiment we desire to express our deep sense of the absolute essentialness of true goodness, we have not one word to say in qualification or apology for it; we have not the slightest wish to weaken its force or to soften it down to suit a less rigorous and stern regard for virtue. But the sentiment does not always stand alone, is not always spoken with the single and honest intention of placing virtue in her rightful supremacy. We perceive a tendency, only too general, to use this maxim in order to depreciate the value of right opinion, and to discourage the efforts of those whose sense of duty calls them to the correction of error and to the proclamation of truer beliefs. It is not that virtue is really more prized; it is that the controversies which inevitably spring up in the correction of error are distasteful and perhaps burdensome. There is also implied in this not quite candid emphasis on virtue the idea that the correction of error and the substitution of what is more true do not tend to increase virtue. We ought, I think, to fix our attention on these two principal modes in which the maxim before us may be perverted; for if the secret of preference for it be found in an unwillingness to share the burdens and penalties of controversy it is an act of moral cowardice to hide behind a sentiment so plausible but which was never intended to serve so unworthy a purpose; and if the use of the maxim be designed to imply that opinions have little or no effect on character and conduct, it is nothing less than a form of untruth all the more dangerous and misleading because disguised under an assertion which commands almost universal assent. (1.) The loud reiteration of the superiority of virtue over right opinion, when it springs from a selfish love of ease and dislike for the trouble and sacrifices incidental to controversy, is a token of moral cowardice. We all know that thought requires a great deal of toil and frequently involves exhaustion; and that few mental efforts are so arduous as the careful consideration and comparison of two conflicting opinions when much can be said on either side. When our hopes and fears are mixed up with the conclusion at which we may arrive, the toil is made harder still and emotional disturbance hampers and clogs the intellectual powers. The fear of going wrong is enough by itself to paralyse thought and overbalance argument. So it is rare indeed to find people willing merely to take the trouble of thinking for themselves. They will do anything but that if they can help it, and catch hold of the first strong thinker that comes in their way to work out all their problems for them and to supply them with ready made conclusions, cut-and-dried answers to every question. If they are unwilling or unable to do their thinking by proxy, they make a virtue of necessity and parade their scorn of severe thought. They say, "What does it matter what we belive? Conduct is the main thing after all, opinions are of no consequence." So they hide their indolence and incapacity under an ostentatious zeal for virtuous action and perhaps persuade themselves that they are in the seventh heaven above those grovelling controversialists. It is amazing how sublte and varied are the count less forms of self-righteousness. But this labour of thinking for oneself is not all, or the most formidable of the difficulties which lie in the path of the correction of error. Independent thought in these days at all events brings one into immediate conflict with popular opinion. Sir Arthur Helps in one of his earlier volumes makes Ellesmere say 66 that a man cannot afford to have independent opinions under a thousand a-year; if he were very economical, he might perhaps do it for eight hundred." We smile over this pungent satire, but we find it no laughing matter to realize in our actual experience. To give this opposition its proper name, we must call it persecution, and this in its thousand forms adds terribly to the difficulties of pursuing enquiry on matters of religious belief. Even those whose minds are powerful and active and whose interest is unwearied in the discovery of truth have been checked and driven back into a base compliance by the stings which their little social world has inflicted on them in return for their candour. And it cannot be questioned that a great number of persons take refuge in the professed contempt for mere |