oney
before they went home to breakfast, and broke all the laws against
regrating and forestalling which the thoughtful stupidity of our
ancestors had devised--in order that bread, the staff of life, might not
be high in price--on a most royal scale. We do not hear of such things
now, nor do the mobs of London now break into the Quaker Chapels to see
if the flour is hidden there--an amiable weakness to which the mob was
much given towards the end of the last century, when wheat was at famine
prices, and the loaf was cheap at two and tenpence. We are fallen upon
better days, upon days of free trade, when the English artisan, in order
that bread may be cheap, has his emissaries and agents scouring all parts
of the old world and the new.

PREACHING AT ST. PAUL'S CATHEDRAL.

In that celebrated chapter in which Gibbon explains the rise and progress
on natural grounds of the Christian religion, it has always seemed to us
that he has not done justice to the immense influence which the
institution of the pulpit must originally have possessed. Had he gone no
further than the pages of his New Testament, the distinguished historian
would have found many an instance of oratorical success. He would have
read how Herod quailed before the rude orator who in the desert drew
multitudes to hear him as he proclaimed the advent of the Messiah, and
warned a generation of vipers to flee from the wrath to come; he would
have read how, whilst the Teacher spake as never man spake, the common
people heard him gladly; how Felix trembled in his pride and power, and
how the polished intellect of Athens listened, and admired, and believed,
while Paul preached of an unknown God. It is true that in a subsequent
chapter Gibbon does not altogether ignore the pulpit, and admits the
sacred orators possessed some advantages over the advocate or the
tribune. "The arguments and rhetoric of the latter," he writes, "were
instantly opposed with equal arms by skilful and resolute antagonists,
and the cause of truth and reason might derive an accidental support from
the conflict of hostile passions. The bishop, or some distinguished
presbyter to whom he cautiously delegated the powers of preaching,
harangued without the danger of interruption or reply a submissive
multitude whose minds had been prepared and subdued by the awful
ceremonies of religion. Such was the strict subordination of the Roman
Catholic Church, that the same concerted sounds m